Unemployment rates vs. education

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the last two decades.  Comparable data for the years 2007-2009 are graphed in an interactive chart at the New York Times; at the link you can see your own cohort sorted by race, sex, age, and educational attainment.

The following comments re the chart above are from Scenarios and Strategy:

Clearly, from an individual’s point-of-view, it’s still smarter to get more education than less.  But the perturbations of past periods remind us that the gearing between between academic degrees and financial success isn’t always perfectly tight…  Indeed, those with sharply-defined professional credentials in fields– e.g, finance– that are unlikely even in the intermediate term (if ever) to recover their bubble-fueled growth rates, may find their advanced degrees at best unhelpful; at worst, downright prejudicial...

All of which underlines for your correspondent the extraordinary value of a liberal arts education. When one is faced with a “working adulthood” that is one transitional challenge after another, no skill is more valuable than the capacity to adapt. And no capability is more central to that adaptation than the ability effectively and efficiently to learn.

This is precisely what, at its core, a liberal arts education is about: learning to learn...

It might not be the college degree per se that allows one to retain a job or find a new one during a downturn.  It might be, rather, that people who have the motivation, intelligence, and economic resources that allow them to achieve a college degree are the ones who will adapt and succeed.