America Works

Here's a statistic you may have missed in yesterday's monthly employment report from the Department Of Labor: the jobless rate dropped for people with a bachelor's degree to 3.7% in January from 3.9% in December (two years ago, the number was above 5%).

Along with increased housing starts and other indicators, that's a great sign of an improving economy. In what other element of American life do we have such a high success percentage?

We regularly hear scaremonger media reports about how tough the market is for recent college graduates (has it ever been easy to find a job right out of school?), but I find it impressive that more than 96% of the people who earned a college degree are now earning a paycheck. It may not be exactly the job they want, it may not pay them as much as they like, it may not be the job they'll hold five years from now, but they're working. And a portion of that other 3.7% might not be employed because they're still in grad school or law school or medical school.

I'm just asking for a little media perspective, instead of the bland, only-the-top-line-of-the-fact-sheet repeating of the overall unemployment statistics.

In case you're interested, the unemployment rate for those with no high school diploma is around 12%. That may seem like a lot, but consider what it means -- 88% of the people who dropped out of school somewhere along the way still managed to find a job.

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