College Education Crucial for Future Employment – A Georgetown Study

The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce is releasing a report this week that looks at projections for jobs and their educational requirements through 2018. Utilizing their own research, a large personnel recruitment company (CPS) and U.S. Department of Labor statistics, they worked up a series of comparisons that illustrate the need for a college degree in bright neon colors.

Shifts in the Job Market

The percentage of jobs requiring post-secondary education is a primary example. The percentage of the workforce requiring some college or above grew from 28% in 1973 to 59% in 2007 and is expected to increase to 62% by 2018. Nine years from now, nearly two thirds of the jobs in the United States will not be available to high school graduates due to lack of educational credentials. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution article on this story,

Many of the jobs that disappeared during the current recession just aren’t coming back. Manufacturing currently represents about a quarter of the gross national product (GNP); America’s years as a smokestack industrial power are over. Jobs will always be available for skilled construction workers, but even those require apprenticeship and classroom hours devoted to a vocational plumbing school or electrician school.

More Jobs than Graduates

The upside of this report for those in the workforce considering an online degree or a return to college part time is that unless the nation increases output from postsecondary institutions, the demand for college talent will exceed its supply. By 2018 there will be thirty million replacement or new jobs to be filled that will require college education. With our current rate of college graduations continuing that means the demand for college graduates in the workplace will exceed the supply.

Many of these jobs that are coming into prominence didn’t even exist twenty years ago. The Internet became a commercial marketplace beginning in about 1990; today a professional with an e-commerce business degree is in high demand. Executing online sales strategies falls to the graduate holding a marketing degree with concentration on the Internet marketplace.

The study goes on to illustrate the current unemployment rate broken out by educational level. High school dropouts have three times the unemployment level (15%) as compared to graduates with bachelor’s degrees (4.9%). High school graduates do better, but not a lot better. If you’re considering a change in career, do it with a college degree or diploma in hand.

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