Friday May 8, 2020 saw the release of the most disastrous monthly jobs report in American economic history. In this piece, the authors try to examine three issues for higher education institutions and students in New England. First, what is the magnitude of job losses in New England compared with the rest of the nation. Second, how have the…

Labor market impacts of COVID-19 shutdowns have been very unequal across industries, occupations and levels of educational attainment. Job losses in the month since the beginning of the shutdowns (between mid-March and mid-April) were concentrated in industries that primarily employ individuals with lower levels of education--industries such as…

Fear of the coronavirus has shut down all but essential businesses. Economists have projected that unemployment could rise as high as 20%, compared with 3.5% this past February 2020. A survey conducted in mid-April by Strada Education Network found 62% of Americans worried about losing their jobs and 34% believed they would need more education to…

Purpose: To examine the recent labor market indicators of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) versus non-STEM college graduates with disabilities. Method: The sample included bachelor of science (B.S.)/B.S.-level college graduates including 1,567,527 with a disability and 32,512,446 without a disability. Data were derived from…

This article looks at the phenomenon of mal-employment among college graduates in the United States, beginning with an overview of labor-market trends and the effects of the Great Recession on the job-market experiences of young people, including recent college graduates. It then defines "mal-employment" and examines its incidence over…

June 2009 is seen by many as the end of the Great Recession. Strong growth in GDP following massive monetary and fiscal responses to the collapse in housing and financial markets meant that the economy was on the mend. Yet a year later, 1.1 million "fewer" people are working, and the unemployment rate is stuck at 9.5%. Worse still, more than one…

Evidence about the role that "soft factors" like student engagement and school environment play in influencing whether high school students go on to enroll in college is hard to come by. Over the past two years, the Center for Labor Market Studies (CLMS) of Northeastern University, with support from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation…

The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce has engaged in a highly publicized campaign claiming that the nation will face a very substantial deficit of college graduates by 2018 if the American postsecondary system fails to rapidly expand the number of college degrees it awards each year. Indeed, the employment projections developed by…

The recent response by Anthony Carnevale et al. to the authors' analysis of the fundamental shortcomings associated with their predictions of widespread college labor shortages focuses on three areas. First, Anthony Carnevale et al. suggest that the authors are educational Luddites by noting in the title of their response that the authors believe…

The authors examine how the American economy has experienced sharp contractions in overall levels of output, income, and wealth resulting from the recent financial crisis, and how these losses have had an impact on the nation's labor market. The significance of these trends to American higher education is summarized in these terms: "Large labor…