Over the past two years, every uptick in the unemployment rate has ignited new worries and discussions about the utility of college degrees. In many instances, commentators, looking at the issue through tunnel vision, have drawn contradictory conclusions, oftentimes viewing the issue through different lenses (e.g. setting the wage of college graduates against inflation versus the perspective that a college degree is one essential part of an equation used to predict professional success). There is one statistic though, on which Wall Street Journal contributor Conor Dougherty reported, which might be viewed as the Gross Domestic Product (which judges the overall health of an economy, its productivity, and its growth) of college graduate-related statistics. Though like GDP, this statistic fails to produce a truly comprehensive image of its subject and lacks nuance or depth. It does relate, in a general way, the long-term impact of getting a college degree.
Dougherty reports that the recession has helped to widen the gap between college and high school graduates, demonstrating, in rather unfortunate terms, how a college degree impacts one’s long-term professional wellbeing. Unemployed graduates seem to be finding work with greater ease: whereas job seekers with a college degree have toiled to find a job for an average of 18.4 weeks, job seekers without such background have remained unemployed for an average of 27.5 weeks. The most important statistic examined by Dougherty, however, only look at the issue of job security through a quantitative lens.
Dougherty explains that “[t]he unemployment rate for workers 25-and-older with a bachelor’s degree or higher was 4.6% in August, for example, compared with 10.3% for those with just a high-school diploma.” This 5.7% gap grew throughout the recession, at the beginning of which in 2007, the gap was considerably smaller, at only 2.6 %. This statistic demonstrates what impact a college degree can have on job security in, what is considered, the worst economic conditions in over a half-century. Though, and as I mention above, this statistic paints an incomplete picture. Dougherty does temper his claims, admitting, “a diploma is [no longer] the slam-dunk it once was,” and is no longer a guarantee that one’s wage will outmatch inflation. Nevertheless, Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute points out, that the American people, despite their educational background, are still in the midst of a period of collective economic hardship.
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