Ordinarily, writing this column is like trying to untangle a complicated knot. I noodle for a while about one problem or another – entrepreneurship or agricultural development for instance. I find some source of data that seems to shed some light on the topic. And I drill down into the numbers and muck around with them until I find some line of thought that seems to make sense. This week is different. I want to pull several disparate ideas together to see if the combination makes any sense.

The first item rattling in my head is the Portland initiative election. Ordinarily, elections are times for celebrations and condolences, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. After last Tuesday, the impression I get from speaking to people is neither. It is, rather, an enormous sense of relief, less a sense of a noble cause won or lost than a sense of a problem avoided, a bullet missed, a sigh of, “Whew, that’s over, let’s get on with it.” For the sake of creating both higher paying jobs and an inclusive community building process, let’s hope we can.

The second item, was a report from the Brookings Institution that attempted to quantity what it called the “value added” provided by institutions of higher education.

As one of the first major uses of information from a 35-state collaborative effort linking education and wage records, it set my data-geek heart aflutter. In essence, the study was an elaborate econometric study using student characteristics such as test scores and parents’ level of income and education to “predict” the earnings graduates of various colleges “should” earn based on the characteristics of their graduates.

It then compared the actual 2011 earnings of 2001 graduates to their predicted earnings and defined the difference between the two to be the “value added or lost” associated with the education provided by each institution.

As an example of the creative use of a treasure trove of underutilized information and a first step toward providing more concrete and transparent information to prospective students and their parents about at least one educational outcome, I certainly applaud this effort.

Colleges and universities should be pressured to demonstrate and explain the likely benefits of their increasingly expensive services to their increasingly debt-ridden customers.

On the other hand, to focus solely on earnings as the measure of “value added” is to over-emphasize training and ignore education. Explorations of realms of human experience other than the acquisition of money is a “value” that schooling beyond high school ought to add to its students and that ought somehow be included in any comparison of the success of various colleges and universities.

Which brings me to the third string I am trying to tie into this jumble of ideas – the charming, engaging, optimistic and energetic young people I have been blessed to have met in a variety of projects recently. I don’t know what schools they attended. I don’t know what degrees they obtained. I don’t know what jobs they do “officially.” What I do know is that each has been encouraged and supported by their employers to become involved in some public policy issue – promoting the importance of entrepreneurship, finding ways to expand the reach of high-speed broadband, working with high school students, welcoming fellow employees new to Maine to our natural beauty, our history and our culture.

The specific project is irrelevant. What is relevant though is the wonderfully leavening effect of these young workers (my grandfatherly impulse is to say “kids”), mostly “from away,” on all the projects in which I’ve witnessed their involvement. They have been self-confident without being arrogant. They have been optimistic and enthusiastic without being overbearing. They have been receptive to all suggestions without exhibiting any defensiveness.

Most of all, they have, each in his or her own way, responded to whatever challenge they have encountered with an enthusiastic, “Well let’s just jump in and see what we can learn, and then decide what to do!”

In short, they neither claim nor need to have all the answers before they begin to struggle with a problem. That capacity and desire to “muddle through” is a quality sorely needed in Maine today and a reason we owe their employers a debt of gratitude – not just for hiring them, but for setting them free in our community.

Charles Lawton is Chief Economist for Planning Decisions Inc. He can be reached at:

clawton@planningdecisions.com

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