The old college (job) try

Working grads dip

THE job market is doing great. That’s what we found out again last Friday in the monthly employment report.

So why does it look as if college graduates aren’t benefiting from that trend?

Some of the raw data from last Friday’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report for July might make parents’ hands shake a bit when they are writing that tuition check.

According to the government’s unadjusted data, there were 56,771,000 Americans at least 25 years old in the workforce in July who had finished college — compared with 57,260,000 this past February.

That’s a drop of 489,000 jobs for America’s most educated.

Those with slightly less education aren’t doing so great either.

From the same set of BLS data — Table A-4 from Friday’s report — the number of people working who had some college or an associate degree — fell to 37,533,000, compared with 37,648,000 in February.

That’s a drop of 115,000 people.

This could be nothing more than a change in demographics — namely, educated oldtimers retiring at a faster pace than college-educated young people are entering the workforce.

It could be — but other government surveys have shown that people aren’t retiring in as heavy numbers as we might expect.

Now, I know that the US unemployment rate, at 3.9 percent for July, is at multiyear lows, and there have been reports about how the job mar- ket for recent grads is rather robust.

Plus, if you’ve been reading my column for any length of time, you know that I don’t trust government statistics, especially the ones that are gathered by going door to door or by phone and asking people questions they’d rather not answer.

But those are the unchanged, not seasonally adjusted figures that the government came up with.

There are a lot fewer college grads in the workforce this summer than there were earlier in the year.

What’s going on with people with college degrees is even more confusing if you look at what happened between January and February.

In February, there was an increase of 1.375 million of these educated workers compared with January levels.

But that was the high point for 2018. Since reaching 57,260,000 workers for this group in February, the numbers have dropped steadily and settled around where they are today.

Who is getting all the jobs? This will kill the parents writing those tuition checks, but the winners are: “high school graduates, no college, 25 years and over.”

There were 376,000 more of these no college just high school workers in July than in February; 973,000 more in July than in January.

If the government surveys are accurate — and, again, I’m not saying I trust them — that would explain why hourly earnings are up only 2.7 percent over the past 12 months.

That increase barely keeps up with 2 percent annual inflation.

Companies are filling lowerpaying jobs with workers who probably aren’t expecting a lot.