Georgetown is blessed to have among its research centers the Center on Education and the Workforce. They have been a source of important evidence on the role of higher education in the larger society. A new report on how the macroeconomic recovery is affecting the job market was just released.
The report is consistent with the narratives that Georgetown students on the job market have been telling me – things are getting better.
From the report, however, I learned that things are not getting better for all persons seeking employment. The report defines a “good job” as one whose annual median salary is in the top 1/3 of all full-time, full year workers, more than $53,000. (The median salary for all full-time, full-year workers is $42,000). The “good jobs” also tend to have higher rates of employer-sponsored health insurance and retirement plans. The US economy has added about 6.6 million jobs in this recovery; 2.9 million were these “good jobs.”
The most telling chart in the report is below.
Almost all the good jobs added in this recovery have been filled by college graduates. High school graduates have actually been pushed out of the jobs.
This is another piece of evidence that higher education matters for the individual life course. The formative processes, both intellectual and social, that occur in institutions of higher education are valued by the US job market. This result, added to the prior evidence of almost a doubling of expected lifetime earnings due to college, demonstrates that the investments in human capital that families and students make have pecuniary benefits. It is critically important for the future of the country to rebuild the world-class ecology of state and private universities within the United States.
We, at Georgetown, are committed to expanding the access of these benefits to larger groups of young people especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. We are also committed to outcomes that are not monetized directly – the formation of women and men whose purpose in life extends beyond their own income to the welfare of others. In this moment when some are questioning the “return on investment” of higher education, however, the CEW report reminds us that Georgetown can focus on “women and men for others” with some assurance that we are also giving our graduates the opportunity for a more secure personal financial status.
Hello Robert, I was wondering that why people are scared of unemployment rate reports issued by the concerned authorities and now I found that they don’t care for any report but they care for their own status in the current demand and supply of right skill set.
Thank you for linking that chart.
Excellent and important comments.
A key point here is that education addresses “the individual life course.” As committed as I am to making that kind of difference in students’ lives, I also know that higher education is not the answer to social and economic inequality, though many politicians and pundits claim that it is. Even at its best, education helps some poor and working-class young people prepare to move into the middle class, an outcome that might improve the economic opportunities of those individuals but doesn’t address the broader economic structure. A thousand well-trained nurses might earn a decent living, but they will work alongside aides, janitors, and clerical workers who don’t. Simply put, moving some people into better paying jobs doesn’t eliminate the low-wage jobs they left behind. This is especially important given that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we will see more growth in low-wage, low-skill jobs over the next few decades than we can expect to see in the kinds of jobs that require a college degree.
Happily, at Georgetown we don’t only research the benefits of education or changes in the job market. We also study the challenges facing the working class and, through programs like the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, we work to address the structural inequalities that undermine the life chances of those who don’t have access to higher education.
Well said