Judging the Worth of a High School Diploma

 From Michael Hicks' New labor market data is eye opening but under used, I cherry-picked what is relevant to Indiana:

I often hear from elected leaders that there are 200,000 unfilled jobs in Indiana, and most of them were for people with high school diplomas or less education. This data comes from help wanted ads, but many firms maintain help wanted ads constantly, particularly in high turnover occupations such as retail, truck drivers, and nursing assistants.

In fact, there is no correlation between raw help wanted ads and labor demand. For example, in April 2020, the first full month of the pandemic, Indiana had 167,000 open help wanted ads. That month we actually lost 463,000 jobs. In the following month, as employment leaped back by 120,000 jobs, help wanted ads dropped to only 126,000. Turnover, not growing demand, drives almost all help wanted ads.

For example, from 1998 to 2022, job turnover among adults in Indiana suggested that firms should have advertised about 191,000 jobs each month. But, over that same period, the state only added 228,000 total jobs among adults aged 25 and older. That is about 250 help wanted ads per net new job created over the past 25 years.

But this one really got me going:

For example if you looked at help wanted ads, you’d think there was high demand for high school graduates in Indiana, and relatively low demand for college graduates. But, from 1998 to 2022 total job growth for people who’d been to college numbered over 190,000, but for high school total job creation was -41,000. Over that time the supply of high school graduates has grown much faster than the supply of college grads.

I have one niece who attended a college, all the others thought they had better options. My opinion was ignored, now the numbers support my view that having only a high school diploma means you are at the low end of the employment pool where it is very crowded.

sch 9:33 AM