The latest round of Community-Based Job Training Grants was announced recently, so EMSI has updated its step-by-step guide to help colleges with their applications. The document shows how Strategic Advantage gives users much of the labor market information that’s required in the solicitation.
Download the PDF: CBJTG guide
Update: EMSI has produced a video tutorial to assist in [...]

In this op-ed for Forbes magazine, William D. Green (CEO of Accenture) uses his own background to argue that community colleges are one of America’s most valuable and overlooked assets.
Over the years, I’ve come to view community colleges and other two-year institutions as the Cinderella story of our education system–doing the hard work, quietly, without [...]

The US Department of Labor / Employment & Training Administration has announced the availability of approximately 20 grants of $100,000 to $500,000 to support technology-based learning  projects (PDF link). Successful grantees will need to target high-demand occupations (requiring labor market information and analysis) and demonstrate the existence of a regional partnership that brings together education [...]

A new report from the National Commission on Adult Literacy, produced in conjunction with the Charles Stewart Mott foundation, finds that the U.S. is actually less educated than it was a generation ago, and that this extremely poor adult literacy (and, presumably, numeracy) will result in a decline in economic competitiveness. The report calls for [...]

Economic Modeling Specialists Inc. (EMSI) will provide crucial data, modeling, and analysis to an economic impact study of New York City’s Watershed Land Acquisition Program. The study was initiated by the Delaware County Department of Economic Development, which fears that additional acquisitions made by the program will hamper development in the region.
Read on for the [...]

A socioeconomic impact study by EMSI has concluded that Schenectady County Community College benefits its region to the tune of $330 million, the majority of which is due to increased student earnings and productivity resulting from their education. This factor, which plays a key role in EMSI’s methodology, is virtually ignored by most college impact [...]

The Bureau of Economic Analysis has released advance estimates for 2007 state gross products. Overall, GDP growth slowed or remained unchanged in all U.S. regions, while national GDP grew by 2% in 2007 compared to 3.1% in 2006.
Regions with the most state GDP growth in 2007 were:

The Pacific Northwest & Rocky Mountain  (WA, OR, ID, [...]

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” [...]

Workforce3one has an informative collection of documents that summarize the lessons of Workforce Innovation Networks (WINs) — an initiative to build capacity of employer organizations (such as chambers) to serve as market-driven workforce intermediaries. Documents include:

Organizing and Supporting the Employer Role in Workforce Development: A Guide for Employer Organizations
Creating Community Advancement Initiatives: A “How To” [...]

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 [...]