Dive Brief:
- It's probably no surprise to most American employers, but out of the 11.6 million jobs created in the post-recession economy, 11.5 million went to workers with at least some college education, according to new academic research.
- The report, America’s Divided Recovery: College Haves and Have-Nots, from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, also found that of these jobs, 8.4 million went to workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
- The study also reveals that employment of workers with a high school diploma or less only grew by 80,000 jobs during the recovery.
Dive Insight:
Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown Center and the report's lead author, said the modern economy continues to leave Americans without a college education behind. “For decades, we’ve witnessed this growing split that parallels the divide in the current electorate,” he says.
The Great Recession of 2008 decimated blue-collar and clerical jobs, and the recovery added primarily managerial and professional jobs. Today, for the first time, workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher are a larger proportion of the workforce (36%) than those with a high school diploma or less (34%). Those with some college comprise the remaining 30%.
Among industries, consulting and business services added the largest number of jobs in the recovery (2.5 million), while manufacturing added the second most (1.7 million). Manufacturing, however, still has 1 million fewer jobs than it did before the recession began.
Tamara Jayasundera, senior economist at the Georgetown Center and co-author of the report, said it's good that the economy is recovering, but it's also hard to ignore the "tale of two countries" with vastly different economic realities for those with and without a college education. “Fewer pathways to the middle class for those with less education will continue to reshape the labor market and American culture as we know it," she said.