A Note from DRF: A question we find ourselves asking right now is what communities will look like and how they will operate in a post-pandemic world. As restrictions are lifted, we may freely move about more but some businesses, organizations and those in the workforce will still struggle to recover for some time to come. DRF asked our friend Ted Abernathy with Economic Leadership LLC to curate some thoughts on the subject from leaders across the United States to help us think about what’s next.

I do not believe we even know or understand all the long-term impacts from COVID yet. However, of the ones in front of us right now, the most concerning is the impact COVID is having on our labor force.

All indications are that the mismatch between available talent and employment demand will continue for a significant period of time. On the demand side, the Life Sciences and Technology sectors continue to hire in large numbers. On the supply side the hospitality, retail and service sector continue to furlough talent in large numbers.

Unfortunately, the traditional workforce and employment institutions across the country are ill equipped and slow to pivot to provide awareness and retraining initiatives that would match this growing supply with current demand.

Compounding this issue is the frightening level of learning loss that our future workforce, the youth in America, are experiencing.

In a recent report by McKinsey and Company K-12 remote learning has not been successful and specifically detrimental to our most vulnerable youth. Current estimates are that youth of color and low-income youth will experience an average 12.4 month learning loss between March of 2020 and September of 2021. To no one’s surprise, the expectation is that will lead to the dropout rate hitting 25% in 2021-2022. 

One in every four High School students may now drop out of school according to Measure of America, a project of the Social Science Research Council. 

In their report, A Decade Undone, they project that the pandemic will change the rate of youth disconnection drastically, likely wiping out a decade of progress.

The implications to our youth, our workforce, and our economy are profound. McKinsey predicts that the issue of disengagement and learning loss will cost our youth currently in the K-12 system almost $200 billion in lost annual earnings; also resulting in over $480 billion in GDP loss by 2040. 

Our students of color and low-income youth are disengaging from remote education in record numbers. Contributing to this disengagement are three key issues: the lack of connectivity and access to remote learning, the inconsistent quality of teaching, and the lack of a conducive home environment.

Our traditional public-school systems have been ill equipped to support the learning needs of our current generation of youth and their future employers for decades. Expecting them to utilize those same education systems to address these new and larger disengagement issues and their impacts on student learning is irrational.

What is required immediately is a national influx of education and workforce innovation and the necessary resources to deploy it at scale. Anything short of that will impede both the short-term recovery plans and long-term economic productivity of the US economy.