At the same time, technological advances also change the skills demanded by our economy. In recent decades, innovation has tilted demand toward more-skilled workers, and these trends seem likely to continue. An increasingly bettereducated workforce thus will be essential to the long-term prosperity of a region or a nation.
A comprehensive approach to supporting human capital investment – one that focuses on the full range of educational stages and options – can help provide our citizens with the skills they need to share in that prosperity. 13  Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “The Origins of Technology-Skill Complementarity,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 1998, vol. 113, no. 3, pp. 693–732.