March 08, 2015
We all know that robots are making it impossible for people without a college degree to get jobs. That’s a basic fact about the economy known to all right-thinking people. And, just like most of the other “facts” about the economy known by right-thinking people, it happens not to be true.
The figure below shows the change in the employment to population ratio (EPOP) for people over 25 from before the recession to the present. (It compares the average for the last four months with the year-round average for 2006.)
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics and author’s calculations.
As can be seen the drop in the EPOP for college grads, at 4.0 percentage points, is somewhat smaller than the 6.1 percentage point drop for those with some college and the 5.9 percentage point drop for those with just a high school degree. But before anyone jumps on this as evidence of the education bias in today’s economy, note that the EPOP for people without high school degrees is only 1.2 percentage points. The data sure make it look like the recovery has disproportionately benefited the least educated.
In fact, these comparisons actually tilt the case against the less-educated. We all know the demographic story in which we are not supposed to be concerned about the decline in EPOPs from pre-recession levels because it’s the result of baby boomers retiring. For the most part this is not true (the drop in EPOPs among workers 25-54 is almost as large as for the adult population as a whole), but insofar as retirement is an issue, it would disproportionately affect less-educated workers.
The people who have crossed into their sixties since 2006 are much less educated on average than the people turning age 25 during this nine year period. This means that the percentage of people with a high school degree or less who have decided to retiree would have risen much more than the percentage of college grads. An age-adjusted measure of EPOPs would surely show a much worse story for college grads than this chart.
Don’t expect these cheap statistics to affect the public debate about technology, education, and the labor market (that depends on what important people say, not data), but folks should know it ain’t true.
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