Good Quality Jobs Are Back! And College Graduates Are First in Line

Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce has dispelled the myth that most of the jobs of this recovery are low paying jobs... their recent study shows just the opposite:

As we all know prior conversations in the media discussed research that suggested that college graduates were stuck filling low-wage jobs. GU's latest report, Good Jobs Are Back: College Graduates Are First in Line, analyzes the growth of the U.S. jobs and wages during the recession and recovery, and shows this earlier research to be misleading. They find that since 2010, the economy has produced 6.6 million employment opportunities, 2.9 million of which are considered good jobs (a term they use for jobs in the upper-third by median wages of occupations in which they are classified). The key findings of the report reveal that 2.8 million of these good jobs went to college graduates. Some of the largest growing professions seek highly-skilled workers and offer large benefit packages. Most good jobs are full time and twice as likely to provide health insurance and retirement plans. Read the full report here to learn more about the growth of good jobs during the recovery.

If you don't have time to read the full report, here is the bottom line: "The Great Recession was a major hit to the U.S. labor market, and the slow pace of economic recovery has left many people apprehensive about embracing any positive news on the jobs front. The prevailing narrative in the early months of the recovery described young people graduating from college and being unable to find positions in their fields of study. They sometimes settled for low-paying, part-time jobs, often in retail and food services industries, because such positions were all they could find. But that is just a small part of the story. The larger picture shows that as the recovery accelerated, more high-quality, good jobs were created, and for the most part, they were filled by highly-skilled professionals with postsecondary education. A more accurate description of the common experience in this jobs recovery is of college graduates finding good jobs with benefits."

Unemployment rate remains steady at 5.3% as US economy adds 215,000 jobs

The US economy continues to add jobs... The US economy added 215,000 jobs in July, while the unemployment rate remained steady at 5.3%, meeting expectations.

So far this year, job gains have averaged 208,000 a month.  That's about 1.5 million new jobs this year thus far.

“...yet another solid employment report”, said Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit.

Additionally last week, applications for unemployment benefits increased by a meager 3,000 to about 270,000. The four-week average dropped to 268,250, close to such low levels not seen for nearly 15 years.

Such near-historic lows point to a healthy job market, according to economists. “Initial claims for unemployment insurance have been below 300,000 for 22 straight weeks, the longest such stretch since 1973,” said Gus Faucher, senior economist at PNC Financial Services. “Claims are running at a pace consistent with monthly job growth of better than 200,000.”

This additional report of an increase of more than 200,000 jobs implies a continued downtrend in unemployment, according to Jim O’Sullivan, chief US economist at High Frequency Economics. Such a downtrend would reinforce the Fed’s assessment of the jobs market and recent employment gains as “solid” and get the unemployment rate to within the 5% to 5.2% range that most Fed officials consider to be consistent with "full employment."

source:  ycharts.com