The start of the school year always makes me consider the commitment to providing opportunities to society’s key assets, our kids and youth. Partisan efforts try to dumb down the issues, but it’s not simple stuff.
Fortunately, some folks do more than ponder, including the North Carolina Board of Science, Technology & Innovation, a unit of the N.C. Department of Commerce. For nine years, it has detailed how our state stacks up against other states on 42 measures of “innovation capacity.”
My colleague Ray Gronberg summed the report in our North Carolina Tribune newsletter: “We don’t have anything to get complacent about economically because we’re not doing as well as we may think.” That view matches the report’s overall tenor.
North Carolina’s GDP per capita, nearly $67,000 as of 2022, ranked 32nd nationally. The national average is about $77,600, and we’re trailing Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia. The latter state benefits from massive federal outlays, but surely we can match the Peach and Volunteer states?
The report contends that a century of investing in infrastructure, institutions and human capital that fuels innovation has been insufficient to propel North Carolina’s income levels above the national average.
History teaches that North Carolina started from a tough spot, but made progress in the 1960s (lots of credit to Research Triangle Park) and the 1980s (both Reagan and Clinton administrations.)
But the state treaded water over the past 25 years, even as the Triangle and Charlotte metro areas became national business centers. Per capita income was 89% of the national average in 2022, versus 91% in 1998. Despite a fast-growing population, the state’s productive capacity and wage levels aren’t keeping pace overall, the report notes. The poverty rate remains above average.
The study implies that North Carolina essentially has two economies. One is the Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham metro areas, which account for about half of state GDP, and more than half of the “innovation measures” such as R&D, venture capital and educational attainment. The other economy is everyone else.
What is happening to break this apparent malaise, outside of the two big metro areas? Most of our state’s most powerful lawmakers, who don’t live in Charlotte and Raleigh, are sticking to a tradition of emphasizing higher education. That includes pumping
$500 million into the NCInnovation effort aimed at promoting research outside the three key research campuses in Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh.
Overall, the state spends a higher percentage of state GDP on higher education than all but four states. Conversely, it spends a lesser percentage on K-12 education than all but one state, citing Census Bureau data.
At the K-12 level, key Republican lawmakers are focused on promoting school choice initiatives, such as providing state-funded vouchers for private school. (Because of a legislative dispute, they’ve botched getting money to about 55,000 parents who want help paying tuition this fall, as of press time.)
Leaders appear disinterested in boosting teacher salaries to match regional or national levels. For now, N.C. teacher pay ranks low, reflecting distrust for a system that still teaches 80% of our students.
But let’s close on a positive note. Using its most current analysis, the report says that North Carolina ranks 11th nationally for its overall innovation economy. Virginia is 12th and Georgia, 25th.
“Overall, North Carolina’s statewide innovation ecosystem is healthy, has improved since the early 2000s, and at a rate comparable to the U.S. as a whole,” the report concludes.
The success just needs to spread out. ■
