According to employment data released last week, Washtenaw County’s unemployment rate remained constant at 3.5%. That’s slightly better than the statewide unemployment rate of 4.3% and mirrors the national unemployment rate. While that’s good news for Washtenaw County, it may not be good news for WCC.
People have little incentive to enroll in post-secondary classes when unemployment is low. Low unemployment means that people with only a high school diploma can move around in the job market. Workers aren’t “stuck” in jobs they don’t like, are physically demanding, or that don’t pay a living wage.
It’s not hard to see this situation continuing for a long time. You can trace the large number of job openings to the also-large number of Baby Boomers who are leaving the workforce daily. On average, 10,000 Baby Boomers retire every day. We’re only about half-way through retiring the Baby Boomer generation.
There’s no direct correlation; for the most part, Boomers aren’t leaving entry level positions. But when they vacate a position, other people in their workplace or industry move up to fill the open jobs. That process repeats at successively lower wage tiers until the open positions have collected at the bottom of the pay scale. We’re seeing that now. Employers are having the most difficulty filling entry level positions.
The common misconception surrounding these open jobs is that “no one wants to work anymore.” Except that youth unemployment is the lowest it’s been since 1953. Among 16-24 year olds, just 7.5% of them would rather be working. The number of young adults who are neither in the workforce nor enrolled in post-secondary classes is shrinking. Has also shrunk. That means all those people who “don’t want to work anymore” don’t actually exist.
Low unemployment rate will depress enrollment long-term
At 3.5% unemployment, we (as a county and a country) are nominally at “full employment.” In February, there were 9.5M job vacancies and 160.9M workers on someone’s payroll. If every single unemployed person took one of the 9.5M vacant jobs, we’d still have more than 5.5M more open jobs than we have workers to fill them.
Under those circumstances, community colleges are going to have to come up with some very compelling arguments to get people to enroll in classes. And I’m not just talking about recent high school graduates. At WCC, people over the age of 25 comprise a very large segment of the student body. These students have already been in the workforce. They may have spouses and children, (and debt obligations) that make it very difficult to take a job that doesn’t pay substantially more than they already earn.
To get enrollment numbers up, community colleges don’t need to figure out how to make their programs more affordable. Instead, they need to figure out how to make their degrees worth more in the labor market.
Photo Credit: somenoise , via Flickr
