Men in their prime working years without college educations were working less and earning less in 2013 than they did in 1990, according to a new analysis of the U.S. labor market with some worrying findings.
The share of men with only high school degrees aged 30-45 working full-time year-round fell from 76 percent in 1990 to 68 percent in 2013, the Hamilton Project found in a report published Monday afternoon.
The Hamilton Project, a non-partisan think tank in Washington, also found that the median earnings for men without a college diploma dropped by more than 13 percent over the same time, from $47,100 to $40,700, adjusted for inflation.
The authors of the analysis, Melissa Kearney, Brad Hershbein and Elisa Jácomek, write that workers without bachelor’s degrees “have been moving away from traditional, blue-collar, middle-paying jobs — such as truck drivers, construction laborers and factory workers — to lower-paying service jobs.”
They find that college graduates, both men and women, have experienced stable or increasing employment rates.
While women lacking college degrees were slightly less likely to work full-time year-round in 2013 than in 1990, women with college or graduate degrees have seen significant improvements in their employment records. In 2013, women with advanced degrees were 1.5 times more likely to be working year-round than women with no college degrees.
The data used in the Hamilton Project’s analysis were taken from the 1990 Census and the 2013 American Community Survey. The earnings numbers were corrected for inflation using a measure of inflation regarded by researchers as more accurate than the Consumer Price Index for measuring living standard changes.
