Some Troubling Unemployment Statistics
By now, most people have heard that the average national unemployment rate has fallen from close to 9.0% to 8.6%—the lowest in almost three years. While this may be cause for celebration, a closer inspection of other statistical findings is necessary to get a real picture of American unemployment (notwithstanding the fact that unemployment rates for African Americans and Hispanics are in double digits).
The source of these revealing stats was an article by Phyllis Korkki published in the New York Times this past New Year’s Day entitled “The Year of the Multitaskers’ Revenge” According to Ms. Korkki, while the overall unemployment rate is 8.6%, the jobless rate for persons who earned a college degree is 4.4% while the rate for those with a high school diploma is 8.8%. The unemployment rate for those individuals who did not graduate from high school is a staggering 13.2%. However, a more troubling statistic offered by Ms. Korkki is that less than 30% of United States population of 25 years or older has a bachelors or higher degree. To make matters worse, 30% of jobless Americans have been unemployed for a year or more.
Ms. Korrki contends that large groups of American will continue to be unemployed or underemployed unless more training and educational opportunities become available to the public. Further she asserts that if the long term unemployed do not get some government help than this groups risks falling so far behind that it will never be able to catch up.
Most analysts predict that unemployment rates in the US will remain high for five years or more. Like Korkki, I believe that the only way to reduce unemployment among non-college graduates is to fund programs that are designed to retrain workers for jobs in emerging technologies. Further, bringing manufacturing jobs from overseas back to the US will also help!
Until next time...
Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!!!!!
I mistakenly received the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) rather than the NY Times today and while I think that the WSJ is a great example of unabashedly biased journalism, there was an article in the publication about today’s job market that contained some interesting statistics.
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While studying the pathogenesis of Neisseria gonorrhoeae in Portland, OR in the early 1980s, genital herpes had replace gonorrhea as the scourge of the sexually transmitted disease community. To help to combat the spread of genital herpes, my labmates and I joined the Portland Venereal Disease Action Committee, a grass roots organization that provided public outreach and education about sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). A few years later, the Regan Administration finally admitted to the American public that HIV/AIDS was real and that HIV infections were likely to reach epidemic proportions. While genital herpes can be painful, uncomfortable and often emotionally debilitating, the unprecedented morbidity and mortality of HIV/AIDS almost pushed genital herpes into infectious diseases obscurity. Now that HIV/AIDS is more treatable than ever before, epidemiologists and sexually transmitted diseases experts have begun to reexamine the infection rates and incidence of other STDs (including herpes, gonorrhea, Chlamydia and syphilis) among Americans. To that end, I read today a 