Men without college degrees aren't doing well

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0:10Today is Jobs Friday! Yay!

0:18That's right. We had 227 ,000 jobs added to the U.S. economy in November. Now, this is a mixed picture because while unemployment ticked up a little to 4.2%, you had hourly earnings growing pretty robustly on average. They were up 4 % over the past year to just over$35 an hour. So that's wages overall. And today we want to zoom in on a subset of that. men's wages and salaries. We want to see how they've been doing. This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong. And I'm Darian Woods. Today on the show, Men at Work. We look at the trends and we ask whether culture is keeping up with economics.

1:08This message comes from NPR sponsor Zendesk, introducing the next generation of AI agents built to deliver resolutions for everyone. With an easy setup that can be completed in minutes, not months, Zendesk AI agents resolve 30 % of interactions instantly, quickly giving your customers what they need. Loved by over 10 ,000 companies, Zendesk AI makes service teams more efficient, businesses run better, and your customers happier. That's the Zendesk AI effect. Find out more at Zendesk.com. Royal Pollard works as a server in a Thai restaurant in New York City. And once tips are included, he says he gets$35 an hour, which he's happy with.

1:49But there's a couple of caveats with that pay. I remember buying a certain pair of shoes and it would be like$90. Then it's like$100. Then it's like$115. I was like, no, I'm not. I'm not doing that. That's crazy. Yeah, price inflation has been eating away at his wages. And given that eroding buying power, he wonders whether he's doing as well as his father was economically at his age. Before you used to be able to get at least a warehouse job that pays good money. Now it's not a thing, right? I mean, it's hard to come by a job like that. Royal is a man with a high school diploma. And men in this group don't seem to be doing well.

2:27We talked to Richard Reeves. He's the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. We asked him, in terms of wage trends, how are men doing? Honestly, with these sorts of trends, like wage trends in particular, I sometimes feel it's a bit like, you know, the Groucho Marx quote about, well, these are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others. It's a bit like that. It's like, here are my wage trends for men. And if you don't like them, I have others. You could say, look, I want to show a chart showing how terribly men have been doing in the labor market, right? Okay, I can do that for you.

2:59I want a chart showing that men's wages, especially low-income men, have had great wage growth. I can produce that chart for you as well. Well, Richard Reeves, I have an assignment for you. I have no prior desire to show it going up or down. I just want to see what your best estimate is. What do you find? So what that means is just being really clear what assumptions you've made. And so I like to use 1979 as a starting year because I think most people are interested in just what are these long-term trends. As it turns out, we have really good statistics on wages starting in 1979. The second thing I would do is I'm going to say I'm going to look at men over the age of 25.

3:37And when looking at those wages, Richard controls for price inflation. There are a couple ways of doing this. One is the Consumer Price Index, the CPI. The other is the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index, the PCE. Richard prefers the PCE measure because this better accounts for changing spending patterns over time. Yeah, let's say apples shoot up in price, but oranges stay the same. People will switch to oranges, and their quality of life is basically the same. And the PCE takes that into account faster. Now, this might sound like a niche detail, but it can actually greatly change what the numbers are saying.

4:14And it has another advantage. If you want to be the nerdiest nerd at the dinner table, don't just ask, have you adjusted for inflation? say, which inflation measure did you use? Of course, you might never be invited to a dinner party again. It's a risk I'm willing to take. It's worth it, right? And then what I'm crucially going to do is I'm going to do it by education level. Because the real story here is it depends which men you're asking about. And so if I make all of those assumptions, what I find is that from 1979 to 2023, three, the wages of men with a four-year college degree have gone up by 38%.

4:54The wages of men with some college or an associate's degree has gone up by just 3%. Basically stagnation, given how long it was. Basically flat. The wages of men with a high school degree has dropped by 6%. And the wages of men with less than a high school degree has dropped by 11%. And so the overall story is of a class gap. And so the basic story is men with a four-year college degree have seen healthy wage growth. I mean, it's not quite as big as the growth that women in that group have seen. They've seen even faster wage growth, but from a much lower base, right? But for men without a four-year college degree, wages have been at best flat, and for many of those, gone down.

5:37So it depends which men you're talking about. And this is the class divide that is very, very strongly shown up by the labor market statistics and are obscured by averages. This seems like a pretty bleak picture to me. What's behind this? Well, the huge changes in the economy that we've seen, of course, mean that many of the jobs that some of those men without a college degree would have gotten would have been in areas like manufacturing, steel, mining, etc., which actually paid pretty well, even though they didn't have high educational requirements because they were physically demanding, quite risky, etc.

6:09but also to be honest it's partly because in many cases those were industries from which many others were excluded and particularly if you were a white man and you actually had access to some of these decently paid jobs but one of the reasons they were perhaps paid even better than they would have been in a fully free market is because women were typically not welcomed into those professions but very often workers of color weren't either and of course very strongly unionized and then of course, free trade. And so we've seen a lot of these, you know, a lot of competition from abroad. And so many men, especially if they're from lower income households, they're worse off than their fathers were in terms of wages.

6:46And I think for a lot of people, they do have this intuitive sense that they're comparing themselves to how their parents were doing. I think a hard fact of American economic life now, and maybe American political life too, is that there are a lot of guys out there who are actually poorer than their dads, even though they've got at least as much education as their dads had. And I think psychologically, that does have quite a big impact on people. So even if it's happened for good reasons, as well as bad reasons, it doesn't change the fact that it's quite hard to be poorer than your parents. So I'm convinced of the problem of men without college degrees with at best stagnating wages overall.

7:23What are some possible solutions here? Well, of course, we can try and help those men do better in the labor market. And that's partly about making sure on the demand side. So infrastructure investment, for example, hugely helped working class men. But also on the other side, on the supply side, thinking about much better access to vocational training and learning. I think one of the big problems we've got in the U.S. is four-year college degree is not the right path for many people. But we woefully underinvest in the alternatives. We lag at the bottom of the league table of advanced economies for apprenticeships, for example, vocational training, trade schools.

7:58That's all very important too. We've had a lot of emphasis on women into STEM jobs, science, technology, engineering, and math. And I'm very interested in getting more men into what I call heel jobs. That's health, education, more administrative jobs, and those that require more literacy. It's not just that there aren't very many men in those traditionally female occupations like nursing, like teaching, broader healthcare, social work, etc. It's that there are fewer and fewer men with every passing year. And so in teaching, for example, the share of K-12 teachers that are male has dropped from 33 % in the 80s to 23 % today.

8:35But I would say, I would even go broader than that and say we've actually got to get beyond a world where we are so narrowly defining the contribution of men in terms of the size of their paycheck. It's incredibly important that we find ways through policy and through culture to signal to men, you matter as a dad, not just as a breadwinner. You matter as a member of your community. You matter as a volunteer, as a church usher, as a scout leader, as a coach. Our tribe still needs you, even if it's in a different and new way. And that's a much bigger challenge than just economic policy. That's a cultural shift that we are only partway through.

9:15If we don't get this right, it could be the beginning of a reaction. And I think how we treat what's happening right now will determine which way we go. Richard Reeves, President of the American Institute for Boys and Men. This has been a fascinating discussion. Thank you so much for joining The Indicator. Anytime. This was fun.

9:35Before we wrap up, we just want to thank everyone who supports us by giving to your local station or by joining NPR+. Everything The Indicator has done this year is because of your help. And if you're not familiar with NPR +, it's a great way to hear this and more than 25 other NPR podcasts sponsor-free. There are other perks too, like bonus episodes and discounts at the NPR shop. You get all that for a small recurring donation. And you know you're supporting NPR's mission of creating a more informed public. Just go to plus.npr.org for details. This episode was produced by Corey Bridges and engineered by Gilly Moon and Debbie Daughtry.

10:13This fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Cake and Cannon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.