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10 Stats and Facts – Job Skill Mismatch

In the coming years, not enough American workers will have the right skills to fill the jobs that will be available.

  1. There are too many workers with a high school diploma or less.
  2. 78% of the unemployed do not have a degree beyond a high school diploma.
  3. In 2020, 38% of US workers will have a high school diploma or less.
  4. Unfortunately there will be 5.9 million more HS dropouts than jobs for people with that level of education.
  5. By 2020, 34% of American workers (nearly 57 million) are projected to have a bachelor’s degree or higher.,
  6. In 1995 only 25% had a degree and in 1970, just 13%.
  7. Despite this increase, there is a huge and growing shortage of people with college degrees, particularly in fields like engineering and computer science.
  8. By the end of this decade, there will be a shortage of 1.5 million college graduates in high-paying, high-skill jobs.
  9. At the same time, 20 million will have an associate degree or certificate, a 30% increase.
  10. 29 million others will have completed some college but not earned a degree.

 

Source: Trends Magazine, McKinsey Global Institute

 

Sep 08, 2011 | 1 comment | View Post

8 Stats and Facts – Jobless Recovery Here to Stay?

It seems that on this Labor Day weekend, the jobless recovery is here to stay. 14 million people remain unemployed. The unemployment rate remains at 9.1%. Politics aside, should we be surprised? It seems that many signs pointed to such a recovery starting with previous recessions and slow job creation since 2000.

  1. It took roughly 6 months for employment to recover to its pre-recession level after each postwar recession through the 1980s.

    Jobless recoveries

  2. It took 15 months after the 1990-91 recession and 39 months after the 2001 recession.
  3. Between 2000 and 2007, the U.S. posted a weaker record of job creation than during any decade since the Great Depression.
  4. Total employment increased by 9.2 million, or 7%, less than 1/2 the rate of increase in preceding decades.
  5. At the current pace of job creation, it will take a minimum of 5 years for employment to recover. (That calculation is based on total net job creation of 117,000 jobs per month.) More and more forecasts look to 2018 or later until we return to full employment.
  6. The unemployment rate for adults 25 years and over with a bachelor’s degree and higher remains constant at 4.4%, below the baseline of full employment.
  7. For adults over 25 with less than a high school education, the unemployment rate is 14.3; with only a high school diploma, the rate is 10% with not much light at the end of the tunnel. For teenagers between 16 and 19 years old, the rate nears 25%.
  8. This year, the share of young people who were employed in July was 48.8 percent, the lowest July rate on record for the series, which began in 1948.

Source: McKinsey Global Institute, Bureau of Labor Statistics

Sep 03, 2011 | 0 comments | View Post

8 Stats and Facts – High School Dropouts

  1. Each year nearly four million kids begin ninth grade.  Nearly 1 million of them don’t make it to graduation. That’s nearly one out of every four students fail to graduate.
  2. A fifth of schools identified by the U.S. Department of Education are identified as “dropout factories,” where no more than 50 percent of students graduate.
  3. The unemployment rate for people without a high school diploma is nearly twice that of the general population.
  4. Over a lifetime, a high school dropout will earn $200,000 less than a high school graduate and almost $1 million less than a college graduate.
  5. Dropouts are more likely to commit crimes, abuse drugs and alcohol, become teenage parents, live in poverty and commit suicide.
  6. Dropouts cost federal and state governments hundreds of billions of dollars in lost earnings, welfare and medical costs, and billions more for dropouts who end up in prison.
  7. Almost half a million black teenagers drop out of school each year. Most will end up unemployed by their mid-30s. Six out of 10 black male dropouts will spend time in prison.
  8. The single biggest reason why girls drop out of school is pregnancy. 41 percent of Latinas leave high school because they get pregnant. These young women often end up with few job skills, more pregnancies and dependency on unreliable and sometimes violent men.

Read more about The High Cost of Dropping Out

Aug 18, 2011 | 1 comment | View Post