As the U.S. adapts to a more competitive global marketplace, education and training are increasingly seen as vital both as part of any national economic strategy and at another level as a mechanism to help assure individuals' economic well being. Moreover, a growing consensus suggests that education and training should not be limited solely to an intensive period prior to entrance into the labor force, but should be undertaken regularly throughout workers' careers. While many business leaders, analysts, and policymakers trumpet a need to invest more in the continuing education and training of American workers, our knowledge about the importance of such investments and the relative value of various types of such learning is not well-formed.
In this paper, I hope to improve our understanding of any developing importance of continuing education and job training (which I will generally refer to as "training"). In particular, I attempt to identify trends in the patterns and value of training during the past three decades. I do this with two goals in mind. The first is to determine whether the evidence substantiates or refutes the general belief that more training would improve both our strategic economic position and the prospects of individual workers. If a case is to be made that investment in continued learning is ever more important, we should expect to see changes in the amount and value of such training which are consistent with a sizable demand shift.
My second aim is to provide a more detailed consideration of recent trends in both the access to and value of training. Here, I am interested in two principal aspects of any recent changes in training. First, I examine whether certain types of training have become particularly valuable. Understanding where and when training is particularly valuable can help move the policy discussion past the ambiguous recommendation to "do more," to a more useful prescription about what to do. Second, I assess trends in access to valuable training among groups of workers with different levels of education. This topic is important because much of the recent interest in training originated in its potential use as a tool to improve the skills and earnings of previously disadvantaged workers. If we are to understand whether training might help reverse the declining economic fortunes of workers with limited formal schooling, it is important to determine whether less educated workers are increasingly missing out on valuable training opportunities.