When North Carolinians went to the polls last November, for many, it was with a distinct sense of economic unease.
The economy was the most important issue, voters told exit pollsters, and 65 percent rated its health as “not good” or “poor.” One out of every three residents said they expected life to be tougher for the next generation.
In the presidential race, the state, which has been a battleground in successive elections, swung narrowly to the Republican candidate, who tapped into those fears. Donald Trump, who pledged to bring back manufacturing jobs and campaigned on making the old economy great again, captured North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes with just under half of the popular vote.
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When North Carolinians went to the polls last November, for many, it was with a distinct sense of economic unease.
The economy was the most important issue, voters told exit pollsters, and 65 percent rated its health as “not good” or “poor.” One out of every three residents said they expected life to be tougher for the next generation.
In the presidential race, the state, which has been a battleground in successive elections, swung narrowly to the Republican candidate, who tapped into those fears. Donald Trump, who pledged to bring back manufacturing jobs and campaigned on making the old economy great again, captured North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes with just under half of the popular vote.
Mr. Trump won among voters without a college degree; he carried 76 of North Carolina’s 100 counties and 58 percent of the rural vote. North Carolinians who worried that life will be worse for their children voted for Mr. Trump, overwhelmingly.
You’ve got pockets of the state thriving. But others aren’t sharing in that dynamism.
Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, was victorious in the state’s two affluent, educated metro areas: Charlotte, a banking hub, and, by an even more lopsided margin, Raleigh, home to the state’s three most prominent universities and a burgeoning high-tech sector.
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Reading the tea leaves in the election, any election, can be tricky business. But in North Carolina’s case, November’s vote seems to have laid bare fault lines of economics and education.
On one side are North Carolinians grappling with economic precariousness. The state’s traditional industries — furniture, textiles, and tobacco — have been contracting for generations, cannibalized by mechanization and competition, both domestic and foreign. The recession a decade ago dealt one more blow.
Even now, in many of the state’s communities, incomes are low, and unemployment remains high. Half the counties still have fewer jobs than before the recession struck.
If the story on one side of the divide is gloomy, on the other, prospects are bright. Since the downturn, 40 percent of all job growth has occurred in just two counties, Mecklenburg, home to Charlotte, and Wake, where Raleigh is the county seat.
“You’ve got pockets of the state thriving,” says Christopher Gergen, chief executive of Forward Impact, a group that focuses on entrepreneurship and community engagement, and a fellow at Duke University. “But others aren’t sharing in that dynamism.”
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That vitality can be attributed in no small measure to higher education and, specifically, to a six-decade-old strategy by the state’s leaders to leverage its three prestigious research universities — Duke and two public institutions, North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — to spur economic growth. It was a bet that colleges could change the economy. And they did.
But if that decision set part of the state on one trajectory, it, however inadvertently, put the other on a different path. For all that North Carolina is illustrative of colleges’ transformative power, it also underscores the limits. Even as education helped part of the state move into the new economy, much of it remains mired in the old.
Today, there is not just one North Carolina. There are two.
Public higher education has long held an important place in North Carolina. The flagship campus, at Chapel Hill, was the first state-chartered university in the country to admit students. Authors of the state Constitution thought a college education critical enough to include language requiring that it “as far as practicable, be extended to the people of the state free of expense.” And for decades, even as other states welcomed out-of-state students and the extra tuition they pay, the Board of Governors of the university system has capped nonresident enrollments, saying that it has a “special obligation” to educate the citizens of North Carolina.
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North Carolina’s Degree Gap The counties that include Research Triangle Park and Charlotte have far more educated populations than the counties that make up the state’s rural manufacturing base. This map shows the percentage of the population 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree or higher. The state average is 28.4 percent.
Source: American Community Survey of the U.S. Census, average for 2011-15
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“Part of our birthright is a belief in education,” says Tom Lambeth, emeritus director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, which works in community development and public education, among other areas.
In the years following World War II, North Carolina opened its first community colleges, recognizing that, as the economy shifted, more of its citizens, even those who did not want to earn a four-year degree, would need some training beyond high school. About the same time, business, civic, and educational leaders came together to create what became known as Research Triangle Park.
In the early 1950s, North Carolina’s economy was floundering. Then, as now, its major industries were coming under siege, undercut by automation and cheaper competition. Per-capita income was in the basement, among the lowest of any state in the nation. Its college graduates were fleeing the state, seeking higher pay and better work.
As they looked for a way to change the state’s economic fate, local leaders realized they had one unusual asset, three highly regarded research universities, two public and one private, just a few miles apart near Raleigh. They decided on a bold — and what, at the time, must have seemed quixotic — plan: They would turn nearby pasture land into a research park and lure the high-tech companies of the day — in chemistry, pharmaceuticals, early computing — who wanted access to the best academic talent. The state’s campuses, its crown jewels, would secure its future.
The strategy, however, was not an immediate success, says Albert N. Link, a professor of economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who has written a history of Research Triangle Park. Companies at the time typically maintained their own research facilities near their manufacturing sites, and there were few other examples of deliberate efforts to create high-tech hubs. At one point, the research park had to borrow money to keep going.
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But, slowly, the park began to attract tenants, first IBM and the U.S. Department of Health, then others.
Now one of the largest science parks in the world, Research Triangle Park is home to more than 200 companies and employs 46,000 people. Its researchers have discovered drugs to treat cancer and HIV, made pioneering innovations in 3D ultrasound technology, and created Astroturf.
Nor are the benefits confined to the Research Triangle’s gleaming 7,000-acre campus. Per-capita income in the area, once 11 percent below the national average, is nearly 3 percent above it.
“North Carolina’s universities,” says Ferrel Guillory, a professor of journalism at Chapel Hill and a longtime chronicler of the state, “are perhaps its biggest man-made competitive advantage.”
The research done in Research Triangle labs has spawned companies that hire graduates of area universities who have in turn made discoveries or developed fresh products. That has created the need for new companies to service the old and attracted outside investors who want in on the action. Which makes Raleigh all the more appealing to students and recent graduates who — well, you get the point.
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In economics, the principle is known as agglomeration. If a region has a critical mass of a certain resource — in the Research Triangle’s case, skilled workers and high-tech expertise — it has a built-in advantage in attracting more of the same. Even the recession was just a brief blip in the region’s economy, a momentary downturn.
If the Research Triangle attracts new residents like moths to a flame — 65 people move to Wake County every day — that brain gain can come at the expense of other parts of the state.
For many of his 39 years teaching at North Carolina State, Michael L. Walden has served as an academic adviser. When students from rural communities first arrive on campus, they often tell Mr. Walden, an expert on the state economy, that they plan to return home after earning a degree. But by their junior year, he says, most students’ plans have shifted, to stay in Raleigh or move to another city where jobs for college graduates are plentiful. “It’s bright lights, big city,” he says.
Nearly half of the area’s residents have a bachelor’s degree, and one in five holds a graduate degree. Not only is the region the best educated in the state, it’s one of the most highly educated metro areas in the entire country. By contrast, just 18 percent of rural North Carolinians have a four-year degree.
If education has created an economic wedge in North Carolina, employment trends suggest the gulf is only likely to widen. Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce projects that by the end of the decade, two-thirds of all jobs in North Carolina will require some sort of postsecondary education. If nothing changes, there can be little doubt of where these jobs will go. Conceived as an engine of opportunity, efforts like Research Triangle Park may be exacerbating inequality.
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“The rich get richer,” says Leslie Boney, director of the Institute for Emerging Issues, a public-policy institute based at North Carolina State, “and the educated are getting more concentrated.”
If one North Carolina was booming, in the other, the recession hit with fury and force.
The downturn in the state was especially sharp because, outside of Charlotte and Raleigh, its economy remained dominated by manufacturing. The state’s job losses in the sector, says Mr. Walden, were four times that nationally.
Say “manufacturing,” and you’ll probably conjure up an urban panorama of sooty smokestacks and hulking factories. However, manufacturing of the sort done in North Carolina — the weaving of cloth, the construction of furniture — has long been concentrated in its rural areas.
Over the years, workers grew accustomed to being laid off multiple times, losing one position when one plant closed and finding another, only to fall victim to the next round of cuts. The recession exacerbated these trends. Across the state it was a roll call of devastation.
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The simultaneous collapse of the textile and furniture industries struck Catawba County, 45 minutes northwest of Charlotte, eliminating a third of its employment base. In the southwest corner of the state, three counties shed 2,500 jobs in a matter of months, with unemployment rates hitting 20 percent. In Alleghany County, too, one out of three residents found themselves out of work.
Patrick Woodie was a commissioner in the north-central county. His mother worked for 42 years at a plant that manufactured compressors for heating and cooling systems. When, after going through three separate owners, the factory closed its doors for a final time, she was lucky enough, at 63, to be old enough to retire, he says.
In the depth of the downturn, it was to community colleges that people across the state looked to for help, with the goal of taking residents from old, blue-collar jobs into the new economy. New training programs were stood up and existing ones expanded.
But it wasn’t always clear what jobs people were being retrained for. As traditional industries contracted, many of the positions that remained, in the retail sector or as home-health aides, paid poorly and required few skills. The challenge across the state was to attract new mid-wage employers, in new lines of work. Job growth in rural areas has continued to lag; a quarter of the state’s counties have two unemployed workers for every job that needs to be filled.
It’s a chicken-or-egg dilemma, says Julian L. Alssid, who is the chief work-force strategist for College for America, a competency-based program that’s part of Southern New Hampshire University. “Work-force development is hard to get right,” Mr. Alssid says. It can be even tougher to do during a crisis.
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That’s true not just in North Carolina but across the country. Employers don’t want to relocate without the promise of a skilled work force. Workers, downsized and downsized again, don’t want to go through retraining without the pledge of a sure-fire job.
It can be tough to persuade older workers in particular to enroll in training programs. They often lack the math and science skills that are prerequisites for certificate or degree programs in more technical, and better paying, fields. As they edge toward the end of their working days, they may question the investment of time and money in a wholly new career. And for those who haven’t seen the inside of a classroom for decades, the idea of going back to school can simply seem frightening.
“For many people,” says Tony Zeiss, who recently retired after 24 years as president of Central Piedmont Community College, in Charlotte, “returning to college is intimidating.”
Catawba County has tried to attract new industries while also preserving the old ones. The 155,000-person county is far enough outside Charlotte’s sprawl to feel like its own place, more small town than suburb. Its location along the Catawba River was an asset, giving it easy access to shipping channels and, later, to cheap electricity. Hickory, its largest town, was a center for both furniture making and textile production.
When the county was first struck by significant consolidations and closures 15 years ago, it sought to diversify its job base, becoming a major producer of coaxial cable, which is used by cable-television providers. But with an increasing number of Americans cutting the cord, that future, too, looks less than certain.
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Job growth in recent years has come mainly from the service sector. The county is home to a Target distribution center, and a pair of call centers employ about 1,400 people. Even so, about 20 percent of Catawba’s work force remains in manufacturing, says Scott Millar, president of the county’s economic development corporation, about double the national average.
Today’s manufacturing jobs, however, employ fewer people and tend to require more skills. That includes furniture making.
Construction of cheap, mass-produced furniture has largely moved overseas, but local companies still produce high-end and custom pieces. A good upholsterer can make between $50,000 and $100,000 a year, says Bill McBrayer, a human-resources manager at Lexington Home Brands, a furniture maker, depending on how quickly he or she works.
Yet, positions at his company and others were going unfilled because employers couldn’t find reliable workers with the right skills, says Mr. McBrayer, who is also a member of the state community-college board. Furniture makers in the area two years ago turned to Catawba Valley Community College to create a “furniture academy,” which offers courses in areas like pattern making, manual cutting, and sewing. Students who complete it are all but guaranteed a job.
“As long as people are alive and need to sit,” Mr. McBrayer says, “furniture’s not dead.”
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The challenge for North Carolina isn’t just in hard-luck manufacturing towns that are reluctantly embracing higher education to preserve their quality of life. It’s also in communities where both college and the middle class have always seemed out of reach, where living paycheck to paycheck — for those who can find work — is a grim reality.
These may be remote rural areas or urban districts. And they may be just blocks from some of the state’s best universities.
Even the regions of the state with highly educated populations and the most meteoric job growth nonetheless have pockets of poverty. In Mecklenburg County, for instance, 25 census tracts, the rough equivalent of neighborhoods, have unemployment rates above 20 percent.
Colleges are seen broadly as engines of opportunity, as economic equalizers. Is that reputation deserved? Read more from a series exploring that question.
High educational attainment overall is no guarantee of economic and social mobility. Economists, for instance, have found little correlation between the number of local colleges and socio-economic advancement.
In fact, North Carolina scores among the very worst in the country on measures of upward mobility for its lowest-income residents. Four of its cities, Charlotte, Fayetteville, Greensboro, and Raleigh, rank in the bottom 10 of the 100 largest metro areas — meaning that a child born in a low-income household in Charlotte has a less than one-in-three chance of climbing the economic ladder to the middle class or beyond.
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“On the bottom rungs,” says Abby Parcell, program director for research and policy at MDC, a North Carolina-based nonprofit organization, “it’s just so sticky.”
One of these places is East Durham, a neighborhood not far from the Duke campus, where crime is high, teen pregnancy is commonplace, and poverty is pervasive.
David Reese, runs the East Durham Children’s Initiative. Modeled after the Harlem Children’s Zone, the effort’s goal is for all children in the area to graduate from high school ready to go to college or start a career — to break the cycle of poverty.
For Mr. Reese, nearby colleges aren’t the answer to the difficulties facing East Durham, but they are important partners in the solution. Its approach is holistic, call it womb-to-diploma: The initiative provides early-childhood home-health visits, child-care subsidies, low-cost preschool and summer camps, tutoring, and more.
Duke’s Center for Child and Family Health served as an incubator to help the initiative get off the ground, and its public-policy school has assisted with data collection and assessment. Social-work majors from North Carolina Central University are frequent interns. And the school of education at North Carolina State is helping develop a curriculum for East Durham summer programs.
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It will be years before any of the East Durham initiative’s students are ready for college — the oldest are now in seventh grade. When they do enter college, some actually may not be the first in their families to get there. Thanks to a donor, the initiative now has a small scholarship program, covering the cost of a year’s tuition and fees at Durham Technical Community College. The first two awards went to parents.
Many of the neighborhood’s parents, however, have not even finished high school. Still, they embrace the idea, Mr. Reese says, that education is the route out of poverty. When the initiative surveyed parents, nearly half said not only did they want to see their children in cap and gown, they hoped their kids would go on to earn a graduate degree.
One of the recession’s cruelest twists was its timing. Just months before the economy cratered in North Carolina and the rest of the country, a commission convened by Erskine B. Bowles, then president of the state’s university system, called for a reinvigorated role for higher education in economic and community development across the state. It was incumbent on colleges, the panel, known as the UNC Tomorrow Commission, concluded, to “respond more directly and proactively to the 21st century challenges facing North Carolina.”
But any efforts were effectively sidelined by the recession before they could even get off the ground.
In the ensuing decade, the political winds in the state have shifted. Republicans took over the General Assembly and, for a time, the governor’s office. With revenues down and lawmakers prioritizing tax cuts, spending on colleges took a hit, though appropriations remain far above the national average. Pat McCrory, the former Republican governor, took aim at universities, saying the state shouldn’t subsidize liberal-arts studies, only degrees that lead directly to jobs. Some of higher education’s wounds have been self-inflicted, such as an athletic cheating scandal on the Chapel Hill campus.
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H. Martin Lancaster, a former president of the North Carolina Community College System and a onetime Democratic congressman, says higher education has lost the good will that it once enjoyed both with lawmakers and the business community. His generation of leaders believed higher education could raise up the state; the new generation, he fears, doesn’t buy it. “We are changing into South Carolina,” he says, throwing shade at North Carolina’s neighbor and its history of poor support for higher education.
But such predictions may be premature — and overly pessimistic. If, in November, anxiety and anger drove many North Carolinians to the polls in a fractious election, in the quiet of the voting booth, nearly two-thirds of voters said yes to a $2-billion bond, most of which will go to fund construction and repairs on college campuses.
The lesson of North Carolina may not be to write off higher education as a driver of economic growth but to recognize that there are limitations to what colleges can do — and to understand that they may need to do things differently than in the past.
What might different look like? There seems to be agreement that colleges and universities need to be part of a broader effort to improve economic outcomes, in much the same way that the East Durham Children’s Initiative applies an all-out press to combat poverty. In a recent report, MDC, the think tank, called for a state “infrastructure of opportunity” to tackle educational and income inequities.
Already, some of this work is underway. In Catawba County, for instance, the county commission recently adopted what it calls a K-64 strategy, an effort to more tightly align its public schools, community colleges, and local employers. The plan, which includes early college for high-school students, a greater emphasis on apprenticeships, and a more-nimble work-force training program, is a recognition that if the county is to attract businesses and retain residents, both young and more seasoned, all of its institutions must work in concert.
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East Carolina University, which serves a wide swath of the eastern part of the state, has both ramped up and streamlined its outreach to the community, with its Office of Innovation and Economic Development functioning as a hub to connect local needs to university expertise. Student interns serve as grant writers for small towns, faculty members advise budding entrepreneurs, and a new office is helping to foster the region’s sustainable tourism industry.
And in the state’s far southwestern corner, Tri-County Community College acts as the economic-development agency for two of the three counties it serves. The remote and sparsely populated region is cut off from the rest of North Carolina, closer to the capitals of five other states than to Raleigh. Tri-County is a natural focal point for a coordinated effort, bringing together elected officials, local schools, public utilities, and others, says Paul Worley, director of economic and work-force development at the college.
The region has lured some advanced manufacturers in precision machining. A year ago, a tribal casino opened its doors, hiring 1,000 people.
“I don’t do anything,” Mr. Worley says. But through regional partnerships, “we do a lot.”
Karin Fischer writes about international education, colleges and the economy, and other issues. She’s on Twitter @karinfischer, and her email address is karin.fischer@chronicle.com.
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Correction (3/29/2017, 4:15 p.m.): An earlier version of the map in this article included incorrect degree-attainment levels for Mecklenburg County. It has since been updated.
Karin Fischer writes about international education and the economic, cultural, and political divides around American colleges. She’s on the social-media platform X @karinfischer, and her email address is karin.fischer@chronicle.com.