Harry Holzer Testifies About Job Creation Before a U.S. Senate Budget Committee Hearing
Washington, D.C. – Harry Holzer, a senior research fellow at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and a professor at Georgetown University, testified Tuesday, September 20, 2011 before the U.S. Senate Budget Committee. Calling for more effective education and workforce development systems to improve job creation, Holzer said the current weak job market is generating low salaries that are likely to “scar millions of young workers for years to come.”
Holzer, a member of AIR’s National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), said in prepared testimony that, “Over 40 percent of the unemployed suffer from lengthy spells of unemployment (i.e., longer than six months), which will make it harder for them to reenter the job market and find employment when job creation picks up. And low earnings will scar millions of young workers for years to come, even when the labor market fully recovers.”
“To improve worker skills, we need to develop more effective education and workforce development systems that are better targeted towards growing and high-paying sectors of the U.S. economy,” he said.
Holzer also told lawmakers, “We also need to better integrate career services and occupational training in our high schools and colleges, and make both sets of institutions more responsive to the demand side of the labor market. For high schools, this means generating high-quality career and technical education – not as a substitute for higher education but as another possible means of preparing for it as well as the labor market.”
About AIR
Established in 1946, with headquarters in Washington, D.C., the American Institutes for Research (AIR) is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization that conducts behavioral and social science research and delivers technical assistance both domestically and internationally in the areas of health, education, and workforce productivity. For more information, visit www.air.org.
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