The Kauffman Foundation has released a new report on increasing entrepreneurship in the US economy. The report’s foundational assumption is that entrepreneurs have created most of the new technologies and business models that have fueled our nation’s staggering productivity growth in the past few decades.
The central policy recommendations of the report are

“Ensuring a skilled workforce” [...]

The National Science Board has released a report and data tool that includes dozens of state-specific science & engineering indicators.
Science and Engineering Indicators (SEI) is first and foremost a volume of record comprising the major high-quality quantitative data on the U.S. and international science and engineering enterprise. SEI is factual and policy-neutral. It does not [...]

The College Board’s National Commission on Community Colleges has released its final report, titled “Winning the Skills Race and Strengthening America’s Middle Class: An Action Agenda for Community Colleges.”
The report highlights the contributions of America’s community colleges and their potential for meeting key future challenges for our national economy, while at the same time bemoaning [...]

EMSI/CCbenefits has just completed a major study of the socioeconomic impact of Maryland’s community colleges, commissioned by the Maryland Association of Community Colleges. The project included individual studies for 14 participating institutions, in addition to an aggregate report highlighting the impact of the system as a whole.
While EMSI’s policy is not to release specific results [...]

The Fund for Our Economic Future, a philanthropic organization in northeast Ohio, publishes a “dashboard” of the area’s economic health, as well as a detailed analysis of dozens of indicator variables used to generate the dashboard results.
The 2007 Full Report is an excellent resource for anyone interested in using socioeconomic indicators to track and improve [...]

We have all heard numerous policy reports that predict a grim future for U.S. competitiveness due to the lack of workers well-educated in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines. A new report from the Urban Institute, titled “Into the Eye of the Storm: Assessing the Evidence on Science and Engineering Education, Quality, and Workforce [...]

We’ve just been reading an interesting study from the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at UC-Berkeley titled “Building Institutions from the Region Up: Regional Workforce Development Collaboratives in California.” Although the paper is over two years old and describes initiatives that began in 2001, its insights into the regional collaboration remain as relevant as [...]

The Northern Virgina Workforce Investment Board’s SkillSource Group, in partnership with Dr. Kenneth Poole of the Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness (affiliated with C2ER), has completed an 18-month BRAC impact study for the area in and around Fort Belvoir and Quantico Marine Base.
EMSI’s Strategic Advantage provided the “heavy-lifting” economic modeling, including the estimates of workforce [...]

EMSI has completed a cluster analysis report on the wine industry in Washington State’s Walla Walla valley, which is booming thanks to smart economic development strategies and the local college’s Institute for Enology and Viticulture. The area is one of the nation’s hottest emerging appellations, producing wines with consistently high ratings and drawing an increasing [...]

A new report from the Texas Higher Education Commission shows overall enrollment is growing in community colleges and universities but the Hispanic growth rate is not enough to close the gap. Hispanic legislative leaders blame rising tuition costs and lack of financial assistance for the slow growth that will make it hard for the state [...]