Offshoring of Jobs and the Decline of Middle-income Earners May Reduce the Value of College

Decline of Middle-wage Jobs May Reduce Value of College

March 7, 2011

The Lookout - We've written before about the job market's incredible shrinking middle. Thanks to mechanization and offshoring, a growing number of new jobs are either high-wage, high-skills, or, especially, low-wage, low-skill. But middle-wage, middle-skills jobs--both white-collar, like clerical work, or blue-collar, like craftwork--are fast disappearing.

When we last wrote about this trend, we noted that the shift makes a college degree more important than ever. But the truth may actually be closer to the reverse.

Columnist Paul Krugman of the New York Times writes today that many of the jobs now lost to computers and foreign workers involve things like legal research or software design--meaning that in the U.S. job market, a college education is no longer any guarantee of steady employment.

Indeed, Krugman points to research sugggesting that "high-wage jobs performed by highly educated workers are, if anything, more 'offshorable' than jobs done by low-paid, less-educated workers."

The point, Krugman argues, that investing in education--a central policy objective of the Obama administration--will not, by itself, solve the country's job woes.