From the Wall Street Journal, September 6:
Unemployment among younger workers who didn’t go to college has rarely been lower in recent decades. It is the opposite story for college grads
For most U.S. workers—those without college degrees, that is—it is one of the best job markets in decades.
In fact, the unemployment rate for workers ages 22 to 34 who never graduated from college has rarely been lower in the past two decades, according to a new analysis by labor-market think tank Burning Glass Institute.***What is just as remarkable is how different that is from the experience of job seekers who did graduate from college, says Gad Levanon, Burning Glass’s chief economist. For most of the past two decades, the two groups largely tracked each other, in good economic times and bad.Now, though, just as job hunters without degrees are having one of their best runs, those with college educations are having one of their worst. And those with advanced degrees or in fields such as science and technology are having an even harder time than usual.
That divergence of fortunes is a departure from what the U.S. economy has seen for years, and much of it boils down to supply and demand: There aren’t enough skilled tradespeople to go around, for example, as older generations retire and immigration drops.
Meanwhile, more Americans have college degrees than ever, just as artificial intelligence is doing more of the entry-level work companies typically hire young graduates for.
“There’s a rapidly growing supply of people with a bachelor’s degree, and you have a rapid decline of people who don’t,” Levanon says. “I don’t think it’s a temporary thing.”***A wrinkle: On an absolute scale, it is still easier to find a job with a college degree. The unemployment rate for degree-holders in their prime working years—ages 25 to 54—averaged 2.7% for the 12 months ending in July. That is well below the 3.6% rate for workers with just some college education, and 4.7% for people with a high-school diploma only.So, to gauge how the job market has shifted for each cohort, Levanon compared current unemployment rates for the different groups with their own range of unemployment rates since 2003. The analysis included data through July.
By that measure, the job market looks much better, historically speaking, for blue-collar workers, including those in construction and on manufacturing lines, and manual-service workers—think security guards, nurses and many restaurant and retail employees.***The more physical and in-person the work is, the lower the unemployment tends to be by that occupation’s own historical standards. Friday’s booming jobs report reinforced the trend: Food services and drinking places added 59,000 jobs in August, more than a third of all 162,000 jobs added to the U.S. economy last month.By contrast, college-educated workers ages 22 to 34 years old have only seen worse unemployment in the past two decades during the pandemic and the economy’s slow rebound from the 2007-09 recession....
....MUCH MORE
