Since 2000, the share of the population with a BA or higher has gone up 39%. But the share of the labor force with a BA or more has gone up 45%.
At the end of last year, 72% of those with college degrees were in the labor force. Only 57% of those with only high school diplomas were in the labor force.
Why would the share of the population with a college degree remain dead flat--even dropping a bit--from 2000 to 2008 and then rise steadily thereafter? You could try to spin a tale about young people choosing college over the HS degree job market in the wake of the Great Recession, but that doesn't sound very plausible to me and couldn't explain the sustained rise all the way to the present day. Perhaps there is a problem with the dataset?
The early 2000s were a real estate boom. For men, especially, it was easy to get a decent job right out of high school working in construction. You could get all the hours you wanted and the pay was solid. If you had special skills, you could rake it in. I bet an awful lot of young men decided to punt college and make good money in construction.
I got one interesting sign of this in my junk mail. It was a catalog for construction workers with aspirations. For example, they had work aprons and note pads clearly designed to exude a professional air. If you were a young guy with a couple of years experience trying to get a remodeling or subcontracting job, this was exactly what you wanted to wear. Construction-y enough so you could actually work in it, but business like enough to deal with the moneyed class you were trying to impress. I'm sorry I didn't keep the catalog.
When the boom went bust, our local community college was oversubscribed. They could only confer associate's degrees, but the demand for new careers and education was palpable. The parking lot and surrounding streets were jammed.
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Wow!!! I must have been a very rare worker. Got my masters in mechanical engineering in 1968.
Data like this needs to be controlled for age. Kevin is great at inflation adjusting. But because the share of the population with a college degree is not consistent across age cohorts, you can't really determine much from this data. Baby boomers are less likely to have college degrees, and more likely to be retired than younger people. So it makes sense that the share of the workforce with a college would be higher than the share of the population.
"Only 57% of those with only high school diplomas were in the labor force."
And there you have it folks; the Bootstrap Party® attracts the very people who have no straps with which to boot themselves up.
Con-men need suckers.
This is a statistical artifact. People over 75 or so are much less likely to be in the workforce than you ger folks. People over 75, especially women, are also much less likely to have college degrees than younger folks, since mnay fewer people went to college when they were 18. That's the explanation.