Thousands of North Carolina jobs requiring postsecondary education may be unfilled by 2018 as a $414 million cut in state funding to the University of North Carolina system has begun to affect classrooms.

More than 830,000 North Carolina jobs requiring education after high school will be empty as the state faces a shortage of qualified workers, according to a report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

While joblessness has been a prevalent story for the last four years, with unemployment hovering at about 9 percent of the labor force, the report said the combination of the baby boomers retiring and a lack of skilled workers will leave more than three million jobs vacant nationwide.

In 2011 the oldest of the baby boomers began to turn 65 years old, according to the Pew Research Center, so many of that generation who are still in the workforce will be poised to retire about the same time that current first-year undergraduates will be entering the workforce.

Job openings for new graduates may seem like a blessing, yet the problem will not be open jobs but the type of jobs available. As many universities have made deep budget cuts after the recession, the Georgetown report said the problem lies in the fact that there will not be enough skilled workers to fill them.

Of the North Carolina occupations requiring a degree after high school, the report said healthcare practioner jobs are projected to employ the third-most number of people in 2018 with 217,000 positions available, behind only education and administrative support jobs. Yet medical degree programs are some of the many being eliminated or scaled back to save money on college campuses.

Baby boomer exodus

At UNC-Chapel Hill, the state’s flagship public university, the School of Nursing decreased its undergraduate enrollment by 25 percent to save about $300,000 this year, according to a statement from the School of Nursing. The program had to choose between decreasing undergraduate enrollment, which costs about $72,000 a student for faculty salaries, or specialized graduate programs that the statement said “would conceivably have a great impact on the North Carolina’s growing need for advanced practice nurses.”

The school also indefinitely suspended admissions into the specialized Registered Nurse to Bachelor of Science in Nursing program and the Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner program after the school’s funding loss of more than $480,000 for the 2011-2012 school year.

“We realize that our decision will impact the state’s nursing workforce as well as students wanting to enter the nursing field,” the report said, and some in the healthcare industry have already begun to worry about finding qualified nurses.

Carolyn Donohue, associate chief nursing officer for UNC Health Care, said declining enrollment in nursing programs would affect her facility eventually and may ultimately impact overall patient care services.

“We may not have enough nurses, or the nurses we have will be less experienced,” Donohue said. One of the reasons Donohue said she expects so many job openings in the next few years is that many older, previously retired or part-time nurses have returned to working full-time as the economy took a turn for the worst.

Of these returners who were seeking the security of a steady job, Donohue said many are from the baby boomer generation and are waiting to retire when economic conditions become more positive.

“As soon as the economy starts to break a little bit, we’re going to start to have migration and attrition of nurses,” she said.

While the oldest of the baby boomers reached retirement age last year, the nation may not have started seeing the affect on the workforce because of this postponed retirement trend—a trend that won’t be exclusive to the healthcare industry. The recession has delayed the retirement of baby boomers across the state’s entire workforce by as much as three to four years, according to the N.C. Department of Commerce Division of Workforce Development Commission’s State of the North Carolina Workforce 2011-2020.

“The ultimate exodus of baby boomers from the workforce will first ease the current high unemployment rates, but then ultimately could result in a subsequent shortage of experienced workers,” the commission’s report said.

Higher skills, higher salaries

Beth Lucas, director of policy and governance for the Workforce Development Commission, said that after cost-cutting during recession, many companies will be operating with fewer workers that will be required to do more with more skills than what employers expected of its employees in past years.

“It’s so painfully obvious that our workers are competing now in an arena that requires them to have higher skills,” Lucas said, “and that requires more education or more certification.”

Donahue said UNC Health Care has already considered different care delivery models around the idea of having fewer nurses that are individually capable of doing more work than previously required. She said these would be higher skilled employees with better salaries, and the decreased number of workers would balance the higher pay.

For those who have the skills and experience, the demand for more adept workers may pose itself as a great opportunity. Yet for those who are not qualified for those jobs—both students and those currently in the workforce—the gateway to obtaining those higher-skilled, higher-paying jobs brings the jobs-gap dilemma full circle as increased education is the remedy for inadequate skills.

With universities fielding state funding cuts, the need to halt program cuts and remedy the state’s current faculty salary freeze has schools seeking for other sources of revenue.

Universities across the UNC-system have proposed tuition increases to raise revenue and maintain the educational quality. At UNC-Chapel Hill, the more than $100 million loss in state funding has begun to affect the classroom with more than 500 classes eliminated in the fall. Those more than 16,200 fewer seats were enough to fill the Tar Heel football’s new Blue Zone about five-and-a-half times.

These cuts have led to the proposed tuition increases of 15.6 percent, or $800, for undergraduate residents; 6.5 percent, or $1,622, for out-of-state undergraduates; 6.5 percent, or $1,057, for resident graduate students; and 6.5 percent, or $1,555, for out-of-state graduate students.

While students, former Board of Governors members and the UNC-system President Tom Ross have contested these proposed increases, Lucas said she is worried about a different group of people: those currently in the workforce who may be under-qualified for open jobs.

“The other part of the dilemma is as cost for attendance grows, it’s tougher to denote a larger part of your income to education,” Lucas said.

‘A year of reckoning’

The increases for UNC-Chapel Hill have been approved by the UNC Board of Trustees and await approval by the current Board of Governors in the coming weeks. After the Board of Governors approval, the proposal will move on to the state legislature, which approved the $414 million system-wide cut that set the need for greater university revenue in motion in the first place.

The higher education funding cut fit into the legislature’s need to balance the state budget in a time of belt-tightening across the nation, but the policymakers may not have considered the long-term effects on the state’s workforce of slashing education funding.

“Everybody knew that 2011 was going to be a year of reckoning,” said Ferrell Guillory, professor at UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, founder and director of the Program on Public Life, and senior fellow at workforce and economic development nonprofit research firm MDC Inc.

“The cuts in the University budget may have an effect over time about the attractiveness of the state to new business and to the supply of creative, well-educated employees that would sustain the state’s more diverse economy,” he said.

Guillory, who has written about southern politics and the projected North Carolina jobs gap in the Program on Public Life’s Carolina Context publication, said there will be a continuing debate as “to what extent is education a private good that a student, or your parents, should pay more for, or to what extent is higher education a public good that enriches the civic and economic life of the state.”

“In the long run, a weakened public university system will make North Carolina’s economy weaker,” he said.