The BounceBack St. Louis survey posed 16 specific questions to local professionals waylaid by the economic downturn.

None of the questions, as you'll see, expressed even the slightest interest in where the 397 respondents went to high school.

An offshoot of the St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association, BounceBack provides support and networking opportunities for midlevel managers and information technology specialists displaced by the recession.

The survey — "Perspectives of St. Louis Area Professionals Changing Careers in a Turbulent Economy" — aims to present a snapshot of a regional employment situation staggered by the loss of 78,400 jobs.

The results of the direct survey questions were decidedly mixed:

Bad • More than a third of the respondents reported being out of work a year or more before landing new employment.

Good • Another third said they began collecting a regular paycheck within six months of their layoff.

Bad • Ten percent of the professionals who managed to find a new job over the past three years have suffered a subsequent layoff or, in some instances, layoffs.

Ambiguous • The survey-takers were almost evenly split (47 percent disagreed, 43 percent agreed) on whether the St. Louis economy is better off now than it was a year ago.

Good • Slightly better than half of those now employed full-time (52 percent) view the local economy favorably.

Bad • The unemployed and underemployed have an entirely different perspective — four out of 10, in fact, believe the St. Louis economy is no better now than it was a year ago.

So those are the survey's basic findings. But here's where it gets more interesting.

At the conclusion of the survey, BounceBack tossed out a random query: "Are there any final suggestions that you would like to offer about how St. Louis can retain and re-engage talented people to work in our regional economy?"

To the surprise of BounceBack officials, more than half of the respondents decided they, in fact, did have more to say.

A lot more, actually.

"This," BounceBack director Blair Forlaw said dryly, "is where folks got philosophical."

As they contemplated the regional navel, few of the respondents — all scathed in one way or another by the Great Recession — liked what they saw.

For starters, few had confidence St. Louis will ever return to prerecession levels of employment and productivity. St. Louis, they said, is simply not positioned to compete in a global marketplace. And the blame, they say, falls directly on the mind-set that generates the definitive St. Louis question.

Yes, that question.

"It's time to get rid of 'Where did you go to high school?'" Forlaw said. "We have to rid ourselves of parochial thinking."

Bluntly put, a businessperson in Singapore couldn't care less about the secondary education of a contact from St. Louis.

"Where someone went to high school is not important anymore," the survey says. "What is important is commitment to the vitality of our community, eagerness to work, readiness to learn and transferable skills. Job-seekers wish that they would be judged on the basis of these attributes instead of other characteristics that are more 'superficial.'"

In vanquishing the where-did-you-go-to-high-school mentality, survey-takers said, St. Louis would take a major step toward gaining equal footing in the global economy.

Because once the importance of high school is discounted — along with the cliquish mentality it represents — the dividing lines that pit different cities and counties in the region against one another will start to melt away as well. And we can begin to operate as one regional economic engine.

Let's return to the businessperson in Singapore.

Does anyone believe he understands, or cares, that St. Louis city is not St. Louis County? Or that St. Charles County is not the Metro East? Of course not.

"We sink or swim together in today's economy," the report says.

And the local economy, in the opinion of a group of people trying to bounce back from the loss of their livelihoods, will remain barely afloat unless St. Louisans realize that events unfolding in the rest of the world are more important than where their neighbors went to high school.