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 its 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 worried about the implications. – SWL