There's a new report from Anthony Carnevale, Tamara Jayasundera, and Ban Cheah, "Weathering the College Storm," that has attracted some attention in the economic blogs. Dylan Matthews wrote about it here and again here, with Dean Baker and Larry Mishel adding in critical commentary.
The report looks at who has gained the most jobs since the "recovery" started, a period they benchmark to January 2010. They find that people with bachelor's degrees and some college have gained all the jobs, while people with just a high-school diploma or less haven't gained any jobs over this time period. They also find that about 80 percent of the new jobs created since January 2010 have gone to men.
What should one conclude? Well, one conclusion is that we wouldn't have any unemployment if we had fewer women and more men. Since men are gaining all the jobs, it stands to reason that if we, on net, had more men and fewer women, we'd have a lot more people employed. Public policy should involve job-training programs where unemployed women get boyish haircuts and study movies like the cult 1980s hit Just One of the Guys and other high school movies loosely based on Twelfth Night. They should learn about swagger, sports metaphors, and that thing where dudes treat job requirements as suggestions when they apply for them, while women don't apply unless they have all of the requirements.
You might point out that I must have skipped a step somewhere. When we are so far away from full employment, does this analysis make sense? Instead of actually reflecting the proper allocation of labor this is just reflecting the fact that, for a variety of reasons including discrimination, men are jumping to the front of the queue to take all of the new jobs that are created. But the report seems to go in the other direction and argue that if there were a lot more college-educated workers we'd have more employment; alternatively, the lack of properly educated workers is a check on recovery.
Dean Baker and Larry Mishel focus on the fact that unemployment rates have gone up for college-educated workers and that most of the big net job increases have gone to those with post-bachelor degrees. I'm interested in the issue of line-jumping. How much does growing employment for college-educated workers in this recession have to do with being prepared for a variety of new, cutting-edge jobs that require a high level of education? And how much is education like a zero-sum hedge that puts the person in question at the front of the line for the limited jobs the economy is creating, even if those jobs require less education?
This chart from the report is interesting:
These are numbers since the recovery began in January 2010. Here people with bachelor's degrees have substantial growth in "high education" occupations. But they also have substantial growth in middle-education ones as well. Meanwhile, those with associate degress have significant growth in "low education" occupations. All the while those with high school diplomas are falling out of middle-education occupations. So two big trends are those with a high-school diploma being kicked out of middle-education (and presumably middle-class) jobs, combined with a down-tier move in education -- those with bachelor's degrees taking middle-education jobs and those with associate degrees taking low education jobs.
The 866,000 jobs lost in middle-education for those with a high school diploma or less are largely a function of the job category "office and administrative support occupations" (see Table 9 of the main report). There were 502,000 jobs lost for high-school diploma or less education in this category; if this is excluded it is a significantly different analysis. Bryce Covert and I flagged this category of work as explaining a lot of missing jobs for women and a broader change in the work environment for GOOD Magazine (data supplement here). This is a function of both longer-term trends and a speedup that has taken place in workplaces since the recession, where people are expected to do more with less. Workplaces keep the same amount of work even as they lose their support staff. So these changes aren't just the result of technological change, but reflect the way that recessions are reworking office environments to put more pressure on workers.
There's no denominator in the graphic above. Is the percentage of those with an associate degree working in the low-education occupations increasing, or has it held constant? What do these changes look like? Though not definitive, it would give us a clue as to whether or not this hedge aspect of education, the ability to jump to the front of the line for jobs, even crappy jobs, is in play in this weak recovery. I take education by occupation for all workers over 25, first quarter 2010 and first quarter 2012, from BLS/CPS, using the reports division of education levels, and compare the percentage of each education group in an occupation before and after to see how they are changing:
As we can see, there is a movement downward in education. BAs gain in their share of medium-education jobs, while AAs and some college gain in the low-education jobs.
In a buried part of the report, the authors anticipate this, noting "increased hiring of more educated workers in low- and middle-education occupations raises a valid concern about whether the workers need more education to perform the tasks or whether workers are being 'underemployed' in a slack labor market. This concern is addressed in detail in the Center on Education and the Workforce report, The Undereducated American....The analysis found a Bachelor’s degree wage premium in jobs at all education levels. The simple fact that employers are willing to pay more for educated workers suggests that they see added benefit in such workers."
I'm willing to believe this, though it still wouldn't directly address the underemployment issue. However, the analysis cited (page 28) only looks at 2007 through 2009, and doesn't look at people specifically hired in that period, much less the recovery. That premium has a lot to do with differentiation within occupations that analysis isn't capturing, like rookie cops and veteran detectives falling under the same occupation, but the second more likely to have more education and pay. But to the extent that premium exists, it isn't clear that it is going to people who now require some college to get even the most menial jobs our economy is producing.
When the economy is stalled, the limited number of new jobs will create certain winners and certain losers. But the first priority for us isn't to make sure that we help people fight for the scraps of a weak economy; it's that we grow the economy and demand full employment to provide for all.
Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:
