Demand for Better-Educated Workers Increasing

A lot of people out there seem to have the impression that there’s some kind of glut of college educated workers out there and that too many people are going to college. The steady increase in the wage premium paid to college graduates seems to say otherwise, as does the fact that in the depths of the current recession the unemployment rate for college graduates is dramatically lower than the unemployment rate for those with only a high school degree. And the trend is projected to continue:

The number of jobs requiring at least a two-year associate’s degree will outpace the number of people qualified to fill those positions by at least three million in 2018, according to a report scheduled to be released Tuesday by the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University.

The story of America for the bulk of our history has been one of steadily increasing educational attainment, which has driven broad-based growth. For the past thirty years, however, we’ve tended to level off:

This is a multi-faceted problem, but also a quite urgent one. And it needs to be tackled along a number of dimensions. Measures to make college more affordable will help with much of it, but obviously won’t help us increase our too-low high school graduation rate. Conversely, improving the high school graduation rate at the margin probably doesn’t do much to help the people who are currently entering college but not graduating. And as this latest report indicates, we need to make sure we’re providing viable options short of a full bachelor’s degree for people who need some education beyond the high school level.