In the UK, with the Brexit vote, and the US, as people gave the Republican nomination to Donald Trump, the reflexive reaction by many has been to write off the results as the product of racism and xenophobia. Nasty attitudes are certainly abundant. But there are serious economic worries for large segments of the population manifesting as an angry backlash.
More evidence that something is decidedly wrong is in a recent study, titled America’s Divided Recovery: College Haves and Have-Nots, 2016, out of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce. The big take: If you don't have at least some college education, chances are dim that you took part in the post-crash job recovery:
For those with at least some college education, the job market is robust. The economy has added 11.6 million jobs since the recession bottomed out — 11.5 million, or 99 percent of them, have gone to workers with at least some college education.
By contrast, workers with a high school diploma or less hear about an economic recovery and wonder what people are talking about. Of the 7.2 million jobs lost in the recession, 5.6 million were jobs for workers with a high school diploma or less. These workers have recovered only 1 percent of those job losses over the past six years. This group also saw no growth among well-paying jobs with benefits.
This move toward college-educated people getting first pick isn't new. However, the Great Recession has caused the trend to speed up considerably. If you don't have an advanced education, you are so screwed.
There's more to this as well, when you think a bit. Ninety-nine percent of all jobs means exactly that. Not just intellectually challenging positions that require advanced training, but virtually all work that has come onto the market.
As the economist Robert Samuelson pointed out in May 2015, jobs post-recession (and even pre-recession) were roughly distributed as about 25 percent low-paying, 43 percent medium-paying, and 32 percent high-paying. Those with a college education were taking almost all of them, showing, among other things, an ivy walls-to-barista counter pipeline. There was nothing left even at the bottom for those without a postsecondary education, let alone jobs that allowed for eventual social mobility.
Things get even uglier with additional context. According to a Pew analysis of census data, 34 percent of 25- to 29-year-olds had completed at least a bachelor's degree in 2014. Sixty-three percent had at least some college under the belt. Another way to phrase this is that 37 percent, more than a third, had no college education and no shot at getting a job.
These are historically the highest educational attainment statistics in the history of tracking such numbers. Project those percentages to the rest of the adult population and, at best, 99 percent of the job opportunities were open to 63 percent of the population.
The real kicker is that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, two-thirds of US jobs need at most a high school education. However, if you're an employer and can get someone with a college degree, even to ask whether someone wants regular or soy milk in their latte, why wouldn't you?
No matter how much cheer some people find in the overall job creation numbers, the split in job access by educational attainment make clear businesses generate nowhere near the amount of work necessary. But the resulting lack of security, lack of money, and lack of hope are masked because they remain concentrated in parts of society not welcome to mix with those who make policy and decisions.
The fears and frustrations are out of sight and, so, out of mind. At least until an angry mob takes to the voting booth. Suddenly we are shocked — shocked — by the results. And so, we write them off by focusing on an admittedly virulent presence of racism and xenophobia and ignore the problem. But it won't go away.
