2009 unemployment rate for college grads = 9.2%

[Hannah Bell]

A college education is better than no college education and correlates with higher pay. But as a cure for unemployment or as a way to narrow the chasm between the rich and everyone else, “more college” is a too-easy answer.

Over the past year, for example, the unemployment rate for college grads under age 25 has averaged 9.2 percent, up from 8.8 percent a year earlier and 5.8 percent in the first year of the recession that began in December 2007. That means recent grads have about the same level of unemployment as the general population. It also suggests that many employed recent grads may be doing work that doesn’t require a college degree.

When it comes to income inequality, college-educated workers make more than noncollege-educated ones. But higher pay for college grads cannot explain the profound inequality in the United States...Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez shows that the richest 1 percent of American households — those making more than $370,000 a year — received 21 percent of total income in 2008...The top 10 percent — those making more than $110,000 — received 48 percent of total income, leaving 52 percent for the bottom 90 percent. Where are college-educated workers?

Their median pay has basically stagnated for the past 10 years, at roughly $72,000 a year for men and $52,000 a year for women...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/opinion/14tue1.html


It is good to see somebody dispense with this "Education Attainment Will Lift All Boats" jive.

Education attainment will certainly make these two guys even richer than they already are.



After all, one owns 38% of a for-profit college company and the other makes shitty computer software that tracks data, test scores and other numbers that excite ed deform types.

But it will NOT solve the income inequality problem.

http://perdidostreetschool.blogspot.com/

[phasma ex machina]

1. Billionaire Buffett's bank holdings also received billions from TARP. nt

[dkf]

2. Wow that is a huge gap between men and women...still.

[Kevin1a]

3. And that's probably still not counting the many underemployed.

As a college student myself (AA working on BA), I see this first hand with my friends. When a college degree gets you a job a Kohls selling clothes for slightly above minimum wage, something is wrong. Not everyone can be a CEO, there just isn't enough demand for those jobs. Dr. Kevin prescribes more worker organisation, higher taxes on the rich, and more co-op and worker-owned businesses.

[leveymg]

4. Multinationals moving almost everything offshore.

The US economy is surviving on federal spending. Shortly, there comes The Collapse, and it will engulf almost everyone except those whose incomes come from abroad.