Panel discussion: A wrinkle in the Minnesota workforce

Minnesota, are you ready to take a demographic dip?

For the next two years, Minnesota's working-age population — the 25-to-64-year-olds — will hold fairly steady in number, state demographer Susan Brower says. Then it will start a multiyear downward slide in size, while the number of senior citizens spikes and the number of children slowly swells.

The working-adult population isn't projected to grow again until the early 2030s, and won't be back to its 2015-17 strength until 2040.

That dip represents a major change for a state that has benefited from a rapidly growing workforce since at least World War II. It threatens to put a negative kink in just about every other trendline worth watching in the next 25 years.

What should Minnesotans know and do now to prepare for the coming trough in the state's working-age ranks? What's needed for Minnesotans to be at least as prosperous and proud as they usher in New Year 2040 as they are this week as 2015 arrives? Those are questions I posed to a panel of six future-minded Minnesotans at a Dec. 12 discussion at the Star Tribune. (Details about the panel members are in the accompanying text.) Here's some of what they said:

Laura Kalambokidis: We are already seeing labor-market tightening in Minnesota, more acutely than we might have expected. We are entering an era in which we'll no longer have a deep-bench labor market. We need everyone in the game now. We cannot afford to leave any workers behind.

Paul Mattessich: What are we going to do about [socioeconomic] inequity? Educational outcomes and to some extent health outcomes with the growing racial minority part of our population are very different from the current majority population, which is shrinking. With today's trends the up-and-coming workers of the future, the ones who will be entering the workforce in 25 years, are less destined for educational success than today's workers were. You put that together with declining numbers in the workforce in total, and we face a real issue in Minnesota — because even if everybody were qualified, we'd have a shortage of workers.

Brad Finstad: Rural Minnesota is graying and browning. The good news is there will be more of us that are aware and care about equal opportunity.

Margaret Anderson Kelliher: For the sake of Minnesota in 2040, early education is a singularly important issue. Kudos to Minnesota for spending more recently. We can't take our foot off the gas on this.

In higher education, the No. 1 thing is when students start college, we need them to finish. We need to help them to finish. At [the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities], we're serving a diverse group of Minnesotans, but too many are not completing their two-year or four-year degree in a timely way. That makes education much more costly for students and their families, and the public investment is not being utilized to its full potential.

Mattessich: There's an analogy to health here. There's only so much you can do to improve health by improving the health care delivery system. To go further, you have to improve the environments in which people live. Same goes for education. A child's academic achievement results from a combination of school, family and community. Yet we focus 98 percent of our attention on the school. We have to think about what we can do through communities and families to help kids learn. That's where we can get a big breakthrough — by understanding and improving the social determinants of education.

Tom Gillaspy: Fortunately for the community side, we have a potential resource we've never had before. It's all these people retiring in record numbers. We can do more to use them. Mentors can have a dramatic positive impact, and cost the state and the schools virtually nothing.

Kelliher: With an aging population, making broadband available across the state becomes phenomenally important. It's what will allow worker productivity to continue to rise. People are going to need to create more on their own. There's going to be an appreciation of craft, of hand-touched work. Right now, 385,000 rural Minnesotans are not connected to broadband. That's 43 percent.

Bringing broadband everywhere can solve a lot of problems. The statistic I can never get away from with broadband is that for low-income families, their incomes go up on average by $2,000 a year within a year of being connected. It's because they're able to do certain things — find a better job, make more money, start a business, get more education, file their taxes online and claim the credits they have coming. Broadband is a critical thing that the state can partner on.

Finstad: We can't succeed if we don't have a statewide view of the future. There are pockets in rural Minnesota where the challenges will be deep. A third of their population will be over the age of 65, living on fixed incomes. How will we keep the lights on in those communities — and what will be the cost if we don't?

Rural Minnesota has a lot of unfunded liabilities already. There's $2 billion, $3 billion in infrastructure that is in dire need of repair. There are small communities that can't add more toilets and showers because they have met the limit of their wastewater infrastructure's environmental standards. We need a strategy that gives those places a future.

Gillaspy: In demographic terms, I see Minnesota increasingly as three rings that don't interact very well. They are the inner city and inner-ring suburbs; the outer-ring suburbs that don't have any idea what goes on in the inner city and don't care, and Greater Minnesota. Their differences are increasing over time. Understanding the rest of Minnesota doesn't happen automatically anymore.

Gillaspy: We've been drawing some of the top scientists, engineers from other countries. That's getting very, very difficult now. Even laborers from Mexico are becoming increasingly scarce. We're now in an age in which place is choice, not destiny. We need to create an environment that develops, attracts and retains the best talent.

Kalambokidis: Minnesota's industrial diversity is in our favor. We're not a state that is overly dependent on one industrial sector. That helps make this state an attractive place, especially for two-earner couples. It's a place where, if I come here for a job, my spouse is likely to find work here too.

Cunningham: A new study by Greater MSP has found a large division on race in that regard. If African-American professionals come here without kids, they don't stay. If they're white, they stay. That's a huge talent gap.

Mattessich: That tells me that we should work hard to recruit African-Americans and other educated people of color who have families and would like what we have to offer. Minnesota is at the top on so many ratings — health, overall education, homeownership. If we want to stay there, we need more educated, middle-class, up-and-coming people of color.

Cunningham: Minnesota is not a leader in developing small businesses. We rank 32nd among the states in the development of micro-enterprises. And you know who does most of the hiring? Small businesses. We are going to have to up our game with regards to supporting development and success of small businesses in general, and businesses of color in particular. What's our small-business strategy? Other states do more by way of small-business assistance — things like technical support, mentoring and assistance in getting access to equity investments.

Mattessich: The transportation conversation we're about to have [at the 2015 Legislature] needs to acknowledge that the purpose of transportation goes beyond transportation. It's how do we stay healthy, feed people and promote businesses in the future. If we stay stuck at how are we going to improve our roads and our bridges vs. light-rail transit, we're just going to dig ourselves into a deeper problem.

Kalambokidis: We need to think more about commerce. The goods-producing sectors in Minnesota matter a lot for bringing money into the state. They depend on getting stuff from place to place. This conversation needs to be about more than how am I going to get to work or to Wal-Mart or the hockey game.

Finstad: Four hundred fifty semis leave New Ulm every day, and we don't have a four-lane road. That's a big deal.

We need new ideas about funding. I don't think we can keep going back to the well of the gas tax. We know that it adversely affects rural Minnesota, because rural people drive more miles and drive bigger vehicles. Let's have a discussion of a full transportation plan with new sources of funding.

Gillaspy: The last ag census showed a change that's going to be important in Greater Minnesota. It's not unusual to see the average age of farmers being about 56. That's been that way for a long time. But in the past, there were secondary and tertiary operators, sons or younger brothers working the farm and preparing to take it over. The last census found very few of those people. When this group of farmers retires, who will take over?

Gillaspy: The good news is that most of the problems we have in Minnesota are solvable. That's not the case in some states.

Mattessich: But we're talking about problems that are gradual and long-term. We're not good at thinking ahead beyond the next election. That's got to improve now.

Kalambokidis: These aren't just questions for government. Businesses have to step up. The businesses that are going to thrive these years without a deep bench are the ones that can attract, train and retain the workforce that we do have. They need to see that now, and decide what they can do now to have the workers they need in the future.

Finstad: The state is at a turning point. All we've been doing is fixing things for the past 25 years — one crisis after another. A lot of that is behind us now. We have an opportunity to create policy, to look forward and say: How do we envision Minnesota in the next 15, 20, 25 years? And then create it.