Education Attainment and Employment

I saw something in Facebook about how great Trump is because he lowered the unemployment rate for his first month in office. I have always been interested in the employment statistics and had visited the employment rate website at the department of labor a few times so I visited it again to see the impact of one month in office. My main goal was to see if this drastic shift in unemployment (-0.1%) effected them who would have less education attainment levels.

The first thing you realize is for people without a high school degree have an excessive unemployment rate – 9%(+0.1% for the month)! That is almost 10 million people that really have a hard time getting a job compared to the rest of us. Looking at the other groups you can see how much higher it is – For a high school degree only – 5.4% (down 0.5% for the month), some college / associate degree 4.3% (up 0.2% for the month), and lastly a bachelors degree at 2.4% (down 0.1% for the month). With a college degree it is 3X less unemployment rate!

Then looking at the data for the last 10 years you realize it has been this way the entire decade. Also the recession hurt the non-high school degree the most. For example, people without a high school degree, at the height of the crash had in 2010 of 14.9% compared to college degree at the same time of only 4.7%! That is 3X less – just terrible olastn people who have financial difficulty already.

From this data done for 2015, you can see that a BS degree has 2X+ more earnings then someone without a HS degree.

Lastly I wanted to know a better idea of who are these people who have such an issue with unemployment. From the graph above from the US Census, my questions were answered. First you can see a little change in the non HS degree area – from 65+ at 84.3% to 25-34 at 90.5%. This is some change in 40 years but sad so little(+6.2%). Getting a high school degree is the first long term goal you achieve and failing to get that, besides financial stress and unemployment, is lower self confidence in reaching goals.

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