‘Good’ jobs for non- college grads lagging

CLEVELAND — Ohio is not among the states that have added good-paying bluecollar jobs for people without a bachelor’s degree, according to a new report.

There are 30 million “good” jobs for those with less than a bachelor’s degree, and 34 states have added such jobs between 1991 and 2015, according to an analysis by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce in partnership with JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Good jobs for workers without bachelor’s degrees are increasingly concentrated in skilled services industries

such as health and financial services, rather than traditional blue-collar industries, according to “Good Jobs That Pay Without a BA: A Stateby-State Analysis.”

The report, released Monday, examines gains and losses of these “good jobs” by industry and education across all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

“There are millions of good jobs in our economy for workers who have graduated from high school and completed some postsecondary education or training, Chauncy Lennon, head of workforce initiatives at JPMorgan Chase, said in a statement.

“We need to connect this workforce with these opportunities, and a good place to start is with the data that shows where these jobs are.”

Many high-paying jobs require an associate’s degree, apprenticeship or moderate- or long-term training, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Thirty percent of associate’s degree holders make more than the average bachelor’s degree holder, reports have said. Many careers that provide a salary of about $50,000 or more a year and require a two-year degree are in health care, technology and skilled trades.

The report defined a good job as $35,000 ($17 per hour for a full-time job) as the minimum earnings for those under age 45 and $45,000 ($22 per hour for a full-time job) for workers age 45 and older. In 2015, these good jobs had median earnings of $55,000 per year.

States with the most significant blue-collar losses were New York,

Pennsylvania, California, Ohio, and Illinois.

The report offered these insights about Ohio:

67 percent of workers do not have a bachelor’s degree, compared with the national average of 61 percent. About 35 percent of non-degreed workers have a good job, below the national average of 40 percent.

There were 1.14 million good jobs for workers lacking a bachelor’s degree in 2015, compared with 1.32 million in 1991.

Losses of good jobs in blue-collar industries, such as manufacturing, greatly outweighed gains in skilledservices industries, such as health and financial services.

While there have been large job losses in blue-collar industries, many good jobs for non-degreed workers still exist in those industries. More than a quarter — 27 percent — of good jobs for non-degreed workers can be found in manufacturing, above the national average of 16 percent.

232,900 good jobs for non-degreed workers in manufacturing were lost between 1991 and 2015, third-highest in the country.

Good jobs in skilledservices industries have expanded by 13 percent, well below the national average of 43 percent during that same time period.

The Georgetown center and JPMorgan said they created the project to investigate the impact that overarching structural economic change has had and is having on workers who do not get a bachelor’s degree.

They have created an interactive website, GoodJobsData.org, that documents the concentration of good jobs, nationally, at the state level, by industry and occupation, and by wage.