"A period of great social and economic change" is coming in the next four years as Minnesota work force ages, said state Demographer Tom Gillaspy in a Moorhead speech covered by Kelly Smith of Forum Communications.

“Statewide, the number of young people graduating from high school peaks this coming spring and will be the largest we will see for a decade,” Gillaspy said Friday.

The coming decline will have a dramatic negative impact on the work force. Gillaspy predicts that by decade’s end, “the local and state work force will hit record lows.”

Clay County Commissioner Kevin Campbell said the projections aren’t surprising, but “we have to do a better job of planning for all of these things.”

“Perhaps the only positive projection is that the area’s population will continue to grow,” Smith writes. “Fargo-Moorhead’s population will increase at a ‘fairly strong pace,’ topping 200,000 people before 2020.”

“This is really sort of unusual given the location of Clay and Cass County,” Gillaspy said.

“We are aging as a society,” he said. “To the best of our knowledge, this has never happened on a national scale in the history of our species. We live in a very unique time.”