We need more Lindas

It's not unusual to hear one of Linda M. Stewart's college classmates greet her with, "Hey, Mom." Or, sometimes it's "Hi, Miss Linda."

Stewart, 57, sits in classrooms at Community College of Philadelphia with students who are the same age - or younger - than her own daughter, who is 34.

Stewart greets them all with a smile and with advice to study hard or, to one young man in particular, to cut out the foul language.

She is beaming because she is thrilled to finally be in college.

Some 40 years ago, as she graduated from Overbrook High School, the counselors told her she wasn't college material.

"They said I should just go to a technical school and take up cooking and sewing," Stewart, of Wynnefield, said yesterday.

But Stewart had dreams. And after a lifetime of working in low-paying jobs, first in warehouses for Sears and Spiegel and more recently in customer service for a cable company and a bank, Stewart got laid off - and decided to go back to school.

She is majoring in hospitality management and can see herself starting her own business one day, after working in hotels.

If only there were more Philadelphians returning to school like Stewart, it would be a great boost to the city's economic growth, says a report being released today by the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board.

"A Tale of Two Cities" paints both a glittering and a glum picture of Philadelphia.

For some, it is a "city on the rise . . . . with new development, a bustling and growing downtown [and] revitalized neighborhoods," the report says.

Yet for many - especially those with little formal education - Philadelphia is a "city on the decline."

The answer to turning around that decline, the report says: close the city's "education gap."

Getting Philadelphia's education levels - the number of people who have graduated from high school, for example, or have advanced degrees - up to equal the state's level would raise the city's potential tax base by $1.8 billion, or 10.5 percent, the report said.

Clearly, there's room for that improvement.

For instance, there are 80,000 Philadelphians ages 25-45, considered the prime working age, who have at least one year of college - but never finished.

Also:

* Only 20 percent of Philadelphians have college degrees, placing the city near the bottom of the nation's 100 largest cities in the percentage of college-educated residents. (We rank 92nd.)

* Twenty-five percent of the city's residents left high school without graduating, a figure that is twice the state average.

* Over 60 percent of the city's adults are considered "low-literate," meaning they have very poor reading skills.

* Forty-five percent of city residents are not working or looking for work, a statistic that ranks Philadelphia as 96th or 97th out of the largest 100 cities in labor force participation.

With these kinds of statistics, "if the jobs come, who's going to fill them?" asks Sallie A. Glickman, CEO of the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board.

Still, Glickman said, the PWIB sees the report not just as honest and alarming - but as a positive call for a campaign to raise the level of education for all adults in the city.

The report was researched by a team led by Paul Harrington, a labor economist and associate director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University.

He said in an interview that Philadelphia's work force problem is similar to that of many cities in the Northeast and Midwest that once depended on factories to provide jobs to people who didn't go on to college. But Philadelphia's situation is "more severe."

"The level of educational attainment required to succeed in the city has changed," Harrington said.

"The old mobility pathways you had in industry and manufacturing to offer full-time, year-round jobs for high school graduates and dropouts have gone away and have been replaced by jobs that require high levels of education," he said. "The average person who does not have a high school diploma will cost taxpayers about $274,000 over their lifetimes, including over $83,000 in criminal justice costs; a person with a four-year degree will pay over $800,000 in taxes in their lifetimes," Harrington said.

He added for an economy to work, particularly in a city like Philadelphia, "you simply have to have more people with post-secondary degrees."

Shay Odom, 19, says he has learned the hard way that education and training are things he needs to have a good life.

Odom, of West Philadelphia, was arrested at 15 for aggravated assault and was sent to a juvenile facility for two years. He got out of "placement" and soon became involved in smoking marijuana and dealing drugs. He was sent to a rehab-type facility in Pittsburgh for five months.

He is now attending one of the city's E3 Power Centers, which offer skill-building and job-readiness training for out-of-school and other youth. E3 stands for Education, Employment and Empowerment. Odom said the E3 center in Parkside that he attends helped him find a job in maintenance at a local museum. But he said he hopes to go to a trade school to learn carpentry and later attend community college to study real estate.

"The way I was living, I was going nowhere," Odom said. "I realized I needed to find another way to go," he said. *