Episode 2:
Systems level trends
The forest through the trees:
why this matters now
living wage job inventory, ROI on degrees, and building the data set to understand what we need to do to match local college grads to good jobs.
Even if Hawaiʻi fills every projected job opening over the next decade, we still won’t have enough living-wage jobs to support the next generation.
In Episode 1, we surfaced a critical insight: even if Hawaiʻi fills every projected job opening over the next decade, we still won’t have enough living-wage jobs to support the next generation. That finding has become a cornerstone of the emerging Generational Workforce Commitment — a 20-year goal to ensure that all people in Hawaiʻi can learn, work, and thrive in a vibrant economy rooted in community values.
Hawaiʻi is a national outlier when it comes to how little college degrees pay off.
According to federal cost-of-living-adjusted data, Hawaiʻi ranks last in the nation in earnings across every level of educational attainment. That means a worker with a high school diploma, an associate’s degree, or even a graduate degree earns less relative to what it costs to live here than their counterparts in any other state. For four-year college graduates, the gap is even more extreme — so stark that it makes us a statistical outlier. According to Strada Education Foundation’s Talent Disrupted report, Hawaiʻi has the highest underemployment rate in the country: only 43% of four-year college grads are working in jobs that require a college degree within five years of graduation.
So how can we better understand whether training investments are leading to meaningful employment outcomes?
This year, the Hawaiʻi State Legislature passed SB742 (now Act 154), launching a cross-agency Data Sharing and Governance Working Group to explore what kinds of programs are working (and failing) in Hawaiʻi’s education-workforce pipeline. As part of that working group’s early conversations, a shared guiding question has emerged: how can we link data across education and labor systems to understand whether training investments are leading to meaningful employment outcomes? Answering that question — across four-year degrees, two-year programs, apprenticeships, and short-term credentials — will require better infrastructure, clearer governance, and deeper trust across systems.
The data shows that many college grads are underemployed, but that doesn’t mean every degree is failing. And it doesn’t mean every job in Hawaiʻi falls short of a living wage. We’re advocating for 20 years of bold, coordinated investment to redesign our workforce system. But we also want to offer immediate value to students, counselors, employers, and policymakers right now. So in this episode, we ask:
What can we already learn from available data about which degrees lead to living-wage jobs — and which don’t?
What programs help graduates stay in Hawaiʻi — and which ones contribute to brain drain?
Where are the bright spots, tensions, and contradictions?
And perhaps most importantly: What questions can’t we answer yet — and what kinds of data would we need to start answering them?
Episode 2 Guiding questions
the data shows that many college grads are underemployed, But that doesn’t mean every degree is failing.
And it doesn’t mean every job in Hawaiʻi falls short of a living wage.
If we want to improve job access and opportunity for all of Hawaiʻi’s people — not just college grads — we need to close the gaps in our understanding. That means:
Knowing whether new programs are actually connecting learners to good jobs.
Seeing how economic development investments affect real workers and communities.
Helping students and jobseekers navigate emerging fields with trustworthy, timely information.
Ensuring every person — regardless of education path — is visible in the data.
roots to canopy:
Explore the Full Data set and analysis
Data and insights across the whole UH system.
A holistic view of what’s happening statewide with respect to degree payoff and job opportunity over time, across sectors.
Data and insights broken down by UH campuses (with sufficient programs and data available).
Drill down into the geographic disparities - where opportunity lies, and where it might not.
What we learned and where the data points towards further inquiry.
Signals and questions that can inform policy, research, and data strategy moving forward.
Learn more about our process, sources, and assumptions for Episode 2.