Getting a master’s degree in business was supposed to be Norm Elrod’s ticket to upward mobility and a stable career. But it has not worked out that way for him, or for a fast-growing number of other highly educated New Yorkers.
Mr. Elrod, 36, lost his job as a manager at an online marketing firm in October and has been looking for work ever since. In that quest, he has joined more than 35,000 college graduates who are collecting unemployment benefits in New York City.
This recession is throwing the city’s most educated workers out of their jobs at a rapid rate. And while unemployment rates remain higher for workers with less education, the gap is quickly narrowing. In the past year, the number of city residents with at least a bachelor’s degree who are collecting unemployment benefits has risen about 135 percent, an analysis of state labor statistics shows — nearly twice the rate of increase for people who did not finish high school.
“We have not seen this in prior recessions where there’s been such an increase in well-educated people turning to unemployment insurance,” said James Parrott, chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute in Manhattan. “It’s an uncharacteristically well-educated group.”
The trend is occurring nationally, though it is more pronounced in New York City. Nationally, the number of unemployed people with college degrees doubled in the last year, rising by more than one million in the 12 months through March, according to a report released on Friday by the federal Department of Labor.
The surge in layoffs of professionals buttresses the view of some economists that the metropolitan area may not be able to pull itself out of recession quickly. One reason is that employers have been increasingly reluctant to fill high-paying positions that offer full benefits, said James W. Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.
Several forecasts for the local economy also project that the financial services industry, which powered the city’s recent growth, will continue to shed jobs long after other businesses rebound. The city’s Independent Budget Office projects that employment will decline through the first half of next year, but that the local finance sector will keep shrinking until 2011. For complete story go to NY Times