Remarks by Assistant Secretary Emily Stover DeRocco

Central New Jersey WIRED Kick-Off

Tucson, AZ
November 27, 2007

Thank you, Linda. It is a pleasure to be here in Central New Jersey today.

Innovation is nothing new to this region of the country. From Thomas Edison's first industrial research center in the town that bears his name to the many Bell Labs facilities found all across the region including right here in Freehold, Central New Jersey has historically been a driver of innovation.

That continues today in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry where Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and hundreds of other companies make up one of the country's strongest innovation clusters.

And that is only the beginning of your asset base. From top-flight universities to the expanding research centers like the Cancer Institute and the just begun Stem Cell Institute, your higher education institutions have demonstrated an on-going commitment to bringing world-class R&D to Central New Jersey.

The presence of these companies and resources offers tremendous opportunity to the citizens of New Jersey. But in order for individuals to take advantage of those new opportunities, they must achieve higher levels of education. It was only a generation ago that our parents could graduate from high school and find a job that would allow them to raise a family, afford a mortgage, and save for retirement. That world no longer exists.

Last year, individuals with a Bachelor's Degree saw five times the job growth, twice the earnings, and half the unemployment as individuals with just a high school diploma. And that disparity is only going to increase. Over the next decade, 90% of the fastest growing jobs and 63% of all new jobs are going to require post-secondary education. These numbers reflect our increasing focus on innovation and show that education is the pathway to prosperity in today's and tomorrow's economy.

This new reality led us at the Labor Department to begin to rethink our role in the economy. My agency, the Employment & Training Administration, invests over $10 billion a year in workforce development programs. For many years, these activities were more focused on social services and on finding individuals jobs at the low end of the spectrum. But as the world around us transformed, so too must the workforce investment system. In response, we created the Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development Initiative or WIRED.

WIRED is not a typical federal grant program. In fact, I don't call it a grant at all. Instead, I prefer to think of WIRED as a force, with investments in regions acting as seed capital to catalyze action, alignment of existing resources, and additional investments.

What this means in practice is that those tremendous assets in Central New Jersey that I highlighted earlier would now work with the workforce investment system, the community colleges, and even the K-12 system to design education programs that would allow individuals to access the opportunities available in those high growth fields. Our investment would be the catalyst to bring these partners to the table, but those organizations would then realign their existing and on-going funding to support this region-wide economic vision.

This is precisely the proposal that Governor Corzine sent forward to us and it is why we selected Central New Jersey as one of thirteen Third Generation WIRED regions and invested $5 million over the next three years.

There are 26 other regions around the country in two previous generations of WIRED that have been working on a similar approach for almost two years now and what I can tell you from experience in those regions is that while each area must choose its own vision and its own strategy, both the opportunities and the challenges that you face will be similar.

For example, we specifically designed this initiative to focus on regions because economic activity naturally clusters in multi-county regions based on assets, commuting patterns, and labor sheds. However, each of those counties, cities, and towns has leaders that are elected to look out for their specific parochial interests and economic development officials that compete tooth and nail with each other.

I know this probably sounds familiar, but I could just as easily be talking about Michigan or Pennsylvania or North Carolina. But as regions in those and other states begin to find solutions, those issues start to move from challenges to strengths. And we have encouraged our WIRED regions from all three generations to share these solutions in hopes that all regions may benefit from their experiences.

This is particularly important here because New Jersey holds a special designation as the most WIRED state in the country. From the Northern New Jersey region south down Route 1 to the tri-state Delaware Valley region, the State is participating in three WIRED projects. In fact, Commissioner Socolow recently joked to me that we should soon expect an Ocean-Atlantic-Cape May Jersey Shore proposal so every county in the State would be covered.

While I wasn't able to promise him that, I did tell him that with three WIRED regions and $15 million comes some pretty high expectations. And those expectations include that these three regions would collaborate and cooperate where it made sense to the benefit of the entire state. Because while we focus on regions, we cannot ignore the critical role that states play in setting the agenda and driving investments in their economic regions.

Of course, if the Federal Government is going to tell states and regions to cooperate, we had better lead by example. Over the last two years, we have built working relationships with a dozen other Federal agencies to align the investment of their resources in support of the economic vision and strategy of our WIRED regions. So when a region needs additional infrastructure funds, we can go to the Commerce or Transportation or Agriculture Departments for help. Or when the National Science Foundation or the Defense Department invest in STEM education, it is not apart from a region's strategy but aligned and leveraged with it.

Commissioner Socolow, Commissioner Oates and others have all spent time in Washington and know what a challenge it is to get different federal departments with separate funding streams to work together and our job is by no means complete, but we are making progress and can hopefully bring some benefit to this region.

When we first started the WIRED Initiative last February, I made it a priority to visit every one of the regions. You can read a proposal or look at statistics about a region, but you cannot fully understand its character, its culture, and its opportunity unless you go there and see it, hear it, and feel it for yourself.

There is tremendous energy in this region with a caliber of partnership that is second to none. Commissioner Socolow, thank you very much for inviting me here today and I am truly excited about the opportunities here in Central New Jersey and across the entire state.

Thank you.