Why a College Education Matters

A recent study released by the Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce starkly illustrates why getting at least some education after high school really, really matters.  Data from the study (https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/americas-divided-recovery/) shows that during the Great Recession, 7.4 million jobs for people with high school diplomas or less education were lost.  During the recovery from the Great Recession, some 11.6 million jobs were created but 11.5 million of these were for people who had at least some postgraduate education.  Only about 80,000 of the new jobs were for people with high school educations or less.

In other words, people with high school educations or less who lost their jobs during the Great Recession are probably still unemployed, unless they managed to get some postgraduate education after being laid off.  And they are likely to stay unemployed unless they advance their educational level or President-elect Trump creates a remarkable jobs program that somehow includes a very large number of low skills jobs with wages high enough to be acceptable to Americans. The latter would be a tough, tough challenge.

We are now in a time of policy flux, with the election of a President whose policy toward postgraduate education seems to be a work in progress at best.  If you're planning for the future, don't wait for the government to decide what it's going to do.  Find a way yourself to get some postgraduate education or training.  Sure, there are ways to make a good living without a college degree.  But electricians and plumbers need a fair amount of training after high school before they can get a license.  It's virtually impossible to attain a middle-class standard of living with just a high school diploma.  Investing in yourself is the most obvious way to step up above flipping hamburgers for a living.  The data shows this to be true.