Multimedia: Charts

Unemployed and Underemployed Workers by Education Level

Any replication of this chart should be credited to The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.

Unemployed and Underemployed Workers by Education Level

February 4, 2011

The traditional unemployment rate does not fully capture labor underutilization in our economy. In addition to the 14 million Americans officially counted as unemployed in 2010, there are over 11 million Americans who either want to work but have given up looking, or who are underemployed, as they are working part-time because full-time work is unavailable.  Adding these additional unemployed and underemployed Americans to the standard measure of unemployment shows a full 16 percent of the workforces as of January 2011 are unemployed or underemployed. (Source: Current Population Survey, Ages 16+, 12-month moving average.)

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Evolution of the “Job Gap” and Possible Scenarios for Growth

April 6, 2012 • Charts

The Hamilton Project tracks the monthly “job gap,” which is the number of jobs that need to be created in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while still absorbing the workers entering the labor force each month.

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Impacts of Training Program Earnings by Years After Training

November 30, 2011 • Charts

It is critical that worker training programs be rigorously evaluated so that scare training resources can be targeted toward the most effective programs.

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Federal Funding for DOL Training Programs, 1985-2011

November 30, 2011 • Charts

Federal spending on job training programs by the U.S. Department of Labor has gradually fallen since the 1980s, aside from a bump in 2009 from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

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Earnings Gains of Displaced Workers in Technical Fields versus Other Fields

November 30, 2011 • Charts

Retraining in technical fields provides higher returns for workers than retraining in non-technical classes.

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Earnings of Workers Who Lost Their Job in the Great Recession

November 4, 2011 • Charts

Recent research suggests that hardship for dislocated workers extends beyond periods of unemployment.  Once reemployed, workers typically earn significantly less than they did prior to job loss.

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Change in Family Earnings of Children, 1975-2010

October 7, 2011 • Charts

Over the last 35 years, the opportunity gap for children whose parents are at different ends of the earnings distribution has grown.  Children at the 90th percentile of the distribution of family earnings have experienced a 45 percent increase, while children at the 25th percentile have experienced a decline of over 20 percent.

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Impact of Incentive Programs on Student Achievement

September 27, 2011 • Charts

Students are more likely to respond to education incentives for certain inputs, such as reading books, than more general outputs, such as making good grades.

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Annual Earnings of Teachers and Non-Teachers

September 27, 2011 • Charts

Over the last 40 years, the salary gap between teachers and nonteachers has grown by over $10,000.

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Average Mathematics Test Scores for 17-Year-Old White and Black Students

September 27, 2011 • Charts

Investments in education have narrowed the black-white skill gap for much of the twentieth century, but has stagnated since the 1980s.

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Average Mathematics Test Scores for 15-Year-Olds, OECD Countries

September 27, 2011 • Charts

The United States scores below the OCED average in mathematics, despite spending $3,000 more per student than the OCED average.

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