Economists of education (Mark Blaug is one whose writings on this subject I have read) point out that college students start out as young people who come from higher socioeconomic status families, all over the world. Those young people thus have better social connections to succeed in paid employment and more capital to found businesses and invest and do other things that lead to high income in the next generation than do young people who are unable to afford college. Moreover, college attendance, even though it costs money to the students, is heavily subsidized by general taxation all over the world, and college subsidies operate as a wealth transfer from working non-college-attending young people to studying college-attending young people. It's not clear at all that there is any added value from the educational operations of a college
and that college-educated people can look at a cross-sectional chart like the one jacquesm kindly submitted here and believe that it shows a longitudinal causation relationship is a demonstration of how badly colleges fail at teaching statistics.
Going to college allows you to tap in to that network of social connections though, which in turn will increase your chances a bit.
No guarantees there though, on an individual level.
Now, what would be more surprising is to show that an increase in education level would show a decreased chance of being employed. So in that sense this graph should really not surprise anybody.
I've done something else (no access to PhD employment stats, maybe someone else does?), I've changed it in to an 'employment' graph, instead of an unemployment graph:
Did you just subtract the values in the original chart from 100%? If so, that's not the actual employment level. Unemployment means seeking work but not finding it; it excludes everyone who is disabled, discouraged, or simply not looking for work (e.g. full-time moms).
The overall unemployment level in the U.S. is a little under 10%, but the employment level is somewhere around 65-70% (iirc). So 20-25% of the population is still unaccounted for in this figure. A chart breaking that down by education might be interesting, too.
> disabled, discouraged, or simply not looking for work (e.g. full-time moms).
Ah ok, I wasn't aware of that distinction (I figured they'd been taken out). Still, the larger point stands, the difference looks huge when you look at this graph, but it is 'upside down', we're talking about the tops here, not about a base 0 reaching to 15%, but a base 0 reaching to 100% where this is the remnant between the tops and the maximum.
What you're saying is that the maximum should have been 80% or 75% instead of 100%.
http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html
and that college-educated people can look at a cross-sectional chart like the one jacquesm kindly submitted here and believe that it shows a longitudinal causation relationship is a demonstration of how badly colleges fail at teaching statistics.