PRESQUE ISLE – When it comes to the region’s labor force, Aroostook County is not much different from the rest of the state.

That was the basic message delivered Tuesday morning by Dr. Charles Colgan, chairman of the graduate program in community planning and development at the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine. Colgan spoke to about 40 central Aroostook County business leaders at the University of Maine at Presque Isle.

“The Aroostook County work force is not so radically different from the rest of Maine or the United States, even though it is far north,” Colgan told the group. “This is not a wildly remote place where people are only doing farming or only cutting trees.”

Over the last 21/2 years, Colgan has been involved in doing labor-force analysis in 17 different regions that cover the entire state. Three of those regions cover all or part of Aroostook County.

One region included Fort Kent, Madawaska and the Van Buren area and another was for the Presque Isle-Caribou labor market. The third region stretched from Lincoln in Penobscot County north to Houlton.

The study of the three regions revealed that the labor force was stable, especially in the St. John Valley area, where Fraser Paper is the major employer.

The percentage of people looking for new jobs in the St. John Valley was just under 15 percent, compared with about 17.5 percent for the rest of the county and just over 17 percent for the state as a whole.

When people did look for new work, the primary motivation was more money. Again, the St. John Valley had the lowest percentage citing money as a motivation, at just under 23 percent. More than 25 percent of the people polled in the Presque Isle-Caribou area said money was a factor when they looked for a new job. The figure was 27.6 percent for the northern Penobscot-southern Aroostook county region.

For Maine as a whole, Portland had the highest percentage of people looking for new jobs to make more money.

“The most popular perception that the streets of Portland are paved in gold is just not true,” Colgan said, adding that high housing and living expenses are a key factor in that region.

Aroostook County residents also were more willing to travel farther to a job that paid more, though most currently work within 14 to 20 minutes for their homes.

“The Aroostook County work force is tightly contained within relatively confined areas,” Colgan said, adding that better highway infrastructure would open up the labor market and make it easier for people to take advantage of better employment opportunities outside their immediate home area.

In terms of education, the number of people with just a high school diploma ranged from 33 percent in the Presque Isle-Caribou area to as high as 46.6 percent in the St. John Valley. The state average was 34.6 percent.

The number of people with associate’s, bachelor’s or graduate degrees was below the state average in all three regions.

“The region is overly dependent on people with only a high school education,” Colgan said.

He said there also are too many people who are dependent on what he termed involuntary seasonal work.

“The County has a bigger challenge getting full-year employment rather than getting full-time employment,” said Colgan.

Despite some of the differences with the rest of Maine, Colgan said that overall, the data suggested that the region was in a good position to prepare itself for future job growth and development.

“The foundation is there to do that,” he said. ” In many ways [Aroostook County] is not apart from the rest of Maine or the United States.”