Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Monday, June 5, 2006
Myth vs. reality? High tech jobs and the future
Everybody knows that the jobs of the near future, the jobs our kids will need their schools to prepare them for, will be more high tech and require more advanced skills in math and science than every before. That’s why everybody is going to need a college education.
But what if it wasn’t true?
Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and former New York Times education columnist, told education reporters from around the country Friday that he is not opposed to teaching kids more math and science. But he is afraid education policy-makers are building their case for change, and making decisions about how kids are educated, based on a huge myth.
Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, he first demonstrated where the conventional wisdom has come from — the simple fact is that college-educated Americans make far more than those who don’t go to college. And the gap is growing.
In 1973, a college degree on average translated to 25 percent more pay for men and 38 percent more for women. Today, a man with a college degree makes 41 percent more and a woman with a degree makes 46 percent more than those without. Figures like these are helping fuel the push to try to send everyone to college.
But what do those huge gaps mean in real dollars? In 1973, the average worker with a college degree made $19.77 an hour while a worker with a high school diploma only made $13.56 (in 2003 dollars).
By 2003, the college educated worker’s hourly wage had risen, but not by as much as you might expect — to $23.44. Meanwhile, the wage for a high school educated worker stood nearly still, at $13.57 an hour. (These figures are from a report called “The state of working America 2004-05”)
Perhaps this is because there is less demand for lower skilled jobs? Think again.
Rothstein argued that while jobs requiring higher education are growing rapidly, they are growing from a very small base. Meanwhile, jobs not requiring higher education are not declining — they also are growing, And while the demand for lower-skilled workers is growing more slowly, it is growing from a much larger base.
One of Rothstein’s charts showed (I’ve updated these numbers, which should have been in millions):
- 68,500,000 jobs requiring a high school diploma or less in 2004, or about 47 percent of all jobs in the U.S. economy.
- Far fewer jobs — 35,500,000 or 24 percent of all U.S. jobs — require at least a bachelor’s degree.
Those numbers in 10 years are projected to look like this:
- Jobs requiring a high school graduate or less — 75,400,000 or 46 percent of all jobs at that time
- Jobs requiring a college degree — 46,800,000 or 28 percent
These numbers demonstrate Rothstein’s point. In 10 years, there will be 11,300,000 more high-skilled jobs and 6,900,000 less-skilled jobs. Even so, the nature of the economy really won’t be changing very much or very fast and nearly half of all jobs still will not require a college degree.
More from Rothstein:
- Most of the new jobs being created in the U.S. are in fields like administrative support and sales, not high tech.
- Wages for mathematicians and scientists have actually fallen over 30 years.
- The growing wage gap between college-educated workers and those with high school only has been driven more by the collapse of unions and other labor market supports that held wages up for lower-skilled workers in the past. It’s not a matter of more demand for college-educated workers.
Rothstein says these realities need to be considered in education policy-making. For instance vocational education — a recent target for cuts at the federal level — should perhaps play a bigger, not smaller, role in school systems going forward.
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