Conventional wisdom says the more education you have, the more you’ll earn over your lifetime. But that’s not always the case. According to a new report by a New York-based policy center, some associate degrees lead to better-paying careers than bachelor degrees.
Specifically, the study done by Demos reports that 31% of associate-degree holders — in [...]

Michael Mandel’s recent blog post on higher education attainment rates and earnings is worth a look. Mandel showed that more college grads are earning advanced degrees but fewer are getting doctoral degrees. And perhaps most eye-opening is that earnings for Ph.D. holders have fallen 10% since 1999.

Mandel’s thoughts sparked us to take a look at [...]

Here is an interactive infographic showing US Per Capita Personal Income since 1969. These figures have been adjusted for inflation and provide some insight on the relative economic health/performance of each state.
Directions/Tips:

It will be most interesting if you switch from the bubble graph to the bar graph — see the tabs at the top [...]

Earlier this year, we looked at the occupational profile of a typical 250-person wind manufacturing firm. While that was a hypothetical case, an article from Dow Jones Newswires, “Wind Power Generates Green Economy in West Texas,” does a nice job detailing the staffing and wages from the world’s largest wind farm in Roscoe, Texas.
Here are [...]

A recent article published by the Community College Times chronicles how, despite the weak labor market, there are many high-skill occupations that employers are having difficulty filling with properly trained workers. These include jobs inside the health care, energy, and engineering fields.

It’s become especially hard to find accountants, health care workers, software sales representatives, actuaries, [...]

We thought it would be interesting to show the most in-demand occupations over the last week in the three biggest U.S. cities — New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. These are the most up-to-date listings available via Indeed.com. EMSI has translated them over to SOC codes to give planners and decision-makers a good sense [...]

To understand regional economic trends it is important to have the right data, and to contextualize the data so you can “see the story” the data is telling. While many can get the data, few can get at the story.
A relatively straightforward way to get at “the story” for a region is through shift share. [...]

Here is a handy economic development metric. It’s called “pull factor,” and it indicates how well (or poorly) a retail business community captures local trade and pulls in customers from outside its region. A pull factor above 1.00 means a region is bringing more shoppers into the area while a pull factor below 1.00 indicates [...]

Which parts of the United States will recover most rapidly from the drawn-out recession? Moody’s Economy.com has released a study that estimates the strongest future job growth will come in Colorado, Texas and three Northwest states: Washington, Idaho, and Oregon.
In the case of the northwestern states, the reason they got picked is because of their [...]

After reading the National Council for Workforce Education’s paper on the role community colleges play in growing a green workforce, we thought it would be interesting to look at some data and employment trends for the sort of occupations employed at a company that manufactures wind turbines.
The NCWE report includes a typical employee profile for [...]