Good Jobs That Pay Without a BA

Posted by Georgetown University on November 27, 2017

New Data About “Good Jobs”

“Good Jobs That Pay Without a BA,” released by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, gives a state by state snapshot of “good jobs” – those with median earnings of $55,000 – which make up about a quarter of the labor market and are increasingly found in the skilled-services industry instead of manufacturing. The labor market has added 4 million good jobs in skilled-services, in areas such as healthcare and financial services, since 1991.

Lest you think the report title means that postsecondary education isn’t needed, read on. “Education matters. More and more, good jobs are going to workers with bachelor’s degrees, who now hold 55 percent of all good jobs,” write authors Anthony P. Carnevale, Jeff Strohl, Ban Cheah, and Neil Ridley. “More associate’s degree holders are getting good jobs, while the number of these jobs held by workers with a high school diploma or less are in decline.”

To put the workforce in perspective, of the 123 million employed workers aged 25 to 64, 75 million do not have a BA. Of these, 30 million workers have good jobs that pay without a BA. The report further notes that the slow national growth rate masks the uneven spread of good jobs for workers without BAs across the country, confirming what we already know: that labor markets are hyper-local. Check out your state results here.

https://goodjobsdata.org/wp-content/uploads/Good-Jobs-States.pdf