bureau of labor

Economix: The Lawyer Surplus, State by State

June 27, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

We’ve written before about the tough job market for recent law-school graduates. The climate is hard partly because of the weak economy, but also partly because the nation’s law schools are churning out many more lawyers than the economy needs even in the long run.

Now a few researchers have tried to quantify exactly how big that surplus is.

The numbers were crunched by Economic Modeling Specialists Inc. (also known as EMSI), a consulting company that focuses on employment data and economic analysis. The company’s calculations were based on the number of people who passed the bar exam in each state in 2009, versus an estimate of annual job openings for lawyers in those states. Estimates for the number of openings is based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau.

According to this model, every state but Wisconsin and Nebraska (plus Washington, D.C.) is producing many more lawyers than it needs. (See table after the jump for full data.)

In fact, across the country, there were twice as many people who passed the bar in 2009 (53,508) as there were openings (26,239). A separate estimate for the number of lawyers produced in 2009 — the number of new law-school graduates, according to the National Center for Education Statistics — also showed a surplus, although it was not quite as large (44,159 new law grads compared with 26,239 openings).

In raw numbers, New York has the greatest legal surplus by far.

In 2009, 9,787 people passed the bar exam in the Empire State. The analysts estimated, though, that New York would need only 2,100 new lawyers each year through 2015. That means that if New York keeps minting new lawyers apace, it will continue having an annual surplus of 7,687 lawyers.

California and New Jersey have the next largest gluts of new lawyers, according to EMSI.

As noted above, not every state is overproducing lawyers. Nebraska and Wisconsin actually have small deficits of lawyers. The place with the biggest shortage is the District of Columbia, which is projected to have 618 new jobs opening annually for lawyers for the next few years, but had only 273 bar-passers in 2009.

Given this shortage, it is perhaps unsurprising that the District of Columbia has the highest median wage for lawyers in the country: $70.96 an hour.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=b6ae88f49d114e8e587f784a85e3d3c4

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: bureau of labor, emsi, lawyers

Economix: Average Length of Unemployment at All-Time High

June 4, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

The average unemployed person in America has been looking for work for 39.7 weeks, or more than nine months. That is the longest average unemployment spell since the Labor Department started keeping track in 1948:

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Note: Pink line on the right side of the graph shows what the numbers would be if calculated under the Labor Department’s older methodology for average unemployment duration.

Now, the Labor Department changed the way it calculates this number in January. But even under the old methodology (shown in the teeny pink line at the far right of the chart), workers still had the longest average spells of unemployment on record this May.

The growing length of joblessness is particularly worrisome because it tends to be self-perpetuating. The longer a person is unemployed, the less employable he or she becomes because of factors like stigma and skill deterioration. That means that the longer it takes to get Americans back to work, the further behind they will fall.

The social safety net for these workers is also fraying. Many of the long-term unemployed — who now constitute about 45 percent of all unemployed workers — have already had their jobless benefits run out. In some cases states (like Arizona) have neglected to make the legislative changes necessary to receive additional jobless benefits paid for with federal money.

To add insult to injury, many unemployed people who have retrained for new careers have so far racked up student loan debts but not jobs.

These long-term unemployed are disproportionately composed of older workers — who, compared to younger workers, are less likely to lose their jobs, but more likely to have trouble finding re-employment if they are laid off. Given how far behind these workers have already fallen, it may turn out that many of these Americans will never work again.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=975cd69efcb9016f78a223e05b1d4f92

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: bureau of labor, deterioration, unemployed person

Economix: Once Again: Is College Worth It?

May 21, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

The dismal job prospects for new college graduates have revived debates about whether college is “worth it.” The PayPal founder Peter Thiel is among the major skeptics, but there are plenty of others. Check out the comments on yesterday’s article about employment rates for recent grads to see what I mean.

College provides plenty of intellectual and psychic benefits alongside the potential economic ones, granted. Let’s just focus on the economic ones. Is college worth it, economically? My colleagues David Leonhardt and Floyd Norris had a blogging debate about this question, which I encourage you to go back and read. For now I’d just like to highlight a few factors to consider.

It’s true that the job market for new college graduates stinks right now. But you know what? The job market for non-graduates is worse.

People with more skills have a broader range of jobs they can do, and having a postsecondary degree sometimes serves as litmus test for employers who can be picky about hiring.

As a result, unemployment rates decline as workers become more educated:

Source: Bureau of Labor Analysis, via Haver Analytics

College graduates also earn more money than their less-educated peers. That gulf in earnings has only widened in the last few decades: the inflation-adjusted pay of college graduates has risen, and the inflation-adjusted pay of every other group has fallen.

(Aside: People with higher degrees have even lower unemployment rates, and earn even more money.)

Additionally, in a survey of recent graduates from the Heldrich Center at Rutgers — the same survey that produced figures on graduates’ poor job prospects — respondents seemed to wholeheartedly agree that college is indeed “worth it.”

Nearly three-quarters of recent graduates said they believed their degree was as valuable now as they thought it would be when they first enrolled in college. Additionally, three-quarters said their college education did extremely well or pretty well in preparing them to be successful in their first full-time job.

That’s not to say they don’t have some regrets. About that same proportion said they would do something different if they could start college over again. Here are some of the things they’d like a redo on:

“Unfulfilled Expectations: Recent College Graduates Struggle in a Troubled Economy,” Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, Rutgers University.

Lots of people would have changed their major, or done an internship, or started looking for work sooner while enrolled. Did you notice what category of regrets got the lowest share of responses?

Wishing they hadn’t gone to college.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=147f0091b2300ead0557a91baaa5c037

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: bureau of labor, peter thiel, rutgers

Economix: Job Openings on the Rise

April 13, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Some very good news on the jobs front: The number of job openings rose at their fastest pace in almost seven years in February, according to a new report from the Labor Department.

Of course the total number of job openings is still below pre-recession levels, since this total had fallen so far during the downturn. But even so, the monthly rise is a welcome development for the nation’s 13.5 million unemployed workers.

The growth in job openings, coupled with the drop in the number of people unemployed, means that the ratio of unemployed workers to openings has fallen quite dramatically. The figure in February was 4.4, down from a high of 6.9 in July 2009.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, via Haver Analytics

Layoffs and discharges are also near their record low level from the previous month. They have been quite low for a while, as the chief problem plaguing the job market during the recovery has not been layoffs but tepid hiring.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=8b1499ce82c11674bc3208ec68532d2e

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: bureau of labor, labor department, layoffs

Economix: College Enrollment Fell Slightly in 2010

April 10, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

The share of recent high school graduates enrolled in college by the October after their graduation fell slightly in 2010, according to a new report from the Labor Department.

Of the high school class of 2010, 68.1 percent of graduates were enrolled in college by October. The comparable share for the previous year’s high school class was 70.1 percent.

Both classes, however, had higher college enrollment rates than those from previous decades:

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

As you can see, the portion of high school graduates who go immediately into college has been rising over the years, largely because of the influx of women into the nation’s institutions of higher learning. Last year, the college enrollment rate among women who were recent high school graduates was 74 percent, and for men it was 62.8 percent.

More temporary factors — like the business cycle or a military draft — also appear to affect young people’s decisions to go college. For example, the weak economy may help explain why a record share of high school graduates chose to enroll in college in 2009.

Last year there were again great disparities in college enrollment among the various ethnic groups. Students of Asian heritage had the highest rate of college enrollment among new high school graduates, at 85 percent. This group was followed by white students (68.6 percent), black students (61.4 percent) and Hispanic students (59.6 percent).

Among all recent high school graduates enrolled in college, the unemployment rate was 22.8 percent. The unemployment rate was higher for those who had not enrolled in college, at 33.4 percent. Remember, though, that jobless rates reflect only those people who are actively looking for work.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=88e56454b2eb649a7dff5a61f2ba8834

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: bureau of labor, enrollment rate, institutions of higher learning

Economix: Average Length of Unemployment Rises Again

April 2, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

As we’ve noted before, the length of time the typical unemployed person has been out of work has been getting longer and longer. And in March, the duration of unemployment again rose, to an average of 39 weeks:

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

That’s the longest on record, even when you account for the fact that the Labor Department changed its methodology for calculating average unemployment duration at the start of this year. (The numbers produced by the department’s old methodology are shown in very light blue in the chart above; as you can see, they’re still higher than they were at any previous month on record.)

So what accounts for the interminable length of unemployment?

Layoffs during the Great Recession were unusually concentrated. Whereas in previous recessions a large swatch of American workers churned in and out of unemployment, this time around the ax fell on relatively few Americans. And as the economy has marched onward, this smaller group of workers has been left further and further behind.

Some of those people had been structurally displaced — that is, they were in occupations or industries that were disappearing more permanently, or they were less productive workers to begin with — and that’s why it’s so hard for them to get new work. But for many Americans, unemployment begets unemployment. The longer a person is out of work, the less likely he is to find new work in the coming few weeks, whether because of stigma, less intensive searching, skill deterioration or other factors.

So while American employers have picked up hiring, they are disproportionately hiring workers who have spent less time looking for a job. That leaves more of the long-term unemployed in the jobless pool — right now nearly half of those unemployed have been unemployed for at least six months — with each of those individual workers racking up even more weeks. The net effect is to pull up the overall average length of unemployment.

Here’s a chart showing the breakdown of unemployed workers, by how long they have been looking for work:

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, via Haver Analytics

One other potential explanation why people who have been unemployed a very long time have continued to stay unemployed is that jobless benefits last longer today than they had in the past. That may give an incentive for workers to keep actively hunting for jobs — a requirement for continued receipt of jobless benefits — whereas under different conditions they might have just given up, and therefore been no longer counted as unemployed.

Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economics professor and former Treasury official (and former Economix contributor), has more on that argument in this column.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=88647d9e7202a5669c878e81933aec38

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: bureau of labor, labor department, recessions