There’s more bad news for women about the gender pay gap. Although more women are graduating from American colleges and universities than ever before, they are still being paid less than their male counterparts when they enter the workforce, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) indicated in a new report Thursday.
The study published by the Washington-based think tank affiliated with the U.S. labor movement found that the gender wage gap has continued to grow among college graduates since 2000 and that black and Hispanic students have higher unemployment rates than their white peers.
International Business Times
April 22, 2016
That’s the depressing takeaway from a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. The report finds that recent high school graduates are still struggling to find jobs despite the dramatic improvement in the overall labor market. More than one in seven recent high school graduates, which the institute defines as those ages 17 to 20, are neither working nor enrolled in college; their unemployment rate is nearly 18 percent. (Both numbers are elevated compared with before the recession.) Those who do find jobs are experiencing sluggish wage growth.
FiveThirtyEight
April 22, 2016
Paychecks, meanwhile, just aren’t growing fast enough. A report last year from the Economic Policy Institute found that growth in worker productivity is outstripping wage growth. From 2000 to 2014, productivity increased by 21.6 percent, while median compensation in the U.S. rose by only 1.8 percent.
The Huffington Post
April 22, 2016
Just as many former renters briefly became homeowners during the housing boom, only to return to renter status, so too did many stock-market dabblers take what was left of their capital and go home. Sure, more than half of American households still own equities, but for most of those investors it’s a modest amount (and the other half owns precisely zero); about two-thirds of equity ownership is held in the top 5 percent of portfolios. The top 20 percent owns 85 percent of all financial assets, according to the Levy Institute; the Economic Policy Institute is even more specific at 87.2 percent. Income gains have been even more skewed toward the top.
Bloomberg
April 22, 2016
This year’s college grads have good reason to feel a notch better — the unemployment rate for recent college graduates is 5.6%, the lowest rate since June 2008, according to a new report published Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research group. New graduates have been taking it in the chin during the Great Recession and in the years after. They have been stereotyped as unemployed or underemployed — the college grad baristas — for being unable to find jobs that would use their four-year degrees. That situation is improving, but not enough. A lack of quality jobs that pay well continues to plague newbies in the job market. Add to that the burden of skyrocketing college costs, and it’s a tough situation to be in.
CNN Money
April 22, 2016
Even though the economy has improved since the recession, the class of 2016 is entering a job market that’s still hobbled by weak trends, such as higher levels of unemployment for young Americans and stagnant wages, according to a new study from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Young college grads, for instance, are suffering from an underemployment rate of 12.6 percent, compared with 9.6 percent in 2007, before the recession started. It’s even worse for recent high-school graduates, with about one-third currently underemployed, compared with roughly 27 percent in 2007, the study found. Underemployment means people who want a full-time job but are working in a part-time role, or who are working in a job that requires fewer skills than they have.
CBS Moneywatch
April 22, 2016
According to the Economic Policy Institute, in New York City, the number of low-wage jobs ($45,000 annually or lower) rose by 191,000 in 2014. Comparatively, the number of middle-class jobs—defined as paying between $49,971 and $71,692 per year—rose by only 3,745. Meanwhile, cost of living continues to soar, with the result that even some homeless people in New York work two low-wage jobs.
Quartz
April 22, 2016
But while the outlook may look good overall, some economists note that the growth doesn’t apply to every sector. There are still 14 job seekers for every 10 job openings available, according to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington think tank. The biggest gaps fall in professional fields, healthcare and retail, food services, and construction.
Christian Science Monitor
April 22, 2016
Corporations should pay much more in taxes, mostly to fund the kind of social investments — such as free universal pre-K programs and free tuition at public colleges and universities — the nation badly needs, reckons Hunter Blair, a budget analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that focuses on low- and middle-income households. “There’s a lack of demand in the economy. If you’re really interested in growth, you’d be interested in more government spending,” Blair said.
The Huffington Post
April 21, 2016
But a 2013 look at the information technology labor market by the Economic Policy Institute found that for every two students who graduate from U.S. colleges with STEM degrees, only one is actually hired into a STEM job. In computer and information science and engineering, it found, U.S. colleges graduate 50% more students than are hired into those fields each year.
USA Today
April 21, 2016