Still think that college degree doesn’t matter?

The monthly unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is out today and the findings are largely  unsurprising–the unemployment rate is largely unchanged and those with increasing levels of postsecondary education are much less likely to be unemployed. For example, the unemployment rate for someone with a bachelor’s degree is 3.8%; for a high school graduate who never went to college, it is 7.4 percent. But if anything this is dramatically understating the very different labor market individuals with some college are facing compared to those who don’t. Just consider this chart:

Simply put, 99 percent of the increase in employed persons seen in the last year was for individuals who had attended at least some college (this removes the negative change in employment for high school grads with no college to not produce a number above 100 percent). Among those who didn’t go to college, we actually lost 284,000 employed persons from May of 2012 to May of 2013. Within the college-going categories, about 60 percent of the increase went to those with a bachelor’s degree and 40 percent to those with an associate’s degree. 

In fact, the only thing holding the unemployment rate down for the less educated categories is that the number of people looking for work in these categories* has declined:

As the data show, jobs are slowly coming back. But basically only fo those with at least some college education.

(Hat tip to David Leonhardt of the New York Times, who I saw tweet this idea about a jobs report a year or so ago.)

* Individuals with a bachelor’s degree are the largest group in the civilian labor force at just over 49 million people. Some college or an associate degree represents about 37 million people; high school graduates with no college is 36 million; and high school dropouts is 11 million.