Home: Newsroom: Newsletter: Education Needs Index, February, 2006

County level study shows educational needs

If you ask Houston Davis, PhD, how many counties are in Texas, Michigan and Tennessee, he’ll tell you – without even thinking – 254, 83, and 95. In fact, Davis is now familiar with the number of counties for every state in the nation.

This uncanny ability is the result of Davis’s work on the Educational Needs Index (ENI), a county-by-county study of educational, economic and population pressures that affect education policy. Recognizing that education conditions are affected by many other factors, Davis – along with team members Brian Noland, PhD, and Patrick Kelly – created a way of evaluating a region’s education while looking at influences such as economic and population pressures. In addition, this project gives education and economic policy-makers a way to compare their county’s educational attainment, unemployment and population growth rates to counties with similar make-ups and challenges.

“State-level statistics may be accurate, but they don’t necessarily paint an accurate picture of what’s happening in your area,” said Davis, who serves as ENI’s project director.

By getting down to what Davis calls “the county-level data,” the ENI raises red flags in counties that are facing education and workforce challenges and highlights those experiencing success. The red flags indicate areas that are experiencing low educational attainment, challenging economic conditions and population growth. Policy-makers in these areas can use the ENI to identify counties that may need more focus or resources.

Similarly, with the ENI policy-makers can identify the counties that have found success – areas that have relatively high educational attainment and promising economic conditions, even with an increasing population and shifting demographics. In these areas, they can ask, “What are these counties doing right? What are the ‘best practices’ coming out of these counties? What initiatives can be shared to help other counties of similar size find more education and economic success?” Such information can help policy-makers plan and implement better economic and educational policy that fits their specific situations.

In short, the ENI is a conversation starter between and among states, involving education, business and government officials.

“Economic and educational challenges are not just state-level issues,” said Davis. “What we’re finding is that these problems cut across state lines. The ENI is a way to identify regions of the country that are facing considerable and comparable pressures.”

The first phase of the ENI project involved getting basic information from every county in the nation and producing a state report for each of the 50 states. The key questions asked included:

• What is the current level of educational degree attainment of the state and its respective counties?
• What is the current economic health of each of the state’s counties?
• Are there counties that are growing and have shifting demographics that skew toward youth, young adults or at-risk minority groups?
• What counties can be identified to be undereducated, facing economic challenges, and facing robust population growth and shifting demographics in categories of youth, young adults or at-risk minority groups?

With this information, the ENI project ranked every county in the nation and placed that county into one of four categories based on levels of educational need: most critical, critical, less critical and least critical.
The second phase of the project will more closely examine a few of the rural areas identified as critical or most critical. The rural regions include:

• Central Washington State
• Central California
• Northwest New Mexico
• Eastern Arkansas and Northwest Mississippi
• Northeast Tennessee and Southeast Kentucky
• Eastern border of Virginia and North Carolina.

The third phase involves looking into a few of the urban areas defined as critical or most critical. The urban regions include:

• Las Vegas, Nevada
• El Paso, Texas
• Memphis, Tennessee
• Miami, Florida
• Providence, Rhode Island
• Gary, Indiana.

In the second and third phase, ENI staff will meet with education and economic officials and residents from these specific areas. They will conduct focus groups to find out how that region’s demographic pressures are directly affecting planning and public policy and what could be done to improve the educational and economic outlook for residents and employers in that region. They will ask questions such as:

• What do these conditions mean to the residents of the area? How are these conditions affecting your everyday lives and planning for the future?
• How are economic pressures affecting this area’s education and training needs? What challenges exist for the emerging workforce versus the current workforce?
• What are the barriers that are preventing public officials from meeting these educational challenges?

With the information gathered from these meetings, ENI staff will produce urban/rural reports detailing the pressures affecting education in these areas.

“The real substance of the ENI project is in these rural/urban phases,” said Davis. “This is getting down to the real challenges and revealing that you just cannot have a ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy for every county in a state.”

Visit www.educationalneedsindex.com for more information about the ENI project. Check back for the rural/urban reports, which will be available on the Web site as they are completed in the fall of 2006.

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MHEC and SREB find tool powerful

Two organizations – one in the Midwest and one in the South – are incorporating the ENI into their work.

The Midwest Higher Education Compact (MHEC) promotes interstate cooperation and resource sharing in higher education through cost savings programs, student access and policy research.

When MHEC members learned about the ENI, they were impressed with the level of detail that it could give – that “county-level data” that Houston Davis described. Thinking the ENI could be useful to state policy-makers in their member states, MHEC members invited ENI staff to present the ENI model to a meeting of State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEOs) in the Midwest.

“As we anticipated, the SHEEOs were quite impressed with the ENI,” said MHEC’s Chris Rasmussen, PhD, director of policy research. "They asked if the ENI presenters were available to travel to the states and make presentations to policy-makers."

The MHEC plans to incorporate the ENI state reports into its Midwest PERL (Postsecondary Education Resource Library). In addition, ENI data will be included in MHEC’s written policy reports that MHEC prepares annually for  member states.

“I’m sure policy-makers will start to use the ENI more as it reaches a broader audience,” said Rasmussen. “And we intend to help facilitate this, believing the ENI to be one more helpful tool to inform public policy.”

The Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) assists state leaders by focusing attention on key education issues. To highlight these issues, the SREB collects and interprets data, conducts studies and initiates discussions about education plans, actions and policy proposals. Members of the SREB decided to use the ENI data to inform their Adult Learning Campaign.

“One of the most powerful aspects of the ENI is its flexibility,” said Bruce Chaloux, director of the SREB’s electronic campus.
"The ENI model allows you to adjust for different variables."

SREB members took the ENI model and applied it to the 16 states in their region.

But rather than focusing on education in general, the SREB used it in a more detailed way – to examine specifically the adult learning population. The ENI helped SREB frame the adult learning challenges for the states in their region.

“The first step in designing policy is to understand what needs to be corrected, expanded, added or promoted," said Chaloux. “We’ve taken the information from the ENI, presented it as a means to inform policy-makers of the adult learning challenge and then suggested a set of questions that policy-makers should ask about adult-learning in their states. The ENI helps us make the case and then ask the key questions.”