The latest edition of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s “Education at a Glance” report highlights the relationship between educational attainment and employment, finding that the gap in employment rates between those with high and low levels of education widened during the recession. Unemployment rates for those without a secondary education climbed 6 percentage points from 2008 to 2011, to 16.2 percent, while the proportion of postsecondary-educated individuals who were unemployed increased 2.5 percentage points, to 4.9 percent.
Andreas Schleicher, the deputy director for education “Those who are well-educated have generally fared well during the years of the economic crisis while those without baseline qualifications, who didn’t complete high school or didn’t get a good vocational education, have really paid the price for the crisis.” When has it been easy to survive in this society without having an education?
Graduate unemployment is a concern as well but the likelihood of being unemployed as a university graduate is below 5 percent. The recession cut back spending in education, will these cuts come back to haunt us later on?
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