Back to school

Evan Phillips was laid off by General Motors Co. in 2008, and still is seeking full-time work. The 25-year-old Kalamazoo resident worked at a now-closed Michigan plant for just over a year.

Phillips isn't counting on the return of his old job. He's back at school, training to become a physical therapist assistant.

"You get to help rehabilitate people and make a good amount of money," he said.

Post-high-school education is important for workers who want to ramp up lifetime earnings, especially when their former occupation downsizes, economists say."One of the things that has become really important is not just that people get out of high school and go to college, but that people go back to school," Hall said. "That sort of training helps quite a bit in transitioning people to new careers."

The payback for more education is at an historic high, according to a recent report by David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The hourly wage of the typical college graduate was 1.95 times the hourly wage of the typical high school graduate in 2009, up from 1.5 times in 1963. All of the gain took place after 1980.

The Census Bureau recently reported workers with advanced degrees earned more than $83,000 on average in 2008, compared with about $59,000 for those with a bachelor's degree, and about $31,000 for those whose highest degree was a high school diploma.

Better credentials

"When the job market is really horrendous, then one of the biggest costs of going to school has plummeted," said Gary Burtless, a labor economist at the Brookings Institution. "When it's easy to find a full-time job that pays good wages then the price of college is pretty high. In current circumstances, that price is a lot lower for a lot of people."

Younger workers have an added advantage: a long working career during which they can repay school loans, and during which they will make extra money due to their better credentials.

Among the 20 occupations expected to have the largest number of job losses between 2008 and 2018, 15 are either production or office and administrative support occupations, according to a BLS report.

Both are "adversely affected by increasing plant and factory automation or the implementation of office technology, reducing the need for workers in those occupations."

Future jobs

Meanwhile, the 20 occupations expected to have the biggest job gains in coming years - including health, education, sales, and food service - will account for one-third or more of all new jobs - 5.8 million combined.

Separately, a recent report by Autor found that middle-skill jobs - including sales, office and administrative, and production workers - have lost share in the employment pool in the last three decades, a trend of labor-market polarization reinforced by the recent recession.

"Employment losses during the recent recession were far more severe in middle-skill white- and blue-collar jobs than in either high-skill, white-collar jobs or in low-skill service occupations," according to Autor's report.

Changes in technology, international trade, and off-shoring all play a part in the shrinking share of middle-skills jobs. Technology has displaced clerical jobs and eliminated some of the need for middle managers who track performance, said Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard University.

But there are tasks a computer can't perform, he said.

"Robots can do a lot of things, but they can't figure out what's trash and what are the important papers on my desk," Katz said.