unemployment

As Employment Numbers Improve, Part-time and Community College Enrollment Goes Down

/ The Old Crank

Ben Cassleman, writing for FiveThirtyEight, notes the drop in college enrollment among recent high-school graduates and argues that the decline is driven by the improving job market:

The drop in college attendance among recent high school graduates appears concentrated among groups most likely to be deciding between going to school and joining the labor force: Part-time and community college enrollments saw the sharpest decline.

UPDATE: 4/25/14: I took a look at the actual BLS report this morning, and I think it’s worth noting that the new data actually reverses the trend: the college enrollment rate for recent high school graduates in October 2013 (65.9%) was actually only very slightly down from October 2012 (66.2%). Cassleman acknowledges this in his article, but doesn’t think it’s that important since “enrollment rates remain above their pre-recession levels by most measures.” But it seems to me one could argue that the story in the most recent data is that the college enrollment decline over the last few years actually appears to have leveled off in 2013, even as employment prospects improved (at least a little bit) during the same period.

Here We Go Again

/ The Old Crank

I’ve written before about the inherent problem with instituting an adult education requirement in order to qualify for a government benefit (as have others), but in light of this recent Labour proposal in the U.K., it’s worth repeating the basic problem with this kind of proposal: it’s only fair, and only works as policy, if access to adult education is free and universal. There are other problems, potentially, with adding new requirements to benefits already earned (which is the case with unemployment benefits in the U.S.) but such proposals are fundamentally flawed at the start if a lack of available adult education opportunities make the education requirement impossible for beneficiaries to meet. If Labour is also proposing a massive new investment in adult education and training (and I mean truly massive), that’s one thing, but it’s not clear from this piece in The Telegraph  that such an investment would be accompanying the new education requirement in their proposal:

People receiving Jobseeker’s Allowance would be forced to sit a basic skills test within six weeks of signing on or face being stripped of their benefits, Labour will say, in a move designed to challenge the Tory’s popular welfare policies.

Anyone who does not show basic competency in literacy, numeracy and IT will be sent on training programmes.

Labour believes that around 300,000 people could be sent on courses every year. If they refuse, they will be denied welfare.

Maybe I’m completely uninformed, and the U.K. has 300,000 empty seats in their adult education and training programs. But if not, I’m not sure how this plan is supposed to work.

Note also that expanding a system to accommodate 300,000 more learners is not just a question of pumping more money into programs. To achieve anything close to universal access to adult education, you’d have to think through a strategy that puts in place some combination of physical program and/or on-line learning that is distributed in such a way that it is truly accessible by all, and you’d also have to figure out some way to ensure that individuals could carve out the time and distraction-free space to successfully engage in learning (all of which might require additional investments in broadband access, transportation, and childcare—just to name three examples).

Structural Unemployment

/ The Old Crank

(Updated Below)

A lot of economists have been making the case for a while (I’ve documented some of it on this blog), but like Krugman, I’ve noticed that more and more economists are falling off the structural unemployment bandwagon.

But it’s not just the pundits who are stubbornly resisting this growing consensus, but people involved in actual policy (in and out of government). For example, a lot of workforce investment policy arguments are predicated on the idea that high unemployment is largely structural. I get that many economists (and political progressives) are frustrated by this because they believe it discourages action on more critical areas of economic policy. But it’s worth noting that there are also a lot of good policy goals (like investing more in adult education) that are (in part) supported by the idea that continued high unemployment is mainly a structural problem. It’s a bit of a conundrum.

UPDATE 8/8/13: An additional thought on this. There really isn’t any reason why an argument for offering Americans the opportunity to upgrade their skills should be dependent on the idea that our high unemployment levels are structural. I think the problem only comes when you suggest that improving skills alone will solve the problem of high unemployment/good jobs. But to suggest that there aren’t real adult education or worker training needs, or good policy reasons behind trying to improve people’s education and skill attainment—that it’s all just a scam—is just as facile an argument.

Nuance on Skills

/ The Old Crank

When the New York Times publishes a scathing editorial against the whole notion of a skills gap, it alarms me, because so much of adult education and training advocacy has coalesced around this idea. It also alarms me because whatever the economic data tells us about the root causes of unemployment, it doesn’t take away from the fact that we still have a substantial number of people who are trying to improve their basic skills, enroll in job training programs, and/or acquire industry credentials. We wouldn’t have waiting lists for services if this wasn’t the case.

Many economists have been arguing for some time that the skills gap has not been a major cause of unemployment. But a case for investing in skills doesn’t need to be dependent on this argument. I’ve often cited an old blog post from Jared Bernstein as an example of a way to argue for skills that isn’t dependent on proof of a skills gap.

The Times piece suggests that skills gap arguments will be increasingly met with skepticism. It’s going to be important not to let that turn into an argument against investing in skills altogether.