This whole style of paying for college called “income-based repayment (IBR)”. Pay It Forward, Pay It Back gets around the typical student debt relief problem that ultimately subsidizes the educations of the well-off. It’s no secret that wealthier people are far more likely to gain a college education, and they disproportionately make up college graduates. Any broad-based tax that reduced student debt burdens would ultimately have poor people paying for the wealthy to receive higher education, furthering the achievement gaps between the wealthy and the poor.

Pay It Forward, Pay It Back neatly defeats this problem. If you make a lot of money after you graduate, your repayments will basically subsidize the costs of students who didn’t make much. Those repayments happen for a set number of years, long enough that even if you start off paying just a few hundred in your first year out, within in a few years you could be paying thousands.

Theoretically, if this program succeeds, the State of Rhode Island could guarantee every single child who is born in the state a college degree, assuming they get accepted.

Are there problems with this bill? Yes, for one thing, it requires that students graduate within four years for a bachelor’s or two years for an associate’s; while saying nothing about those who drop-out. This may be because it is simply a pilot, but drop-outs and those who take five years (perhaps because of a double major) could simply make payments for less or more time, respectively.

It’s also couched in the “workforce development” language of the skills gap, which is big on Smith Hill right now, even though the gap is fictitious. Another problem is that instead of being for all degrees, it will only be for select courses of study in an attempt to provide workers to state employers; so future English majors don’t expect to reap the benefits any time soon. Presumably education degrees won’t be targeted, despite our rhetoric to have better-trained teachers.

But how you sell the bill is less importance than its existence. Hopefully a Sub A will expand this bill to be far more ambitious with a focus on the students rather than their potential employers who may not even hire these people when they graduate.

The lead sponsor is Speaker Gordon Fox himself, and the press release also credits Rep. Joseph McNamara as House Health, Education and Welfare Committee Chairman. For those saying there’s no ambition in Rhode Island or a dearth of leadership, this is a bill which should give you hope.

There’s just one niggling little problem: there’s virtually no evidence that such a skills gap actually exists. Certainly not in Rhode Island, where six out of 10 of summer 2012’s job vacancies had either no education requirement or only a high school diploma or G.E.D.

I’ve talked about this before; specifically, UWM researcher Mark Price’s work debunking the skills gap in Milwaukee. Currently, for every 2 U.S. students who graduate with a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degree, only 1 gets a job; usually they cite that either they couldn’t find one or they could earn more in another industry. An article in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Spectrum showed there were 11.4 million STEM-degree-holding workers employed in non-STEM fields in comparison to 277,000 STEM vacancies. Professor Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School’s Center for Human Resources concludes that there multiple issues at fault: refusal by employers to hire entry-level applicants, refusal by employers to provide on-the-job-training, overcomplicated job requirements, software that screens out potentially great matches for. For anecdotal evidence tied with data, there’s the manufacturing CEO who told New York Times writer Adam Davidson that he didn’t like workers with union experience and paid less than work in the fast food sector – not uncommon; Davidson says the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ data shows that skilled jobs have fallen off and their wages have fallen as well.

Perhaps you’ve noticed a trend there. Virtually all of the hiring issues are on the employer-side of the equation, not the applicant-side. That’s pretty much what a study from Illinois found. The researchers there suggest that there are four main reasons for advocating for the existence of a skills gap: it scapegoats job-seekers rather than business, it could be caused by employers parroting other employers in their sector from low-unemployment states, it increases the labor supply driving down wages, and it transfers the costs of training onto the state and off of the employer’s books.

“Rhode to Work” offers virtually no evidence of an existence a genuine skills gap. Instead, it cites this article from WPRI that used only two anecdotal pieces of evidence from employers, and never once offered data that concurred with their conclusions. Similarly, this article from The Providence Journal‘s John Kostrzewa made the rounds a few weeks ago, offering only employer-anecdotal evidence. Responding to that article, the far-right Current/Anchor’s Justin Katz reached pretty much the same conclusion as the above study (once you get past the moralizing); this is an attempt to socialize job training costs.

Let’s pause and say that job training isn’t bad. It’s perfectly fine for workers to be retrained or to learn new skills. It’s just that we need to make a couple things clear. First, job-training should be paid for by employers, who will benefit from it. And second, it is not a cure for Rhode Island’s unemployment issues. Once again, ostriches.

Rhetorically though, “Rhode to Work” (despite the tiresome wordplay) is a perfectly fine piece of politics. It’s hard to be against it unless you want to be seen advocating for keeping people ignorant (because that’s basically what the “skills gap” talk posits: Rhode Islanders are too stupid to do the work that’s available). And it’s an easy rallying point for supporters of dismantling the public education system; the exact same rhetoric is used, that creepy “building the workforce of tomorrow” language that’s supposed to inspire us to have our kids buckle down real hard for the tests that will decide their future. Also, it mainly focuses on a future workforce, rather than the one we’ve got (you know, the one in need of help). It’s good politics to focus economic policies on the future workforce, because it means during future boom times you can take credit for that success.

That refusal to deal with the problem at hand a real shame, because as we’ve previously pointed out, very few of Rhode Island’s policies are actually targeted at Rhode Islanders who actually need assistance. Maybe we can look to the House for better solutions. But I wouldn’t hold your breath.