Opportunities for 2021
2020 was a pretty crappy year for many. It was filled with uncertainty for the future, and we experienced so many things in a short amount of time. Anyone remember that Trump was impeached at the start of this year? It seems like light years away.
Many Americans lost their jobs and unemployment still persists even into this month. I left my job in August of this year at the height of the pandemic, a decision I had to make to achieve my goal of attending grad school. While I am thankful for the funding opportunities I received in order to attend, it is still tight. Trying to make a budget during a pandemic is both easy and hard. I’m not spending as much money on concert tickets which is a great money-saver, but paying for an apartment every month in Arlington, VA is frustrating on a student budget.
Amidst the turmoil of 2020, I want to take the time to reflect about the future opportunities for 2021. This gets my mind churning thinking about the possibilities that the new year could bring. As an economist-in-training, I want to take a look about how our society could fundamentally reshape itself to take on the next challenge. New innovations are already happening and I hope to see their continued development in 2021. This is a very short list and of course not everything. But, it is something that was on my mind and I want to highlight here.
Education
I currently attend George Mason University; online of course. I had applied in December of last year on a whim seeing if I would be accepted, applying to the Mercatus Center at the same time for funding opportunities. I had numerous friends that went through the program with funding from Mercatus. The stories they told me of debates during and after class with scholars, going to luncheons at DC think-tanks, and publishing their ideas seemed such a romantic dream that I wanted to achieve. Funnily-enough, I got in. YES! Dream achieved! This is going to be awesome!
Then the pandemic came. I had to make a decision: do I continue with the program, knowing that everything would be online and I wouldn’t be able to interact with everyone; or do I continue at my job, putting off my dream but having a secure job that I could rely on and ride out the storm? The question I asked myself was, “How long will this pandemic last? One year? Two years? Five years?” Dramatic in thinking five years, I decided to take a leap and continue the program. I wasn’t about to have a pandemic completely ruin my plans.
I was privileged to be able to make that decision. I’m blessed that I received funding for grad school and opportunities to pursue something I planned for my life for a long time. Many other students could not make the same decision, and students from elementary school to my level at graduate student are experiencing the strain of being online.
I think the issue stems from trying to replicate a classroom environment on an online system when we should be creating new ways to learn. Already warning bells have rung highlighting how unprepared some schools were in the transition. Solutions are already being provided, and successes are happening. What I hope to see in 2021 is a return to schools, but a mindset of learning from the pandemic and applying it in the future. The pandemic provided a new slate to write the future of education on. We shouldn’t copy and paste what was before the pandemic.
Technological innovations create new tools that teachers and schools can access to teach their students during the pandemic. Once the pandemic is done, I fear these innovations will go out the window without advocates showing their success. One idea I hope stays is hybrid schooling, or mixing online and in-person education. This has been seen in most schools already and should continue as an option if local educational needs demand it. Not all classes require in-person education (a chemistry class definitely; an English class, not so much). Staggering what classes are offered provides an opportunity to continue developing online learning techniques and technologies. These will become important as our society develops to become more technologically interconnected.
This is not saying that there aren’t issues with going online, there are and there is never a silver-bullet solution. What I want to highlight is that successes are being seen and should not be thrown out because we want to go back to the “good-’ol-days.” Those days are long gone, and a mindset of going back to our original ways of schooling should go too. This will require policy debates on all levels, but it’s a debate I hope Americans engage in. I am intrigued where it will go because I will be impacted by it as a student myself.
Along that same line…
Online Work
Working during a pandemic was an interesting experience. I went online at my job between April of 2020 through when I quit to start grad school in August. Let me tell you, off-boarding is a pretty weird experience and a weirder one when my ‘official’ goodbye happy hour was on Zoom.
Transitioning online to work was not a dramatic event. My work as a data and business analyst was already done on my computer and I communicated with my clients that were in states across the country. I worked with remote clients, but was able to use the computer, coffee, internet, and desk at my office to get my job done. What happened when I had to work from home? I took my computer and monitors, bought my own desk, and did the same thing from my apartment. The only difference was the internet and coffee were no longer free.
This got me thinking: why am I working from an office in the first place? Yeah, free coffee and raiding the leftover food provided for new hire orientation is a great perk, but so is being able to throw my laundry in five minutes before a Zoom meeting and not waiting until the weekend to do it. Working from home was awesome. The pandemic sucked, but if I was able to work from home and still go out and see my friends without a pandemic, it’s what I imagine a perfect work-life balance being.
I’ll be honest, when I graduate in 2022 I will likely try to find a job that allows me to work completely remote or a mix of remote and in-office. I’ve been set in the remote working mindset for a long time now and it continues as I work at the Mercatus Center and take classes online. I’m not alone in this, and workers across the country are starting to question the traditional idea of working from an office.
A major change I can see is in office spaces. Workers at home no longer need a desk, so what need is there for an expensive office? Offices are huge costs for employers, and reducing office space is reflective of a wider trend of reducing costs in the workplace. According to Global Workplace Analytics, 25% to 30% of the American workforce could work from home by the end of 2021. This could translate to roughly $11,000 in savings for employers per employee with an additional $4,000 in savings for employees working from home. These figures are when an employee works from home for half the time! COVID is a catalyst that sped the direction of remote working.
The biggest impact I see in remote working is reducing the brain drain in states. I am guilty of contributing to this when I left Nebraska in 2013, exacerbating an issue in a state that is plagued by brain drain. Why did I leave Nebraska? I was offered a much better opportunity in Michigan to attend school, and then the DC area for a job after I graduated. I couldn’t work in my dream career in Omaha. I can now, though.
Working remote creates the opportunity to move back to states with cheaper living costs. Most states in the US have experienced a level of brain drain, and new opportunities present themselves in the post-covid and remote-working world. Rural states like Nebraska and Iowa have cheaper costs-of-living than states like California, New York, or Maryland. Where I live in Virginia, costs-of-living are much more expensive because I live in the DC metro area. The apartment I live in costs $2400 per month which I spit with a roommate whereas my sister in Omaha pays about $700 for a bigger place that she has by herself. I’m jealous!
While I don’t plan to move back to Omaha (sorry Nebraska), I would like to move back to the Midwest and I can do that if a future job I want to do will allow it. I’m no longer chained to an office, and pursuing my career gives me more freedom to choose where I want to live. This is not without potential downsides which I think the BBC analyzes well in their article on remote working. Software like Zoom cannot totally replace a good face-to-face meeting, and the extrovert in me would probably want to grab a drink with my coworkers sooner rather than later. Even so, the challenge facing many employers is offering the flexibility of working remote, in office, or a mix of both. Companies that offer this flexibility will, I think, be the leaders of the post-covid working environment.
To summarize, I believe we’ll see a shift in employers preferring remote workers to save costs, a rise in workers moving states with cheaper costs-of-living, and greater flexibility in how workers can do their jobs. This will not affect everyone or all careers, but it could drastically change the American psyche on what is ‘work.’
I’m excited to see how education and work change in 2021. I will be monitoring it closely because it will impact me going forward and have implications on my life for decades to come. 2020 did the same thing for me, though it dragged me kicking and screaming into a new world I didn’t want to join. I still wouldn’t trade it for a better year though because 2020 upset so many of my preconceived notions of what my life would be for the year, and I’ve learned new ways of doing things. It helped me prioritize what was truly important even if doing so was uncomfortable. I’m excited to get back to ‘normal’ but I want to take what I, and hopefully what most Americans, have learned into 2021. So to this I say: happy new year, welcome 2021, thank you for the wild ride 2020, but good riddance.
