As the cost of higher education has mounted, so has debate over how the added expense translates into actual jobs. It's become increasingly apparent that employers are asking for diplomas when hiring for jobs that don't really require them. And according to a new analysis, that trend is most prevalent in cities with highly educated populations — making them even harder to live in for people who never got a college degree.
The research comes from the Federal Reserve Banks of Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Cleveland, which wanted to find places where you could still make a decent living without sinking tens of thousands of dollars into more school.
To untangle the problem, researchers first determined a set of what they call "opportunity occupations," or jobs that pay more than the national median wage — adjusted for differences in the local cost of living — and typically don't require a four-year degree to do the work. Instead, they might just ask for an associate's degree or certificate from a local community college, which take much less time and money to complete. So that's jobs like computer support specialist, nurse, sales rep, secretary, maintenance worker, cop, and certain positions in manufacturing.
The story of such "middle skilled" jobs hasn't been good for the past few decades. The proportion of jobs that qualify as "opportunity occupations," the Philly Fed found, fell from 29.8 percent in 2005 to 27.4 percent in 2014. That's a feature of a phenomenon economists worry about: The "hollowing out" of the labor market, as both low-wage, low-skilled occupations (like retail and restaurants) and well-paid, highly skilled jobs (like software developers and financial analysts) expand.
With 70 percent of adults over age 25 lacking a bachelor's degree, that potentially leaves millions of people with few pathways to the middle class. And with modern data collection methods, we're able to understand something else that's working against them: a bias toward college grads, even for jobs that shouldn't require higher education to do well.
A company called Burning Glass Technologies has developed a way to scan online job ads to determine how many ask for a diploma, and found that the practice — which they call "upcredentialing" — has become quite prevalent. Employers sometimes use college success as a screening device in the face of mountains of applications, which can keep otherwise qualified people out of the running entirely.
[Read more: Why not having a college degree is a bigger barrier than it used to be]
To come up with their analysis, Philly Fed researchers combined Burning Glass's data with federal sources. Here are the areas that came out on top, indicating that they have a high proportion of relatively well-paying jobs accessible to people without college degrees:
- Louisville (32.1 percent of jobs in opportunity occupations)
- Birmingham, Ala. (31.3 percent)
- Toledo (30.8 percent)
- Springfield, Mass. (30.2 percent)
- St. Louis (30.1 percent)
Other metrics, such as those measuring home price appreciation and population growth, suggest not all those cities have been doing great in recent years. "Some of the characteristics associated with high opportunity occupation metros are more indicative of economic stagnation than dynamism," the authors write. Still, if you live there, you might have a better shot at a comfortable life.
In contrast, the metropolitan areas with the lowest percentage of "opportunity occupations" are those that we typically regard as healthy, with super-heated real estate markets and lots of tech and finance jobs: New York, Bridgeport/Stamford/Norwalk, Conn.; Washington, Los Angeles, and Miami. And a number of those, including Washington, came out worse than they would have otherwise because of their tendency to require B.A.s for jobs that usually don't ask for them.
So why is it that these cities are more particular with the people they hire as secretaries, IT managers, and salespeople? Well, it could be a couple things, says lead researcher Keith Wardrip.
"It could be that that type of work is more sophisticated and complex," Wardrip says, meaning that higher-tech industries in those cities could demand more of their support staff. "Or it could be that the metro area benefits from a more highly educated workforce, and employers can choose to require higher degrees."
Now, if you're looking for a job and don't have a diploma, don't write off those highly educated cities. Wardrip's analysis didn't assess job vacancies, just overall employment — it may be that the market for opportunity occupations is tighter in smaller cities than bigger ones. It also only reflects an area's share of employment that's made up by opportunity occupations, not the absolute number of jobs; big cities would probably top the rankings if that's what he looked at.
"A smaller percentage of 3 million jobs would still produce more employment," Wardrip says. He still thinks you might be better off in one of the places that came out well on his ranking, though. "I guess my reasoning is that in a larger economy, even though there are more jobs that qualify, you would still have more competition for those jobs."
Of course, few people move to promising cities in hopes of landing a job; online career sites make it possible to conduct a nationwide search and then choose your destination based on where you get hired. But the ease of applying over the internet is also partly what's driving employers to use college degrees as a filtering device — technology is a blessing and a curse.
Original article and pictures take www.washingtonpost.com site
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