学历越高饭碗越安全?

Fifteen years after high school, the working lives of Tremell Sinclair and Phyllis Sellars have evolved very differently, largely because of a single decision.

Ms. Sellars went to college; Mr. Sinclair didn't.

That decision has always shaped their economic prospects, but never more so than during the recent recession: Ms. Sellars kept her white-collar job, recently landing a pay raise, while Mr. Sinclair was laid off from his forklift driving job last year and only just found a new one -- at a 46% lower salary.

The classmates illustrate a divide between the fortunes of Americans with college degrees and those without. It's not only that the college educated earn more, but that they are far more likely to keep their jobs when times get tough. By some measures, recession has exacerbated the divide. The unemployment rate for workers 25-and-older with a bachelor's degree or higher was 4.6% in August, for example, compared with 10.3% for those with just a high-school diploma. That's a 5.7-percentage-point gap, compared with a gap of only 2.6 percentage points in December 2007 when the recession began.

Laid-off college graduates are also finding work faster. Their median duration of unemployment was 18.4 weeks as of August, compared with 27.5 weeks for high-school grads. Three years ago, that figure was roughly the same for both groups -- 9.5 weeks and 9.6, respectively. And among the worst-off 25-and-older workers, the 5.2 million who have been out of work six months or more, only 19% are those who graduated from college, even though that group makes up a third of the work force.

Yet because college is increasingly expensive and doesn't guarantee a good job at a good wage, skepticism about the value of college is rising, even as the government pours more money into helping people get degrees. As part of the health-care legislation passed in March, Congress approved a student-loan overhaul that replaces private lenders with the federal Department of Education and redirects some $60 billion to community colleges and programs such as Pell Grants, which are college loans for the needy.

To economists who look at the numbers, college is a necessary, even if not sufficient, ticket to the middle class. 'We are experiencing a period of shared misery, where workers at all education levels are struggling, including those with a college degree,' says Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington think tank. Still, he says, 'It is certainly evident that those with college educations are faring much better than those with less education.'

Not that a diploma is the slam-dunk it once was. It no longer guarantees a wage that rises faster than inflation. And while people with four-year college degrees make, on average, 64% more than those with only high-school degrees, that wage premium hasn't climbed much since 2001, after rising sharply for two decades.

Meantime, the unemployment rate for people with a college degree or higher, though lower than others', is the highest it's been since comparable data begin in 1979, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the Economic Policy Institute. Even in the early 1980s recession, when national unemployment hit 10.8%, the rate for people with college degree or higher never eclipsed 3.9%.

College tuition has also grown faster than the rate of inflation for more than two decades, including a 6% increase in 2009 -- a period when overall prices fell. Some 64% of Americans thought college was a good investment in July, down from 79% a year earlier, according to a telephone poll of 3,000 individuals conducted in July for Country Financial, a Bloomington, Ill., financial-services company.