A new report by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce says that very soon there will no longer be enough job opportunities for those with only a high school diploma (or less). Instead, they say, future job opportunities will center around 16 career areas, all of which will require a college education.
While the report does say that there will continue to be jobs for people without a college education, it also says there won’t be enough of those jobs to support the current level of people who don’t have a degree. The report goes on to say that only one in three such jobs will pay enough for people to live above the poverty line.
Though currently there are more women going to college than men, the future looks less bright for them, as a high number of women are working towards degrees that are not in the 16 areas defined by the study, such as manufacturing, construction, hospitality and transportation. Most notable however is the dearth of women entering science fields, which are expected to dominate the job market starting now and projecting into the foreseeable future.
On the other hand, there are sectors where women seem to be winning, such as in health care and education, though neither pays as well as the more traditionally male dominated hard sciences.
The complete list of the 16 sectors includes only those areas that the research team sees as providing reasonably high paying jobs in reasonable numbers: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; finance; government and public administration; information technology; marketing, sales and service; hospitality and tourism; health science; business, management, and administration; and education and training.
The report underlies a constant theme and that is workers of the future will have to go to college first if they wish to obtain a reasonable standard of living and as part of that, will have to avoid the liberal arts majors and instead focus on more employable areas of study that corporations are looking for. This will likely mean a broad change will need to come about regarding the educational process in this country to accommodate the number of new jobs that will come available if the United States is going to fill its vacancies with residents, rather than from qualified people from other countries.
The report concludes by nothing that if current trends continue, the U.S. will fall far short of meeting such goals and thus will have to rely on outside sources for workers.