The Higginbotham Plan To Make West Virginia Irresistible To Outside Investment And The Jobs That Come With It

West Virginia's intractable barrier to prosperity is our low inventory of STEM-educated college grads. Our governor and our legislators say so on radio and TV talk shows but they have not presented a plan to grow West Virginia's supply of STEM grads. 

Here's mine:

The Higginbotham Plan To Make West Virginia Irresistible To Outside Investment and The Jobs That Come With It

1.    Make the Promise Scholarship a STEM scholarship. Companies won’t come here for our English majors, political science majors and communications majors, but they will come here to gain access to our mathematicians, software engineers, chemists and other STEM grads if we produce them in large numbers.

2. Require Promise Scholarship recipients to sign a contract with West Virginia obligating them to stay in West Virginia for, say, 5 years after graduation. Too many of West Virginia’s college grads are leaving with their degrees and making some other state’s workforce magnetic to outside investment. If they give us five years, they’ll marry, have children, build houses, make friends and most will never leave. Maybe along the way they’ll invent things and, who knows, maybe some of them will start the next Apple or the next Google.

3.    Greatly expand the Promise Scholarship to fund tens of thousands of students’ college careers instead of the current 3,000 to 3,500.

4.    Double the per-student annual scholarship award from its current $4,750 to around $9,000 or $10,000.

5.    Buy the college debt of STEM grads who want to come to West Virginia and are willing to sign a contract requiring them to become part of West Virginia’s workforce for at least five years.

6.    Pay for the above with a severance tax, an excise tax or the proceeds from the state lottery or some combination of the aforementioned.

Tom Roten, Hoppy Kercheval, Danny Jones, Mitch Carmichael, Jim Justice, Tim Armstead,