I spend a lot of my time working on projects for the Office of Career and Technical Education at the Virginia Department of Education. CTE receives a significant portion of its funding from the federal government, and like all government funds it comes with strings attached. For the last 25 years one of the most important of these has been the requirement to equalize the gender balance of students enrolling in and completing courses. Penalties are exacted when courses in traditionally male fields, like engineering, have fewer than 25 percent females, or courses in traditionally female fields, like nursing, have fewer than 25 percent males. Schools have succeeded in equalizing enrollment in some areas, but in others, this goal is extremely difficult to meet. The Accounting and Computer Information Systems courses enroll almost equal numbers of male and female students, but few Pre-engineering or Cosmetology courses meet their 25% target. CTE has trouble meeting this goal not because of lack of effort, but because their enrollment patterns follow the job trends in society at large. Continue reading
Tag Archives: employment
How to Succeed Financially: The American Template
In the U.S., the traditional narrative of how to succeed financially in has been to do the following:
- Go to college and earn a degree
- Use that degree to get a good job (with health insurance) that pays enough money to cover your basic needs and allows you to build some savings.
- With your savings, a mortgage loan, and maybe a little help from your parents, buy a home (presuming it makes sense vs. renting). This will save money on rent and home equity will be a major portion of your nest egg.
- Take advantage of institutionalized savings mechanisms (401K or other pension plans) to start saving for retirement to supplement Social Security. With diminishing payouts and concerns about the future solvency of Social Security, supplemental savings are increasingly important.
- After many years of work, retire and live comfortably off of your savings and Social Security.
While the notion of a strict linear model of the life course is increasingly outdated, there are also questions about the veracity of its basic assumptions–is a college degree worth the price tag? Is homeownership really a good investment? Yet, in the absence of clear alternatives, this remains the dominant life course narrative. Taking advantage of the online analysis tools at the University of California, Berkeley’s Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA) program, I used the triennial Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF) and annual Current Population Survey (CPS) data to examine trends in work, benefits, and wealth among young working-age adults, those aged 25 to 44, over the past twenty years, with an eye to examining each step in this traditional narrative.
Employment is up, wages are down
Employment rose nationwide in 2011, but the average weekly wage fell 1.7 percent according to data just released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Only five periods have seen declining wages since the series began in 1978 and fourth Quarter 2010-2011 is the only period to have seen declining wages occur with rising employment.
Virginia’s twelve largest localities, the only ones covered in this report, mirror the national trend. All twelve experienced employment growth, and all but one, Alexandria City, simultaneously experienced wage declines. We need to wait for more details on industry and occupational employment patterns in order to work out just why employment has risen without also driving up wages. And we need employment data for a few more quarters to see whether this divergence of employment and wages is a blip or the beginning of a trend.
Employment and Wage Change, Virginia’s largest Localities, 2010-2011
| Employment Percent Change |
Average Weekly Wage | Wages Percent Change |
|
| December 2010-11 |
4th Quarter 2011 | 4th Quarter 2010-11 | |
| Arlington, VA | 0.3 | $1,591 | -5 |
| Chesterfield, VA. | 1.6 | $852 | -2.5 |
| Fairfax, VA | 1.7 | $1,519 | -1.5 |
| Henrico, VA | 1 | $939 | -2 |
| Loudoun, VA | 2.5 | $1,136 | -5 |
| Prince William, VA. | 3.2 | $848 | -2.8 |
| Alexandria City, VA | 0.6 | $1,434 | 0.4 |
| Chesapeake City, VA | 0.2 | $751 | -0.7 |
| Newport News City, VA | 1.9 | $876 | -1.7 |
| Norfolk City, VA. | 0.8 | $933 | -2.6 |
| Richmond City, VA | 1.6 | $1,027 | -3.3 |
| Virginia Beach City, VA | 0.5 | $763 | -0.8 |
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, County Employment and Wages Summary
Job Gains and Losses, 2007-2012
The Pew Center on the States recently published an interactive graphic on job gains and losses among the states. Using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, they examine annual percent changes (April to April) in the number of employed persons in each state between 2007 and 2012.
This interactive graphic is conceptually very similar to the state-by-state infographic on gay rights. There are six concentric circles, each representing one year. For example, 2007 captures the percent change in employment between April 2006 and 2007. A white band represents the official beginning of the recession in December 2007. The states are organized into five regions, although the separation between the regions is not well defined. Continue reading
Computers Really Are Taking Our Jobs
UNIVAC 1. The first commerical computer, delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1951
The last great recession began in December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009. But it doesn’t feel like it’s over. Even though productivity and in many cases corporate profits have rebounded, unemployment and underemployment remain high. We have seen this pattern after each recession since the 1990s and it has been dubbed “jobless recovery.”
There are many arguments about why unemployment remains so stubbornly high. Some explain that because the economy is weak employers are afraid to grow and reluctant to hire. Others have argued that the economy is facing stagnation and a failure of innovation, especially relative to booming economies in Asia and India. For educators, the “skills gap” explanation has been the most pertinent. This posits that employers now require different, generally higher skill levels from their workers and education is not providing what is needed. Consequently too many people are simply unprepared for work in the 21st Century.
A new book, Race Against the Machine, by MIT Sloan School of Business professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee puts an additional explanation in very clear and accessible terms. It’s not simply that we’re afraid to grow, or stagnating, or even unskilled. Instead, they argue, we’re out of work because, as we have feared for some time, computers really are taking our jobs, and they’re getting better at it every year. Computers are faster and cheaper than people at repetitive tasks, like filing documents, and building things on an assembly line. And as they get more powerful, they can take on more sophisticated repetitive tasks like reading X-rays, analyzing legal documents, and geocoding address data. And equally, if not more important, computerization allows for the reorganization of tasks in a way that eliminates the need for many jobs. Internet shoppers don’t need store clerks; Google searchers don’t need librarians; and Facebook friends don’t need letter carriers. Continue reading
Occupation Change, 1920-2010
Every year the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases new data about occupations and employment in America. They estimate how many jobs there are for doctors and actors, how many jobs there are in manufacturing and real estate, how many jobs there are in a multitude of other occupations and industries. And every two years they make projections for the future, giving us an idea of which occupations will be growing and adding more jobs and which will be shrinking and perhaps even disappearing. Despite all the work that goes into these estimates and projections, from year to year the data look pretty much the same. Some occupations outpace their neighbors in growth, but rarely by much; the 7th largest occupation last year might be the sixth largest this year, but we rarely see dramatic yearly changes. So why is all this work important?
