Thu, 01 Apr 2004 18:24:58 GMT
Unemployment level of college grads surpasses that of high-school dropouts.
http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/
webfeatures_snapshots_archive_03172004
This isn't an 'edtech' related item, but it was so striking I couldn't pass up on posting it. The first graph is sheer number of unemployed, and shows that in the U.S. there are now more of them with college degrees than are high school drop outs. This in itself is not that shocking – as the report says, “There are, however, far more college graduates than high-school dropouts in our current labour force.” The graph shown in figure two should be more alarming, though it's trends be not so steep – it depicts unemployed as a percentage of those two populations, and actually shows a decrease in unemployment for high school drop outs, but a steady increase for college graduates. I saw this referred to in an interesting article in Salon magazine about globalization and off-shoring software jobs to India, and as someone who works in both 'high tech' and 'high ed' it's hard not to be afraid of the implications. – SWL
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this is striking. but i don't think offshoring has anything to do with it. it is a much broader change arising in the last 20 years involved with the relative worth of labor, information processing and the management structure of enterprise. it is tied closely with an increasingly powerful class of super-wealthy who no longer need the tens of hundreds of tiers of managers underneath them to keep their empires going.
