ICYMI: Washington Post: How a California Democrat is bringing tech education to rural America

Washington, DC – Representative Ro Khanna (CA-17) spoke with Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin about the trip he is leading this week to Pennsylvania, Iowa, and South Carolina where he is meeting with students at community colleges that are participating in a public-private partnership program established to help prepare them to get good paying tech jobs after graduating.

Washington Post: How a California Democrat is bringing tech education to rural America

[Jennifer Rubin, 4/13/23]

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), one of the bright lights in the Democratic Party, represents a district smack in the middle of Silicon Valley, the area where tech giants including Yahoo, McAfee, Google and LinkedIn are headquartered. So why is he spending time this week in rural areas of Iowa, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, where there is very little tech industry?

He's there precisely because there is so little tech — and so many people missing out on the renaissance in advanced manufacturing, high-paying tech jobs (many that don't require a college education) and a sense of belonging in the 21st-century economy.

He backed a program with buy-in from Google and TechWise. "The essence of the program is to get tech jobs to communities that haven't had access to them before," he told me in a phone interview. But to get the jobs, you first have to have tech-trained workers.

Khanna has helped to put together a collaborative effort among the tech companies, local governments and community colleges, historically Black colleges and universities, and Hispanic-serving institutions that specialize in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math. The tech companies put up $5,000 per student (to allow them to focus on studies full time), work with the schools to construct an 18-month tech-training course and assign a mentor to check in regularly with students. (Khanna candidly says that government job-training programs are not nearly as successful as those developed with private employers, which know the skills needed and the job market.) Best of all: If the students complete the program, they are guaranteed job placement with Google or another company. The programs, now in eight locations (having already trained 240 students), have an 85 to 90 percent completion record.

Khanna told me his passion is ensuring that people in rural or industrial America "have strong middle-class jobs in an economy dominated by tech." He conceded that many people are frightened by artificial intelligence. "They should be," he said, "but there are simple applications." And some applications of AI can enhance jobs we don't ordinarily think of as "tech."

Past generations had to master high-level math to perform tech jobs, but AI can make tech more operator-friendly. Khanna pointed to home health-care workers who can rely on AI to monitor patients, keep them on appropriate diets, and remind them when to take medications and measure blood pressure. "That doesn't mean we're sending robots to people's homes," he joked. But it does underscore how essential tech will be to jobs in every sector.

Khanna wrote in the Atlantic last year, "A key pillar of building a multiracial, multireligious democracy is providing every person in every place with the prospect of a dignified life, which includes the potential to contribute to and shape the digital age." He argued:

National policy makers, to our peril, have ignored the destabilization of local communities. Many have overlooked the extent to which Americans' sense of fulfillment is tied to where we live. In an unfamiliar age, home represents the familiar. Choosing to stay where you grew up might mean that extended family members meet for weekend meals, instead of seeing one another only on FaceTime. It might mean choosing love and responsibility over one's career ambitions, prioritizing the care of an aging parent or a sibling with special needs. Place matters as much for certain techies who cannot envision leaving their adopted neighborhood in San Francisco as it does for parents in rural communities who do not want to lose their children to faraway cities. What about the unemployed? … If they want to, they should absolutely be able to [move]. But no person should be forced to leave their hometown to find a decent job.

This week, Khanna is visiting community colleges in Iowa and Pennsylvania and Benedict College, an HBCU in Columbia, S.C. He'll meet with the about 20 students in the program at each school. If these programs can be "sized up," Khanna says he thinks up to 1 million people could be trained by the end of the decade to work in an expected 25 million jobs that will require tech proficiency.

He's under no illusion that once people get through training you'll see Google facilities pop up in farm country. Graduates might have to travel to hubs where chip facilities are springing up, but the hope is that they might later return home to start their own businesses.

More important, the coronavirus pandemic showed us the extent to which remote work is possible. People can live in local communities while working for companies located anywhere in the world. "They want community," Khanna said. "We want Americans to have a sense of community." But, through remote work, "they can have a new community to be exposed to in every part of the world."

Khanna gets philosophical about the larger goal: to help knit the country together. Maybe we cannot rally around the idea of Jeffersonian democracy, he acknowledged, "but maybe we can start prospering together. That's a more achievable aim." The divide between workers in rural and urban locations (and, say, a fifth-generation American and a new immigrant working for a new chip plant in Ohio) might diminish if more of us worked together out of common economic self-interest.

What does Khanna need to scale this up? He needs more tech companies to buy in, for one thing. But he also says he thinks the White House can help by convening a larger gathering of tech companies, educators and local governments. President Biden, Khanna said, "can use his convening power" to give impetus to the program.

Khanna is right: We cannot sustain our democracy and prosperity if hope and opportunity are relegated to the coasts. When workers living in rural America have a share of high-paying tech jobs, the country will undergo a sea change, economically and politically. We even might learn to like each other more.