Pay gap between college grads and everyone else at a record

WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans with no more than a high school degree have fallen so far behind college graduates in their economic lives that the earnings gap between college grads and everyone else has reached its widest point on record.

Since the Great Recession ended in 2009, college-educated workers have captured most of the new jobs and enjoyed pay gains.

"The post-Great Recession economy has divided the country along a fault line demarcated by college education," Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce, said in a report last year.

The number of employed college grads has risen 21 percent since the recession began in December 2007, while the number of employed people with only a high school degree has dropped nearly 8 percent.

Long after the recession ended, many young college graduates struggled to find well-paying jobs in a slowly recovering economy, and stories about graduates working as coffee shop baristas abounded.

[...] four in every 10 college students drop out before graduating — often with debt loads they will struggle to repay without a degree.

Rather, labor economists say, many high school grads would benefit from a more comprehensive approach to obtaining skills, especially involving technology, that are increasingly in demand.

Public employee unions, which often represent teachers and others with college educations, have generally maintained staying power while large industrial unions have deteriorated.

College grads are more likely than high school-only graduates to contribute to a 401(k)-style retirement plan , according to research by Christopher Tamborini of the Social Security Administration and Changhwan Kim, a sociology professor at the University of Kansas.

College graduates are more likely to move to find work than high-school-only workers are, says Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

What Holzer calls the "new middle" includes such health care jobs as X-ray technicians and phlebotomists, as well as computer-controlled manufacturing and some office occupations, like paralegals.

Labor experts say the U.S. educational system is failing to help young people acquire such skills.

If they know where to look, high school graduates can choose from among numerous options for vocational skills training — from two-year programs to online courses to for-profit schools.

Joseph Fuller, a professor at Harvard Business School, says counselors increasingly focus on things like substance abuse, discipline, and standardized testing, rather than on career advice.

The construction industry had offered a lifeline to many high-school educated workers, particularly men, during the housing boom in the 2000s.

Yet construction now employs 840,000 fewer people than it did nine years ago.

Since the recession, the fastest-growing industry for high school-only grads has been a mostly low-paying sector that includes restaurants, hotels, and amusement parks, according to Georgetown's analysis.