According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults 16-74 years old – about 130 million people – lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. That’s a shocking number for several reasons, and its dollars and cents implications are enormous because literacy is correlated with several important outcomes such as personal income, employment levels, health, and overall economic growth.

Commenting on the significance of the study, British A. Robinson, president and CEO of the Barbara Bush Foundation, said, “America’s low literacy crisis is largely ignored, historically underfunded and woefully under-researched, despite being one of the great solvable problems of our time. We’re proud to enrich the collective knowledge base with this first-of-its-kind study, documenting literacy’s key role in equity and economic mobility in families, communities and our nation as a whole.”

The new research by Gallup attempts to estimate the gains in GDP that could result from improving adult literacy rates for the nation as a whole as well as in the individual states and major metropolitan areas. Here’s the basic methodology of the study, entitled “Assessing the Economic Gains of Eradicating Illiteracy Nationally and Regionally in the United States,” under the direction of lead author Dr. Jonathan Rothwell, Gallup’s principal economist.

Rothwell relied on an international assessment of adult skills called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) that classifies literacy into several levels. The Department of Education used those results to create and publish estimated literacy levels for every U.S. county.

Adults who scored below Level 3 for literacy on the PIAAC were defined as at least partially illiterate. Adults below or at Level 1 may struggle to understand texts beyond filling out basic forms, and they find it difficult to make inferences from written material. Adults at Level 2 can read well enough to evaluate product reviews and perform other tasks requiring comparisons and simple inferences, but they’re unlikely to correctly evaluate the reliability of texts or draw sophisticated inferences. Adults at Level 3 and above were considered fully literate. They’re able to evaluate sources, as well as infer sophisticated meaning and complex ideas from written sources.

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The August unemployment report showed that jobs are slowly returning. The economy added nearly 1.4 million new jobs last month, bringing the four-month total to 10.7 million, slightly less than half of the jobs lost in the early months of the pandemic. Many of those jobs won’t be coming back and workers know it.

Historically, when the country experiences a downturn, more people turn to higher education and job training opportunities. While coronavirus has made that more complicated, the current economic crisis is no different.

Vickie Schray, executive vice president at the education technology company Zovio, said she has seen a significant increase in demand for services including online degree programs, coding boot camps and certificate programs that can be accessed entirely online.

A handful of industries have experienced continued growth during the crisis, like cybersecurity, technology and health care, Schray noted. In other cases, jobs that were in high demand disappeared virtually overnight.

“I just don’t think we’re ever going to go back to the way we were,” Schray explained. “We need to think differently about how to provide training resources and tools to people and think differently about the jobs of the future.”

For those at the forefront of innovative job training, that means changing how workers access education and training opportunities, how those programs connect students with the skills they need and how employers assess the skills and experience of the people they’re hiring.

Schray continued, “We should not look to the past for ideas and solutions to get us out of this pandemic and out of this economic downturn.”

Even before the pandemic, millions of jobs were considered at risk. Automation and shifting demands were expected to result in tens of millions of lost or displaced jobs over the next decade.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the threat of job displacement is more acute. The McKinsey Global Institute estimated as many as 57 million U.S. jobs were at risk in the near term and that many of the workers would need help developing the skills to move into new positions.

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