For Immediate Release January 4, 1998
Contact: Tom Krattenmaker, 610-328-8534, [email protected]
http://www.swarthmore.edu/Home/News
'Functional Literacy' Termed the Key to Success in New Job Market
Low Unemployment Masks Increasing Joblessness Among Men
Increasingly, it takes more than a college degree to get the best jobs. New research by Swarthmore College economist Frederic Pryor and a University of Wisconsin colleague shows that "functional literacy" -- a dexterity with numbers and written words -- separates the most successful college-educated workers from fellow graduates who take jobs for which a high school diploma used to be sufficient.
In a related finding, the professors report that joblessness among less-skilled men in their prime working years is at an all-time high, despite a low unemployment rate that masks the large numbers who have given up on finding work.
The findings are presented in a new book, "Who's Not Working and Why?" (Cambridge University Press), by Pryor, emeritus professor of economics at Swarthmore, and David L. Schaffer, assistant professor of economics at UW-Eau Claire and a 1979 Swarthmore graduate. The researchers base their study on a federal data bank showing the income and education levels of American workers and a second set of statistics showing functional literacy test results by occupation and income. Functional literacy, Pryor explains, "is the ability to use reading, writing, and arithmetic to solve the problems of daily life."
With the number of college graduates growing faster than jobs requiring a college education, Pryor and Schaffer find that more and more college-educated workers are crowding into the workplace niche once occupied by people with only a high school education. The phenomenon is illustrated by the rising education level of cab drivers, who today have an average of 12.5 years of education in contrast with 10.5 years in the 1970s. The high school graduates, in turn, are displacing high school dropouts in the jobs that were once the exclusive territory of those without a high school diploma. At the end of this chain of downward mobility, high school dropouts are leaving the labor force entirely; roughly one-quarter of all high school dropouts are now jobless, and about one-half of all black dropouts, Pryor notes.
"Who are the college graduates taking the high school jobs?" Pryor says. "They're the ones who scored lowest in functional literacy. It's still true that if you have a college degree you can always get a job, but unless you have a high degree of functional literacy, it might not be the kind of job you were counting on."
Pryor believes that functional literacy more than education level explains the rapidly rising wages of the most skilled workers, such as executives, engineers, and other professionals. More of those jobs are being created than there are functionally literate people to fill them, so companies have to pay more to land the scarce talent. Within occupations, meanwhile, a greater range of education levels is causing a wider distribution of income. On the lower rungs of the ladder, the new crowding explains the deterioration of real wages for less-skilled workers, according to the Swarthmore economist. "We're seeing more and more of a winner-take-all phenomenon," Pryor says.
Another important factor in the changed work force is the large presence of women. Female workers are replacing men at the lower end of the economic scale because they tend to be more functionally literate than men with equivalent educations, Pryor and Schaffer report, and they're replacing men in some higher-end positions because of their general willingness to work for lower wages.
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