A Challenge for Higher Ed: Modernize Manufacturing, but Protect Jobs

In a project laden with both symbolism and substance, Carnegie Mellon University on Monday began the conversion of an old Pittsburgh steel mill into the home of a $250-million advanced-robotics center.

The site occupies 178 acres of riverfront just 10 minutes from downtown, where thick black smoke from rows of coal-fired furnaces once signaled a solid middle-class life for tens of thousands of steelworkers and their families.

Soon the development, known as Hazelwood Green, will house shiny glass-and-metal offices where faculty and students from the nation’s top-ranked robotics program will help companies around the country automate their manufacturing operations.

Such work will “trigger a significant resurgence” of U.S. manufacturing, Carnegie Mellon’s interim president, Farnam Jahanian, promised dignitaries who marked the occasion by taking pens from a two-armed robot and signing a steel girder on the site.

Yet with the two-year construction project now underway along the Monongahela River, a big question looms: What can Carnegie Mellon, and the rest of higher education, do to make sure that a new age of manufacturing really benefits the work force?

The rapid automation of American jobs has created economic, educational, and political upheaval. But from Carnegie Mellon’s perspective, there’s no point in denying that automation will keep replacing human workers throughout manufacturing. An academic leader should help ensure that American companies have the best automation, and therefore keep the best jobs.

“If we don’t do that,” said Gary K. Fedder, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon and a leader of the Hazelwood Green project, “we’re going to lose more competitiveness.”

A Role for Community Colleges

Embracing robots and automation, Mr. Fedder and other experts said, isn’t just about research-intensive showcases like Hazelwood Green. It also must mean more and better worker training — largely at the nation’s hundreds of community colleges — to help Americans handle a new class of manufacturing jobs.

A set of new analyses underline that point: The traditional four-year degree often isn’t necessary to get a good-paying job in the new era of tech-heavy workplaces.

One of the reports, from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, acknowledges that only 45 percent of “good-paying” U.S. jobs in 2015 went to those without a four-year degree, down from 60 percent in 1991. Yet the raw number of good-paying jobs for those without a four-year diploma grew from 27 million to 30 million over that period, with the growth especially strong outside the Northeast and Midwest.

And among workers with only a two-year degree, the Georgetown study found, 56 percent have a good-paying job — defined as $35,000 a year for those under age 45 and $45,000 for those age 45 and above. The average salary for a worker with a two-year degree is $41,000, compared with $53,000 for a worker with a four-year diploma, according to federal data cited by Georgetown.

Another analysis, by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, emphasizes the value of its members’ four-year offerings but notes the critical importance of coordinating local work-force-development efforts with both research universities and community colleges. And a Brookings Institution study of the computerization of jobs stresses the value of apprenticeships and other types of experiential learning rather than a four-year diploma.

All that suggests that the robotics experts descending upon Hazelwood Green might help to create, not close off, a future for workers who haven’t and probably won’t ever get a bachelor’s degree.

But there are a few important caveats. One, said Jeff Strohl, an author of the Georgetown analysis, is that the type of two-year degree matters. A community-college student is more likely to find a higher-paying job by choosing a technical specialty, said Mr. Strohl, director of research at Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce. But that technically-trained student is accepting greater risk, too, he said: As labor demands shift, that student might need to be retrained.

By comparison, a liberal-arts major at a community college might have better long-term prospects, said Mr. Strohl, a research professor in public policy at Georgetown. But, he said, that’s only the case if that liberal-arts student follows through with a four-year degree — something that often doesn’t happen.

That adds up, Mr. Strohl said, to another generation of American workers taking a big gamble on the quality and robustness of future retraining options. The federal government hasn’t sponsored a truly major job-retraining effort since the 1970s, he said, and many local job agencies suffer from chronic failures to integrate company needs with educational offerings.

Incorporating Apprenticeships

Community colleges also need growth in that area, said F. Mark Muro, a Brookings expert studying the computerization of jobs. A displaced worker arriving at a typical U.S. community college often struggles to find a path forward, said Mr. Muro, a senior fellow and policy director in the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings. “Much of it is adrift, and unhelpful, frankly,” he said of community-college offerings. “This is a solvable problem, but I’m not sure we’re particularly close to resolving it.”

Technology companies are pleading for qualified applicants. But the weakness of retraining programs makes it tough to understand whether Americans who can’t find jobs are not trying hard enough or are legitimately discouraged by their available options, Mr. Strohl said. He described overeager efforts to train workers for careers in fields like “green energy” that end in frustration as the actual number of jobs proves far lower than expected.

At Hazelwood Green — where the Carnegie Mellon-led robotics institute, backed by $250 million in federal and private support, will become the lead tenant — Mr. Fedder recognizes the main focus will be on the cutting-edge research. If the project plays out as expected, the site of the renowned Jones & Laughlin Steel Company will eventually become an upscale campus of companies, condominiums, and restaurants.

But the degree to which a project like Hazelwood Green actually helps fill good jobs nationwide, Mr. Fedder acknowledged, may depend heavily on a less-noticed aspect of the plan. Companies getting Carnegie Mellon’s help in automating their factories are being asked to incorporate apprenticeships aimed at sectors that include younger workers, older workers, veterans, and various underserved populations. The lessons learned from that request, he said, hopefully will create better models for how job-training efforts could work nationwide.

Long-term predictions are impossible, Mr. Fedder said. But he does not accept the idea that anyone, at any age, is beyond the point of retraining and contributing. “I don’t think any of us are willing to give up on that,” he said.

Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.