With a high school diploma in hand, Monte Hall didn’t see any reason not to take a job at Chrysler.
His father worked there. His grandfather worked there. It was good enough for him.
“They had great jobs, great insurance,” Hall said. “You can’t find a better job with just a high school education at $30 an hour.”
Then the recession hit.
The father of three took a buyout in April 2009. That month, Howard County’s unemployment rate was 13 percent. Two months later, the rate would hit a high for the recession at 20.1 percent.
With no formal higher education or skills, finding work was almost impossible with Hall’s qualifications, he said.
Then he received a letter saying he was eligible for federal funding that would pay for him to go back to school because he lost his job to foreign competition.
Hall graduated in May 2010 from Ivy Tech Community College with an associate degree in construction technology and several certifications. Then he took a job as an HVAC technician with Sears Holdings Corp.
He doesn’t earn as much per hour as he did before he left Chrysler, but with better opportunities for raises and advancements, he is confident that he will make more and he has more job security.
Hall’s experiences aren’t unique, educators and economic experts say. Students and families in the Kokomo area have become more accepting that higher education is necessary to find decent work.
But for some, it has been or will be painful, said economist Michael Harris, Indiana University Kokomo’s chancellor.
“We have a whole generation of people that don’t believe their kids need to go to school,” he said. “Why go to college? As shifting continues, simple labor [jobs] that have the skills of high school are no longer going to get the income.”
In many cases, it is the children who see more of a need for a higher education than their parents do, said Jeb Conrad, president and CEO of the Greater Kokomo Economic Development Alliance.
“I think young people are getting it,” he said. “It’s the incumbent workers, the ones who have been doing this for 15 years. Now you’ve got to go back to school.”
New Demands
Kokomo’s corporate and union leaders agree: High school diplomas often aren’t enough.
That is because companies such as Chrysler and Delphi Electronics & Safety have begun changes in the past year that require more advanced work forces, Harris said.
Chrysler plans to produce fuel-efficient eight-speed and nine-speed transmissions in Kokomo. Delphi began production last year at a new facility, where it is manufacturing parts for electric vehicle batteries.
“Manufacturing isn’t irrelevant,” Harris said, adding that Chrysler and Delphi’s changes require more skilled workers. “Manufacturing is relevant, but it’s a different type of manufacturing because it’s really smart manufacturing.”
Jerry Price, vice president for United Autoworkers Local 685, said it has grown more common for assembly-line workers to have a college education, including a few with master’s degrees.
“When you talk about the old days, when I got out of high school, you went to college for a year or so, then went to work at a steel mill or for Chrysler or another factory,” Price said. “There were all kinds of jobs then.
“Some kids do perceive that ‘I’ll graduate. I don’t need to get a college degree. I’ll just get a job at Chrysler.’ I wish it was that way.”
During a manufacturers’ summit earlier this month, Brian Harlow, who oversees Chrysler Group’s plants in Kokomo, said critical thinking and communications skills aren’t just for engineers and managers. Assembly line workers need to have those abilities for the company to keep up with competitors.
It is a point that was mirrored by the chief executive of Tipton County-bound Abound Solar.
Company CEO Tom Tiller, during a February visit to the company’s future plant south of Kokomo, said the manufacturer will look for education and initiative in all of its workers when it begins hiring for the plant late this year or early next year.
Conrad said the “harsh reality” is that companies looking to build or expand in an area usually like to see a well-trained, well-educated work force ready for them to hire.
“With higher skill sets in place, it’s obviously easier to get them,” Conrad said.
Degrees an edge
A degree from a four-year university hasn’t been recession-proof, but people without any higher education are more than twice as likely to be out of work.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, people who stopped their education after high school had a 10.7 percent unemployment rate in February. People with an associate degree or some college had 8.2 percent unemployment. Those who hold a bachelor’s degrees or higher had 4.4 percent unemployment.
Skilled labor positions were hit over the past decade, but in Indiana, many of them were more recession-resistant than many non-trade positions, according to an annual U.S. Department of Labor report.
Between 1999 and 2009, the most recent year statistics were available for, Indiana lost about 10.1 percent of the jobs in the “installation, maintenance and repair occupations” category. Most of the careers in the group required higher education or certifications.
The “production occupations” category, which mostly included positions that don’t require degrees or certifications, lost about 30.5 percent of their jobs over that same decade, according to the report.
Globalization has pushed many of those occupations to other countries where labor is cheaper.
In a 2007 study, a Princeton University economist theorized U.S. employers could potentially outsource more than 30 million blue-collar and white-collar U.S. jobs.
Low-skill jobs, which fueled the economies of cities like Kokomo for decades, are going to keep moving abroad, Harris said.
“It used to be you go to high school, work in the plant,” he said. “That is good, but more complicated than that, we are in a world where there’s a global competition.”
White-collar and skilled labor positions will be what remains most abundant, he said.
“We can’t compete with China when it comes to pay per hour,” he said. “But we weigh better than them in manufacturing. We weigh better than them in knowledge.”