The Georgetown Center on Education the Workforce has started a project on "good jobs", with a focus on good jobs that don't require a university degree.
According to their first report, there are 30 million American workers without a college degree who have a good job. This is a little less than the 36 million good jobs that those with college degrees have.
To put this into perspective, there are about 75 million U.S. workers without a college degree. So about 40% have good jobs as defined by Georgetown.
The obvious question is what's a good job?
As you can see from the study chart below (click to enlarge), Georgetown defines a good job as one that pays at least $17 for a full-time job for those under the age of 45, and $22 per hour for those over the age of 45.
Not surprisingly, the share of good jobs going to those without a college degree has fallen over time. In 1991 60% of good jobs went to those without a college degree. But by 2015 this share had fallen to 45%.
The report goes on to break down which industries produce good jobs and who has them by demographic group.
We find this work quite interesting primarily because it puts a stake in the ground in terms of defining a "good job".
This has been a huge issue in the debate around the gig economy, with many arguing gig economy jobs are "bad". But despite describing them as bad, we've seen little on the topic of what would make them good, or what makes any job good.
Over the next couple of months we're going to dig into this topic in more detail, using the Georgetown definitions and findings to compare gig jobs with traditional jobs.
It should be interesting.
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