Things are so tough in Massachusetts that the closest thing I could find to good news today is a report that the biggest state in the US has many of the same problems we do. On Sunday, the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California released California’s Future Workforce: Will There Be Enough College Graduates?

PPIC projects that 41 percent of California’s workers will need bachelor’s degrees by 2025, thanks to the ongoing replacement of manufacturing with white-collar jobs. (The change is also happening here; see the MassINC report Mass Jobs: Meeting the Challenges of a Shifting Economy.) But it’s going to be almost impossible to meet the demand for college educated workers. Report author Deborah Reed notes that the most educated age group in the state is the 50-to-64 chort (i.e. people about to retire), and the growing Latino population is not making significant gains in education. (PPIC estimates that 40 percent of the working-age population will be Latino by 2020, but only 12 percent of that group will have bachelor’s degrees.)

Another problem is a familiar one to Massachusetts: out-migration.

Since 2000, international immigration has brought an annual average of 56,000 college graduates to California. However, during this period, more college graduates left California for other states than arrived from other states. This is likely the first time in its history that California has sustained net out-migration of college graduates. Outmigration of college-educated workers since 2000 has been driven, in part, by high housing costs in the state and that may be temporary. Nevertheless, even if California were to return to 1980 levels of net in-migration of college-educated adults from other states, migration would not come close to filling the projected gap between supply and demand.

In 2003, the MassINC report MASS.migration detailed how the continuing loss of young, highly educated residents could be a major threat to our economy in the new century. Among the states stealing our talent was… California.