## Saturday, March 13, 2010

### Unemployment rate by level of education

In case you can't read the legend, the education categories are:
• Less than high school diploma
• High school graduate, no college
• Some college or associate's degree
• Bachelor's degree or higher
Click on the graph to see the full-sized version:

I find it interesting to see that the typical unemployment rate for someone with a college degree is only about 2-3%.

From Calculated Risk.

#### 3 comments:

1. I find it unfortunate that unemployment for a bachelor's is climbing. This means that employer's are hiring no college to associates degree while shedding employees with bachelor's or higher. And, more unfortunate is that those unemployed with higher education are not finding jobs.

2. The numbers are misleading. As there are a larger percentage of individuals with AA degrees than there are individuals with PhD's, then the unemployment rate for AA degrees will always be a larger percentage of the total labor force than will be the unemployment rate for PhD's.

More effective measures would be the rate of change for each group and the percentage of unemployed PhD's of the total number of individuals with PhD's.

It would be nice to know if the graph is percentage of total unemployed or percentage of the group.

3. Anonymous said...
"The numbers are misleading. As there are a larger percentage of individuals with AA degrees than there are individuals with PhD's, then the unemployment rate for AA degrees will always be a larger percentage of the total labor force than will be the unemployment rate for PhD's."

Wow, I did not know it was possible to misinterpret the graph that badly.

The graph for college graduates, for example, shows the number of unemployed college graduates in the labor force divided by the total number of college graduates in the labor force. It does NOT show the percentage of unemployed college graduates in the labor force divided by the total number of people in the labor force.

This should be obvious from the fact that the unemployment rate for high school dropouts is higher than the overall unemployment rate.