By Manfred Keil and Mark Schniepp | Inland Empire Economic Partnership
Short-term economic problems for the nation, the state, and the Inland Empire have been discussed in our previous articles. Here we want to focus on the longer term prospects for our region. Think of this as Inland Empire 2045. We pick that year because someone born today would be 20 by then, and would be deciding whether to be in the area’s labor force. Some would have started to work at an earlier age and others would be in college.
The question we want to address: If you have a young child, what sort of work environment would you want to create for them in our area, the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario Metropolitan Statistical Area?
Roughly 20% of residents in the Inland Empire commute daily to their jobs today, resulting in clogged freeways and hours spent on the road. The close to 400,000 commuters represent the equivalent of the entire Coachella Valley population.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, San Bernardino County and Riverside County — in that order — are the first and second ranked counties in the Top 10 of all 3,500 U.S. counties in terms of “extreme commuting” (traveling 90 or more minutes to work). The mean time travel time is one hour, 50 minutes with an average distance of 75 miles. The estimated time, according to the Waze App, to drive the 57 miles from Riverside to Downtown LA depends, of course, on the time of the day. The worst time to drive west is at 7 a.m. Thursday (1 hour 20 minutes), and the slowest return is on a Thursday at 4 p.m. (1 hour 55 minutes), making this a more than 3-hour drive (easily 4 hours on many days). If you could average a speed of 60 mph, then it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out the drive would take 57 minutes or one hour; and indeed, at midnight, it does.
This problem could be solved if you eliminated the need to commute. We are stating the obvious here, no one gets pleasure out of commuting. The solution is not to provide more public transportation, such as extending the Gold Line to Montclair. This does not solve the underlying problem of how to attract higher value-added firms and jobs currently only available in the coastal areas. After all, it takes 75 minutes to go from the Rancho Cucamonga Metro stop to Union Station. Instead, this would eliminate the need to commute.
The firms will not come if they cannot find a sufficient number of qualified workers here.
This identifies the central problem that prevents the Inland Empire from moving up in the rankings in terms of Gross Domestic Product per capita, the most commonly used measure of the quality of the standard of living, among MSAs.
We are the 12th most populous MSA in the U.S., and have passed the San Francisco MSA. We are only about 250,000 people short of moving above the Boston-Cambridge MSA. But when it comes to per capita GDP, we are currently ranked about 290 out of 380 MSAs. We don’t recognize some of the MSAs near us in the rankings (Parkersburg-Vienna in West Virginia or Fort Smith, Arkansas), but Waco, Texas rings a bell. Having only 25% of residents with a bachelor’s degree or more, does not result in firms being attracted to move into our area.
We have to find ways to increase the quality of the human capital in the Inland Empire. Having higher levels of residents with a bachelor degree or more, would do the trick. The problem is not that we do not have educational institutions in the area that generate graduates with higher degrees. After all, there is UC Riverside, Cal State San Bernardino, the University of Redlands, California Baptist University, the Claremont Colleges, University of La Verne, and Cal Poly Pomona. There are many community colleges also, which offer a two-year degrees or can be a stepping stone toward a university degree. The problem is that after graduation, students often don’t stay in the area, but move elsewhere (for higher paying jobs).
Perhaps anecdotal evidence is in place: One of us recently attended a talk by the head of IT at a large city in the Inland Empire, who told the audience there were seven openings for jobs in the city in the IT department and that the city could not find any qualified applicants. When asked what the city would do, he said that they would automate the tasks.
To make matters worse, there are two recent studies by WalletHub and ADP Research, which suggest the problem will not go away in the near future if we do not take action now. WalletHub’s study ranked the “Most and Least Educated” MSAs in 2025. Ann Arbor, Michigan, Durham-Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Madison, Wisoncsin, were in the top three, while the Inland Empire came in ranked in the bottom 15 of 150 considered large MSAs. Below us? Salinas, Stockton, Fresno, Modesto, Bakersfield, and Visalia. ADP Research asked where college graduates are actually finding jobs, and looked at MSAs under three criteria: wages, hiring, and affordability. Of 55 larger MSAs, the Inland Empire ranked 53rd. Our area does not have the type of jobs that most 20- to 29-year-olds with a college degree would consider.
We want to emphasize that while we are also concerned about the current employment situation in the Inland Empire, it is the future we are stressing here by looking at the quality of jobs. Compared to other California MSAs, the Inland Empire actually just created a significant number of jobs from a year ago. The 17,700 positions generated here are only outpaced by the Greater Los Angeles MSA (+29,100), and the San Diego MSA (+14,100) among the larger MSAs in California. However, similar to the rest of the state, Inland Empire employment growth is nearly entirely dominated by two sectors: Healthcare (+18,200), and Local Government (+12,800). This implies that the other sectors combined lost 13,300 jobs.
What makes the short-term outlook worse, future prospects for these two sectors are not favorable. Healthcare spending is vulnerable to budget cuts. Education, the largest subsector of local government, continues to lose student headcount, at the K-12, community college, and California State University levels. Lower enrollment levels are projected for the rest of the decade. The Logistics sector currently is of no help (+600 jobs created from a year ago) and will be negatively affected by President Trump’s tariff policies on Asian countries. Consequently, unless business investment decisions include significant hiring of workers in other sectors of the Inland Empire economy, a clear stagnation or decline in jobs is forecast for the rest of 2025 and likely into 2026.
It is important to separate the short-term concern from the long term perspective. After a contraction in employment in the near future, the Inland Empire will rebound economically. The crucial question we have raised in this article centers around the kind of jobs decision-makers in the Inland Empire should try to focus on if you want to have a prosperous area in 20 years: an area that does not require long daily commutes to seek better paying jobs and congested freeways as a by-product. We have identified the problem and leave it up to leaders to act on this information.
Manfred Keil: Chief Economist, Inland Empire Economic Partnership, Associate Director, Lowe Institute of Political Economy, Robert Day School of Economics and Finance, Claremont McKenna College. Mark Schniepp: Director, California Economic Forecast.
The Inland Empire Economic Partnership’s mission is to help create a regional voice for business and quality of life in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Its membership includes organizations in the private and public sector.
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