100 Years of 100 Things: Non-College Employment

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. It's thing number 28. 100 Years of Making a Living Without a College Degree. Did it used to be easier to be middle-class and non-college-educated? Did our country allow a mismatch to develop between education goals and workforce opportunities as the types of jobs available changed over the last 100 years? Did we price too many people out of going to college while not providing alternatives for developing financially rewarding skills?

Is there a bias today against hiring workers without bachelor's degrees who could actually do the job? We'll look at 100 Years of Making a Living Without a College Degree and ask what families, educators, and employers should do now and policymakers, too. This is an election year issue, with non-college-educated Americans being so many of the swing voters in the swing states and the mismatch between their incomes and their expenses being such a top concern for them. We'll bring on two guests in just a minute and invite your oral history calls about your non-college-educated parents and grandparents and about yourself.

Let me walk you briefly through a timeline of the jobs that Americans have had that I think you'll find very interesting. This is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1900, about 38% of the US labor force worked on farms, 38%. By the end of the century, that figure was less than 3%. In 1900, the percent who worked in goods-producing industries such as mining, construction, and oil manufacturing was 31%. By the end of the century, it was down to 19%. This is the decline in manufacturing jobs that everyone's debating today.

A closer look at just that sector from the Pew Research Center says manufacturing jobs peaked in the US in 1953 when about a third of American workers were in manufacturing. Today, it's only around 9%. These main sectors where the percentage of jobs has tanked, agriculture and manufacturing, they declined from close to 70% of all jobs to only around 12%. These were basically all no-college-needed jobs. What took their place? All kinds of professional and service sector jobs, obviously. What the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls service sector jobs soared to practically 80% of all employment by the year 2000.

Many of those jobs do not require higher education, but many, many do. Did education keep up? The Bureau of Labor Statistics says back in 1910, less than 3% of Americans had graduated from a school of higher learning, as they call it, less than 3%. By 1999, the end of the decade, the figure was 25%. Today, it's closer to 40% of adults aged 25 and over having bachelor's degrees. That's statistic, according to the Pew Research Center, but that still means the majority of American adults do not have bachelor's degrees, while only those 12% work in manufacturing or agriculture anymore.

There are other types of non-college jobs, of course, but that's a starting point for the vast changes in American jobs and education levels over the last 100-plus years and the questions they raise about training and opportunity. This is actually the first of 10 segments on our show that we'll be doing with a Gates Foundation grant focused on workforce solutions to improve economic mobility for people experiencing poverty.

With us now are Justin Heck, research director for the group called Opportunity@Work. His bio page says he uses data to develop a better understanding of how workers currently navigate the labor market and to identify ways to improve economic mobility and outcomes for all and Annelies Goger, an economic geographer at the Brookings Institution whose bio says she focuses on developing innovative policy solutions to address rising inequality. For example, she wrote an article for Brookings a few months ago called Proposed Labor Department Rules Won't Solve the Nation's Apprenticeship Awareness Problem.

Annelies and Justin, thanks for joining our 100 Years of 100 Things series on 100 Years of Making a Living Without a College Degree, and welcome to WNYC.

Annelies Goger: Thank you. It's wonderful to be here.

Justin Heck: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, as we do in these 100-year segments, we're inviting your oral history calls 212-433 WNYC. In this case, I wonder who has a story about your non-college-educated parents or grandparents or great-grandparents. Whether they made what you would call a middle-class living or a story about yourself as someone without a bachelor's degree. Whether the right kinds of opportunities exist today for you, either in well-paying jobs that you believe you're qualified for. The opportunity to get a college degree at a cost that's worth the price, or if other kinds of skills training are out there and available, what do you need to become a so-called star?

Have you heard that acronym yet? Star? A person skilled through alternative routes. 212-433 WNYC 433-9692. Call or text again any of those things. Who has a story about your non-college-educated parents or grandparents or great-grandparents, and whether they made what you would call a middle-class living or a story about yourself as someone without a bachelor's degree, and whether the right kinds of opportunities exist today for you? You're always welcome, anyone is welcome to ask a question of our guests. 212-433 WNYC. Call or text. Annelies, I'm curious what you were thinking, just an open mic here, as I was walking through that timeline.

This is one reason that we're doing a 100-year history series. We often take the conditions of modern life for granted, but with a 100-year lens, there have been such foundational changes in the American experience and the human experience, going from nearly 70% of all jobs on farms or in manufacturing down to around 12%, if all those numbers are cited are true, or going from 3% having a college degree at the turn of the last century to nearly 40%. I'm curious for each of you, Annelies, first, what might be one thing you were thinking, hearing those numbers about the fundamental difference between society 100 years ago in our society today?

Annelies Goger: I think the real point is that we often take for granted when you have a child, oh, I'm going to send my child to college. Like you said, actually, a majority of Americans don't succeed in completing college. The challenge there is that the systems that we have are really-- the systems we've inherited from the previous generation are not really well matched to the current economy. What I like to call it is, it's really a separate and unequal system we have. It's, I'd say three dimensions of that. One is funding, the level of funding for college-going people, and the level of funding for job training programs.

Accreditation, the ability to, start one program and then continue on. We give credit to people when they go to a bachelor's program, as they go along, we don't give credit to people. We have what we call non-degree, non-credit certificates, and whatnot. It's hard to progress that way when you can't get credit. There's that. Then finally, on a cultural level, just not valuing the education and learning that happens in the workplace. I would really like to see, as we look to the future, how do we start to recognize the skills that people already have, as you said, the STARS.

I think this is a good point for Justin to pick up. To really see that when you learning in the workplace, when you're doing things through experience, that's also learning. How do we give people credit for that and give them ways to advance and not have to start over when they want to switch careers or they have to switch careers?

Brian Lehrer: Justin, same question. Take the handoff that Annelies was giving you, or reflect on anything going through your mind listening to that 100-year stat crawl.

Justin Heck: I think the most important thing to highlight is that today, more than half of our workforce are skilled through alternative routes to a bachelor's degree. That is the common experience, and that's been historically true. To Annalise's point, it's easy to feel like our current moment has been the moment we've been in for a long time. Even if we look back to early 1910s, there was a moment when having a high school diploma wasn't the standard.

We've slowly added these new standard expectations, which is an incredible way for us to progress as a society, but we've also started to lean on degree completion as a way of determining the depth and breadth of someone's skills and forgetting the lifelong learning that often happens after that moment. College is such a critical pathway to gain skills in this country and to help workers move into higher-wage work. It's not the only one. There are lots of examples, and Annalise already pointed to a handful of ways in which workers continue to move into higher-wage work.

That good wage work, I think the default example we think of is in manufacturing, but many middle-wage roles have been historically open to STARS. Roles as supervisors, support specialists, sales representatives, secretaries, administrative assistants, roles that are in the professional industries that STARS have filled with great success over the past handful of decades. Today, they're now often considered hard-to-fill roles because employers prefer candidates who are college graduates. Even when workers have relevant experience, they're often excluded from consideration.

Brian Lehrer: On how foundational the changes have been, I could even just keep going from that Bureau of Labor Statistics page. In 1900, US life expectancy at birth was just 47 years old. Now it's in the upper seventies. In 1900, 80% of American children had a working father outside the home and a stay-at-home mother, 80%. By the year 2000, that dropped from 80% to less than 1/4 of kids. Of course, it's even less than that today. In 1900, only 5% of us factories used electricity. What? Imagine that. Considering how we think of what happens inside any workplace today, how much we take electricity for granted as a given. Maybe especially manufacturing with a lot of heavy machinery.

In 1900, only 5% of factories used electricity. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us life has changed so much in so many ways. Let's get our first oral history caller in here. Jane in White Plains, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jane.

Jane: Hi. I think about this all the time, what's happened to the middle-class. My grandfather was an immigrant who ended up being a canned fish salesman. Yet on that one salary, he was able to let my grandmother go to Florida for a month, I think, and then the Jersey shore for a month had a nice apartment in the North Bronx. Certainly don't see that happening to somebody who would have that job today.

Brian Lehrer: Jane, thank you very much. Annelies, let me use that as a jumping-off point to get to the central question. Was it easier to make what we would consider a middle-class living 100 years ago without a college degree? Maybe you need to define middle-class and how that concept has developed over time to answer that question, but where would you begin?

Annelies Goger: I think the answer I would have is yes and no because I think the heyday that we're really thinking about when we say middle class is the post-war period in the United States where we had that era of mass manufacturing. That was the baby boom generation's moment. That's when college for all and expansion of higher ed happened. I think what's important to keep in mind, though, is that even during that period, there were a lot of groups that were excluded from that. We should be careful about overly romanticizing that because a lot of women were excluded, for example, from the workforce, as you just referred to, a lot of people of color or farm workers, domestic workers.

I think what we need to think about now is, that's really the era where we started to really think about wage employment as this central feature of wealth generation. I think what we're also seeing now is that wealth generation has somewhat shifted away from wage employment alone and towards other forms of wealth generation, including the financialization of the economy. You see billionaires that aren't earning their wealth through wages, for example, but also through technological innovation. Who gets to capture those gains? A lot of the innovation funding that we invest as a government, and even in the post-war era, that's how Silicon Valley came about.

It's through public investments and defense. Yet the gains that are captured have come often largely through private gains, through the people that invented different technologies. I think there's a question here that we should be thinking about how we need to rethink-- if we're talking about inequality and how wealth gets generated, it's not just anymore through wages. We have to think about the distribution of wealth when it comes to those bigger questions.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Here's another oral history caller. Irving in Highland Park, who I think has a story that might be kind of up that alley. Irving, you're on WNYC. Hello?

Irving: Hi. My dad is from the Bronx, and his dad died in 1929 and left my grandmother with six kids. He was 13 or 14 years old and he dropped out of high school when he was 16 because he had to work for the family and make money. He worked in jobs that weren't-- just starting to get union. One time he was at a union meeting, and he stood up for his friend, and he heard, who's this guy Kaufman? It turned out a hitman went to his house to kill him because he was going, an anti-union person. They felt so bad for him because he had all these hungry kids at home, they didn't kill him.

He eventually worked in the printing business, and he started Kate poster and a silk screen printing business with his friend, who he defended. They had a 50-year career and we moved to Rockland county. We had a suburban lifestyle. I became a doctor. My brother became a lawyer, and my sister is a clinical psychologist. I have four kids now, and my oldest has a high school education. He's getting extra training through Job Corps. He lost a job. He has a new job. My second oldest is a high school, is a college grad. He does IT. My third kid is [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump in, and I need to move on in a second for time, but is there anything from your father's experience, as you were describing it, starting a business, that silk screening business without a college degree that informs anything about how you look at your one kid who's trying to make it without a college degree?

Irving: He had to have a lot of hustle, and he stole signs from the subway and then used it as examples of his printing. He taught us hard work and creativity was the way to go. My child, with the high school education, is getting some training and some warehouse management right now, and he's doing okay. His wife also doesn't have a college degree, but she's working in the healthcare industry, so they're making ends meet.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Irving. Thank you very much. Justin, I've seen stats, and he says they're making ends meet without the college degree, which doesn't say thriving. It says making ends meet. I've seen stats that today, people with bachelor's degrees make, on average, twice as much income as people with only a high school diploma. That's a gap that it took 100 years to develop, I imagine because almost no one went to college 100 years ago. Was that gap inevitable, giving the changing technology of the last century?

Justin Heck: I wouldn't say that the gap was inevitable. I think so many features that we see in the labor market today feel like gravity. It feels like we had to end up here, and instead, they're usually the result of a lot of individual and institutional choices. I think when we think about the bachelor's degree, the roles that folks move into that first come to mind are often teachers and doctors, and nurses. Roles where you're learning a very specific skill, going into a very specific role, but in today's economy, that's often not the case. Folks can get a bachelor's degree and go do all kinds of things that are very unrelated to the curriculum that they studied.

Workers with bachelor's degrees have this latitude where employers are willing to take risks on them and invest in them and train them in ways that are often not offered to STARS. Historically, STARS were able to make a lot of these same types of transitions, and instead, there's this hesitation from employers to, is this a riskier hire? Even as they accept a lot of the risks that come with all hires. Every hire is a risky hire at its core.

Brian Lehrer: That gets us to one of the contemporary issues. For people who are just tuning in that acronym, STARS refers to people with skills training through alternative routes who are left out of the workforce too often. I think we have a text message that's very relevant to this as an example, although this person does have a college degree. Listener writes, I'm a legal secretary. It pays well. Virtually all big law firms require a college degree to be a legal secretary. I have a degree in theater absurdly unrelated to my job. The person writes. Then they ask, how do employers live with themselves maintaining such steep but stupid barriers?

Justin, that's one of your main focuses at your group, Opportunity@Work. Is trying to work on, I guess you'd call it a movement to get a lot of employers to drop college degree requirements for jobs that don't actually require a college degree?

Justin Heck: That's right. Employers in general want to find the talent that they're looking for. In part due to shifts that happened in the '80s and '90s where we started using human resource information system software, it just became a lot easier to look at more talent and screen talent. In general, I would say employers are on autopilot when it comes to hiring based on degree requirements. This has become a default posture rather than a more thorough investigation of what are the skills I'm looking for for this role, and how can I find those skills wherever they were developed.

Brian Lehrer: Annalise, this is in your wheelhouse, too, right?

Annelies Goger: Yes, and I think that the other side of that coin, one side of the coin is employers shouldn't only rely on college degrees to try to find a matching candidate. If they continue to do that, they'll probably be at a disadvantage because they're missing a huge pool of workers that don't have degrees but have a lot of experience that may be relevant. Another side of the coin, though, is building the institutions. We need to recognize the skills that people have. Things like degreed apprenticeships.

You might even start in high school, earn credit towards a degree, get an applied degree. In many countries, there are entire university systems where someone spends part of their time on the job and part of their time in the classroom. I think we need to start to value that learning that happens in the workplace because as we started to talk about a little bit earlier, innovation comes from people. That intersection of solving a problem in a particular industry and applying new technologies you might theoretically learn about in a classroom. I think that that's a huge gap in our country that's pretty unique to our country.

A lot of other advanced nations put a lot more effort into that space where people are really learning as they go and trying to innovate in that area. I think it's going to hold us back from innovation if we don't start doing that more systematically. Giving people actual degrees for doing that kind of learning could be one way to do that from the other side of the coin of just let's relax all degree requirements.

Brian Lehrer: I think we have a caller, actually, who's got a story about one of those other countries that do things differently and maybe better in this respect. Here's Jean David in Manhattan, but I think originally from France. Is that right John David? Hi, you're on WNYC.

Jean David: Good morning, Brian. Yes, I'm originally from France, and trade school in France is everywhere. After middle of school, they will evaluate, talking with the parents, if you think that your kids is worth to go to college or a trade school. You can become a plumber, an electrician, you can become a baker, or a cook. Everybody find something that they like. Then the employer can already hire you. You already have some kind of a skill, so you don't have to come and you know nothing. I went to trade school. I went to a restaurant school, and then I moved to a wine school, but then my first job, I was making more money than my father. You could understand it.

This is so much easier because now I'm-- when I moved to New York, I was working at Daniel Boulud, and I was making $90,000 back in '96. Obviously, you have to work in the best restaurant to make the most money, because if you work in a diner, you're not going to make as much money as Daniel Boulud. Now I've pivot to open a contractor business without a college degree and doing very well for myself.

Brian Lehrer: I'm going to leave it there, but thank you very much. Great contribution. I get your main point about trade schools everywhere in France compared to the United States. There is a critique that I've heard, though, Annalise, and I think perhaps it applies to why this hasn't taken root more in this country, at least to some degree. That is that the tracking system in at least some European countries, I don't know about France, can pigeonhole by class.

People who start out from working-class families get pigeonholed, tracked to go into trade schools as opposed to college. I think that's been one of the fears here, too, that a lot of children of color in this country are seen as not college material when they really are college material, and so they get tracked into different things. There's a concern about that kind of discrimination, if we're going to say, "Oh, noncollege roots, are the alternatives we should be doing a lot more of in this country," because we know who's going to get tracked into those roots. Is it really in the interest of equality? Have you grappled with that question?

Annelies Goger: Yes, and I really appreciate that you brought this up directly, because I absolutely agree, 100%, that we have a history-- vocational education in the United States has a history of racialized tracking, of tracking immigrants right into pathways that they couldn't then get out of. A system of dead ends. Here's the thing, though, I would argue that what we have now is also a dead end. When you have what we call even using deficit language, non-degree credentials, systems that don't articulate. You can't start in a workforce program and transition to a credit program very easily.

What we see in countries-- I actually turned to Switzerland to show an example of a country that has actually started to build those. You build the pathway in applied universities, but you also build paths for people to cross between those pathways at every level. They call this permeability, but it's the idea that you can have different-- if you change your mind or if you have your circumstances change, you can start in the apprenticeship system in high school and even go into college level, master's level, but you can also switch at any point into the academic world and vice versa.

I think that we need to look at examples like that. The students that actually earn the most are the ones that make that switch because they have the combination of theoretical learning and hands-on learning. I think a lot of employers in the US are really missing that combination and I think it's holding us back as a country from having that. Employers want different kinds of talent and sure, some people, they want to get out of MIT with the highest tech skills possible, but also they want people that know their industry. I've talked to employers in agriculture, for example, trying to deploy precision AI technologies in agriculture.

They need people that actually know their industry and how to apply those technologies to their industry. I think we need to build it right with intentionality, like you said, to really not reproduce that tracking that we had before and that we currently have.

Brian Lehrer: Very interesting. One more call before we run out of time with the story of making it without a college degree today. Jasper in Central park, you're on WNYC. Hi Jasper, we have about 30 seconds for you. I apologize for the short slide.

Jasper: Oh, that's all right. Good morning. I didn't go to college, but I've got a great job that I love and eventually, I hope to be able to [unintelligible 00:28:02] into it, maybe owning my own business or something. It's interesting that we don't have trade schools as much as other countries considering how many people I think just aren't really like myself, cut out for office work. I just could not end being inside a building for pretty much my entire schooling career. I think we need more of that in the states.

Brian Lehrer: Jasper, thank you very much. Justin, you want to close this out with a last word maybe on politics if you dare to go there with this being an election issue? Both parties, I think, say that they want to increase alternative skills pathways and apprenticeships and things like that. I think both parties criticize what happened in the '80s and '90s under Reagan and Clinton economic globalization, where there was a bet that we could outsource a lot of low-skill, low-wage manufacturing jobs to China and elsewhere while making the US the leader in higher-skill, higher wage jobs and trying to really ramp up the number of Americans who do go to college.

I think the conventional wisdom now is that that didn't really work to expand the middle class backfired in this country. A quick thought on the politics?

Justin Heck: I think there's a danger in building clear tracks for workers that are non-college and college, primarily because the future of work is so unknown. The jobs that we're currently preparing for are jobs that don't yet exist. Using skills as a common language that we recognize when it's developed in college and we recognize regardless of where it's built, can allow the US to build a more resilient and adaptive, diverse, and skilled talent base.

Brian Lehrer: Justin Heck from Opportunity@Work and Annelies Goger from the Brookings Institution, thank you so much for joining our 100 Years of 100 Things series. Number 28, 100 Years of Making a Living Without a College Degree. Thank you very, very much.

 

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