CSUMB President weighs in on regional economy.

Eduardo Ochoa came to CSU Monterey Bay in 2012, after working for two years for the Obama Administration in Washington, D.C. as the assistant secretary of postgraduate education. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Ochoa received a master’s degree in nuclear engineering from Columbia University and a Ph.D in economics from the New School for Social Research. As president of CSUMB, one of his key objectives is to make the university a catalyst for cultural and economic development in the region. He spoke to the Weekly about those goals.

Weekly: A report last year by the United Way of Monterey County found only 42 percent of residents are economically self-sufficient. Is it possible for CSUMB to help create more economic opportunity?

Ochoa: If you look at Monterey County, our educational level is below the state average. That average is already dampened by the high educational level in the Peninsula compared to Salinas. Salinas was recently singled out as the least educated city in America, which is a very ugly distinction.

I think everyone agrees that raising the educational level of a population would have all sorts of beneficial effects across the board. We’re expanding to Salinas to better reach that community.

The way to improve the region and the quality of life here is to raise the educational level of the population. We can help change the workforce profile to match the increasingly skilled labor needs that are going to be appearing in ag, while also diversifying the economy to help generate new industries and new firms that can take advantage of a skilled workforce.

The costs of education, even state-funded, can be prohibitive. Is the movement for free higher public education feasible in your eyes?

University education will never be free. The question is, who’s paying? If you look at it at a very high level – which is the way Bernie Sanders typically operates, rather than actually figuring out how to make it happen – it makes a lot of sense that as the economy is developing the way it is, we are approaching a time when college education will be as much a prerequisite as a high school education has been in the past.

At one time, there was not free high school education in this country. If you look at the economic history, free high school education provided a huge economic advantage because its labor force was substantially more skilled than that of other countries. The big productivity growth in the U.S. economy can be traced to that decision.

Making free public universal education is a visionary goal, and one that makes a lot of sense – if we can find the way to pay for it.

You’re a board member of the Fort Ord Reuse Authority. Do you, or the university, have an opinion on Monterey Downs, the equestrian-themed development proposed for Seaside?

(Laughs.) I knew that was coming. We haven’t taken a position on it because it’s premature. It hasn’t hasn’t come up for consideration.

In considering this development, people should be thinking not just about the immediate impact on a particular municipality, but on the impact on the path of economic development for the region. Once you make a major investment of that type, that sets the regional economy moving in a certain direction – which may preempt or preclude the economy from moving in other directions.

When examining a development, every municipality shouldn’t just be thinking about the sales tax revenue but instead ask if this is advancing us toward the kind of community we want to become in 20 years or so.

I think that we need to diversify to try to attract other industries that are clean, sustainable and that create demand for skilled labor. That’s the future.

The question then is, do the kind of jobs created by this development help further that path or detract from it? That’s how people should make a judgement.