College Educated Workers Now Dominate the Labor Market - 90+% of Post Recession Jobs Went To Them

'You eat what you know' has never been truer - and appears to be getting more so. JL

Anna Sussman reports in the Wall Street Journal:

This year marked the first time college-educated workers, now 36% of the workforce, outnumbered those with a high-school degree or less. The share of the workforce with a high school diploma or less dropped to 34%, down five percentage points from 2007. That’s because the vast share of the 11.6 million jobs gained in the recovery — 73% — went to those with bachelor’s degrees or higher.
For decades, workers with a four-year degree have out-earned their less-educated peers. Now, they’re also the largest share of the labor market.
That’s the finding of a new report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. This year marked the first time college-educated workers, now 36% of the workforce, outnumbered those with a high-school degree or less. The share of the workforce with a high school diploma or less dropped to 34%, down five percentage points from 2007. That’s because the vast share of the 11.6 million jobs gained in the recovery — 73% — went to those with bachelor’s degrees or higher, according to the report.
“We really do have a nation of people who are post-secondary ‘haves’ and post-secondary ‘have-nots,’” said Anthony Carnevale, the center’s director and one of the report’s authors. “It is definitely something that divides us, both in economic and apparently in cultural terms.”

Several other factors helped tip the balance in favor of college grads: Many high-school graduates returned to college during the recession, and demographic changes in the composition of the workforce have been a factor. But Mr. Carnevale said it was also because college-educated workers and workers with an associate’s degree or some college are taking the middle- and low-skill jobs that formerly went to high-school graduates.
“If you’re running a pizza joint and you’re going to hire somebody…then you’re looking for a more highly skilled worker than you were looking for 20 or 25 years ago,” he said. Those employees might have to handle internet orders and operate a more complicated cash register system than in the past, he said. “It’s very clear there’s been some bumping effect,” he added.
Workers with just a high school diploma or less were hit hard by the recession, losing 5.6 million jobs between December 2007 and January 2010, the report said. As a group they gained just 80,000 jobs in the subsequent six years. But those with a bachelor’s degree or higher added 187,000 jobs during the recession, then gained another 8.4 million during the recovery.

Much has been made of the recovery’s many low-wage and low-skilled jobs in industries like food service, retail and hospitality. But a substantial number of jobs grew in high-wage service occupations like management, computer science and healthcare, the report found. And the college wage premium – a measure of how much more college grads earn at the median than their high-school educated peers — stood at 81% in 2015, according to Labor Department data. That’s down from a peak of 83% in 2013, but still high by historical standards.
Employers are “hiring the people they think they need,” said Mr. Carnevale. “They’re spending the extra money because they’re looking for something.”