Rural America has long been perceived as "left behind" by policies that leave it struggling while benefiting bustling urban cities and suburbs. That narrative holds some truth: rural America has a declining population, along with lower educational attainment and lower workforce participation than urban America. But while rural America…

Over the past century, the United States workforce has undergone a massive structural shift. Technological change has moved the economy toward skilled labor and away from unskilled labor--a phenomenon known as skill-biased technical change. This structural shift has increased the relative demand for educated and skilled labor, leading to…

This appendix documents the methodology used by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce to project educational demand within the US economy. The methodology produces forecasts using data from two private analytics companies. The authors use occupational forecasts provided by Lightcast that are calibrated to total employment…

The staggering highs and lows of the recent US economy and their effect on the labor force has been deeply unsettling. The US has come through the COVID-19 recession, the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, followed by the quickest recovery ever. One trend in the workforce has remained unaltered throughout this historic change:…

This report projects education requirements linked to forecasted job growth for all 50 states and the District of Columbia from 2021 through 2031. It complements a larger national report that projects education demand by occupation and industry for the same period. The national report finds that by 2031, 72 percent of all jobs nationally will…

In the post-World War II period, workers with a high school diploma or less were able to attain jobs with middle-class wages in American industry. Good jobs were available in manufacturing and other blue-collar industries that employed large numbers of high school-educated workers. But as automation, globalization, and related phenomena have led…

The Great Recession that began in December 2007 laid bare many of the shortcomings of the American workforce, especially the lack of workers with postsecondary education. A large majority of jobs lost in the recession and in the recovery had been held by workers with a high school diploma or less. The only real gains made during the still…

The rising cost of college education and high unemployment levels among recent college graduates are raising the question "Is college worth its cost?" in the minds of many Americans. A recent study published by the Associated Press found that one out of every two recent college graduates is jobless or underemployed, suggesting maybe college isn't…

This report is the successor to "Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education Demand through 2018," in which researchers examined the connections between educational attainment and educational demand in the labor market. In this report, the authors update the jobs projected to be available through 2020, using a macro-micro modeling…

For recent high school graduates, life is tough. In the past year, one in four young high school graduates was unemployed and over half were underemployed. In the past decade, recent high school graduates' wages have fallen by 12 percent to just $19,400 annually in 2011, below the poverty threshold for a family of four. The downward plight of high…

The recession that began in December of 2007 is already 30 months old, but the U.S. economy will not recover its pre-recession employment levels for at least another two years. From there, it will take an additional three years to make up for lost growth and create a job market strong enough to employ both the casualties of the recession and the…