Study finds gains at the high and low ends but softness in the middle; college is also key
Job growth since the recession has increasingly come from hiring in a potentially surprising area: high-paying occupations.
According to a study released Monday by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, the U.S. economy now has about 1 million more jobs in occupations that rank in the top third of income and 800,000 more in the bottom third. The middle third, however, has yet to recover the jobs lost during the recession.
The monthly jobs report from the Department of Labor, upon which economists and policy makers place so much focus, provides a breakdown only of which industries are growing—but industries can have a mix of high- and low-wage workers. Health care, for example, has both low-wage home health aides and very highly paid specialists.
The Georgetown study undertook the complex task of tabulating job growth in 485 occupation groups, sorting them into the highest-, middle- and lowest-earning thirds, and measuring which category has seen the most growth.
The highest third of jobs have average earnings of at least $53,000 a year for full-time employees, and includes occupations like software developers, registered nurses, financial analysts and physicians. More than two-thirds of workers in these occupations have employer-provided health insurance, just under two-thirds have employer-provided retirement plans.
Meanwhile, many middle-wage occupations, those with average earnings between $32,000 and $53,000, have collapsed. Jobs in the middle include traditionally blue-collar occupations such as truck drivers, welders and auto mechanics. There are 900,000 fewer workers in these occupations than there were before the recession, the report finds.
“It used to be recessions were pauses and people went back to the same job distribution, but that’s not true anymore,” said Anthony Carnevale, an economist at Georgetown and the report’s lead author. “A lot of the jobs in the rearview mirror aren’t coming back.”
The report provides evidence that the middle of the U.S. labor market is hollowing out. Good jobs are primarily available to college graduates—of the 2.9 million higher-wage jobs added since 2010, the authors estimate that 2.8 million went to workers with at least a bachelor’s degree.
But middle-skilled jobs, which once provided a stable living for those with less education, have been replaced with low-wage work. Occupations at the growing bottom earn less than $32,000 on average. Only one-third have health insurance and only one-quarter have retirement benefits.
