Amid allegations Gov. Scott Walker has not met the job creation goals he promised since taking office, the governor recently established a workforce readiness council, which aims to create degree programs to move people into the workforce.
Walker signed an executive order Jan. 13 creating the College and Workforce Readiness Council, set to create degree programs requiring less time and money and allowing students to transfer credits from high school to college with greater ease.
The council will be made up of 15 members, including cabinet secretaries and representatives from both the public and private schools systems, as well as from small businesses, Walker said in a statement.
Walker spokesperson Cullen Werwie said partnering secondary education programs with private sector employers who are looking for employees within the state will cause unemployment rates in Wisconsin to drop.
Werwie said the ultimate outcome would hopefully be that all students would have access to the type of education they need to gain employment in the state.
“We can ensure that the education that the kids are getting will lead directly into jobs and help kids through the transition from student life into the working world, ” Werwie said.
Still, Rep. Kelda Helen Roys, D-Madison, said she has great doubts about the initiative. She said council will not have more economic success than the passing of Walker’s budget, which she said has resulted in more and more job losses each month since it was passed.
Roys said the council will not be able to correct the $71 million worth of funding Walker cut from Wisconsin technical colleges and $250 million worth of funding cuts from the University of Wisconsin System.
“Over the past year, we’ve seen that when it comes to jobs and protecting the economic security of the middle class, the governor is all style and no substance,” Roys said. “The one thing that Gov. Walker has made Wisconsin number one in is cuts to education in the nation, and those cuts are going to have a devastating and long-term impact on our economic success.”
UW System spokesperson David Giroux said he is in support of Walker’s council.
Giroux said the system believes anything to help the governing body reach its goal of producing more college graduates and a more robust workforce in Wisconsin is a positive, despite the cuts the System has sustained.
“We’ll hope that this council helps facilitate that kind of progress for the state,” he said.
The proposed council, Giroux said, would be beneficial in providing a forum for the Legislature, the governor and educational officials to create a plan to improve education for the future.
A solid plan, he said, could help ensure post-secondary education correlates with high employment numbers throughout the state.
“If you look across the states today, the states with the higher percentages of college graduates have high incomes,” Giroux said. “The states with lower percentages of college graduates have lower incomes.”
This council is part of Walker’s plan to create 250,000 new jobs by 2015. The council aims to have a detailed plan to achieve these goals by Dec. 31, 2012.
