Ohio is not on track to produce enough college graduates to fill the anticipated 1.7 million new jobs that will be created statewide by 2018, according to new research and state officials.

Ohio currently has about 36 percent of working-age adults with a college education. That number will need to increase to 57 percent within the next five years to meet job market demands.

“To stay on track for Ohio’s future, we need to have more people with degrees,” said Jim Petro, chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents.

“We’ve got a lot of advantages, but we don’t have a workforce that businesses can look at and say, ‘Ohio can meet my workforce needs both now and in the future.’”

The Lumina Foundation, a private organization dedicated to graduating more students from colleges, notes the education gap in Ohio is not expected to close anytime soon because the number of college graduates is growing at only a slight pace — with a 0.9 percent increase for those with at least an associate’s degree between 2008 and 2010.

“You have to have a well-educated populace to be able to support the economic growth that we need,” said Dewayne Matthews, vice president of policy and strategy for Lumina.

“If we don’t raise skill levels or we don’t raise education levels, what happens is our economy stagnates.”

Just earning a degree cannot be the goal, Lumina CEO Jamie Merisotis wrote in the foundation’s new report, “A Stronger Nation Through Higher Education.”

“The true goal must be completion with connection — a credential that connects clearly to the workforce and to opportunities for further education,” he wrote.

The gap between jobs and the people trained to perform them is not new in Ohio, but it has recently grown, said Robert Premus, an economics professor at Wright State University.

“Everybody’s trying to push higher productivity, which requires higher-skilled labor,” he said. “Those, in turn, tend to be those people who have gotten their college degrees and work experience, especially now in the more technical fields.”

Petro said Ohio is encouraging more college students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math because those are where the future jobs will be.

“We don’t have enough people with baccalaureate degrees in Ohio, especially in the STEM disciplines,” the chancellor said. “If you want to guarantee yourself a job, go to college for four years and get a STEM degree. We need you here.”

A career change

Jobs such as those in construction that offer on-the-job training and pay well are disappearing, Matthews said.

“We have found for the first time in history you can say that it is almost impossible to be in the middle class in the United States without education beyond high school,” he said.

Petro said the major pitfall Ohio faces is too many people entering college and not finishing their degree.

“When they get no degree, we’ve wasted our money and they’ve wasted theirs,” Petro said. “That’s a blight that can no longer continue.”

More than 1.3 million Ohio adults attended college but did not earn a degree in 2010.

“Twenty-two percent of the total adult population of Ohio actually have gone to college and never finished,” Matthews said.

“We found nationally that about one-third of those people actually have 60 or more college credits. When you ask these people, ‘Why didn’t you finish?’ What they will tell you overwhelmingly is that something happened that interrupted their college experience,” he said. “It was often times financial. They literally couldn’t afford it.”

Higher education has “become financially out of reach” for many middle- and low-income students, according to a new report, “The Great Cost Shift: How Higher Education Cuts Undermine The Future Middle Class.”

“We need more graduates in order to stay competitive,” said Rich Williams, a higher education advocate for U.S. Public Interest Research Group. “It’s a problem that college costs are getting higher and potentially squeezing out many students who are college eligible.”

In the past decade alone, an estimated 2 million qualified high school graduates nationwide would not have attended college because of the cost, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

University students are paying more than double the tuition they did in 1990 as costs rise to make up for declining state funding — a trend that “threatens the future economic health of states” and deprives them of the educated workforce they will need, according to the cost report.

In Ohio, average annual tuition and fees increased 84 percent from 1990 to 2009 at public four-year universities, according to the report.

“Affordability is a huge problem,” Matthews said. “They (universities and colleges) have to find ways to deliver more high quality education to a more diverse and demanding student population than before and they have to find ways to do it at a lower cost per student,” he said.

Ohio will also need to increase college success among working adults, low-income and first-generation students and minorities to meet the workforce demands, according to Lumina.

On degrees, the state is not currently on track to meet the foundation’s goal of 60 percent of Americans having a degree by 2025.

At the current pace, only 44 percent of Ohioans will have a degree by that time, according to the foundation.