Across almost all demographic groups, education levels, and states, American workers continue to experience dramatically elevated long-term unemployment relative to before the Great Recession.

What is long-term employment? The long-term unemployment rate is the share of the labor force that has been unemployed for over six months.

Who are the long-term unemployed? Today’s long-term unemployment crisis is widespread across all sorts of workers. It is clearly not confined simply to inflexible workers who are unwisely concentrating their job-search in specific occupations or industries where jobs aren’t available while ignoring opportunities elsewhere. Long-term unemployment is elevated in every group, in every occupation, in every industry, at all levels of education.

While workers with higher levels of education (4-year college degrees or better) face substantially lower long-term unemployment rates—which is always true, in good times and bad—even these highly credentialed workers have long-term unemployment rates that are more than three times as high as before the recession started, just like workers without 4-year degrees.

What is behind today’s elevated long-term unemployment rate? Because the evidence shows that long-term unemployment is high among all sorts of workers – even those with advanced education credentials – this signals strongly the root of today’s long-term unemployment is the continued weakness in aggregate demand that is the legacy of the Great Recession. This weakness in aggregate demand (spending by households, businesses, and governments) is keeping employers from ramping up hiring quickly enough to bring down long-term unemployment at an acceptably rapid rate.

In this feature, to be developed over the coming months, we will provide long-term unemployment data and breakdowns by education, age, gender, race/ethnicity, occupation, and industry. We’ll show the extent to which all groups are experiencing substantially higher long-term unemployment rates than they were before the Great Recession started. We will also show the share of children living in households with at least one parent that is long-term unemployed. In coming weeks, briefs and reports posted on this page will examine specific aspects of long-term unemployment in the United States.