Written by John Griffin Miller   

While I’m sure that you all regularly peruse the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, I hadn’t been in a while, so with the help of my friend Mr. Google, I took a brief stroll around the land of funny numbers today.

I was particularly curious about the reported unemployment rate for college educated adults (25+), because that is an important number for me. Well, I was shocked to discover that one in twenty-seven of my fellow bachelor’s degree holders (and above) was out of work in January. Shocked, I tell you! One in 27!

That number is much higher than I would like to see. The Bureau site doesn’t readily allow you to drill down too far, but I can surmise that since the rate is 3.7% for all “degreed” people, that the rate for white college graduates is probably a bit lower: So maybe 1 in 40 of the white college grads are looking for work. But that’s still much too high.

Then I realized that that includes white WOMEN. White women actually represent a substantial part of the college degrees these days. So if you throw out the women and drill down to just white, male, college graduates, you’re probably in the range of one job seeker out of every sixty or seventy men. Better, but not really good enough.

That poor guy!

One definition of a Recession is when your neighbor is out of work, while a Depression is when you lose YOUR job. We must be doing ok, since with numbers like that, in my neighborhood, you’d have to search pretty far and wide to find that neighbor who represents the one in seventy who needs work.

So before returning to my martini and relaxing after a very stressful day, I wandered a little further around the site. They have some predesigned charts, which don’t allow you too much flexibility. I noted that high school grads overall are at 8.7%, about 2½ times more likely to be unemployed than college grads (or around 500% more than the likes of me!).

I thought about it, and realized that it’s probably a very good thing that the Bureau doesn’t allow you to easily do too much customization, especially when you wander over to the higher numbers, like high school dropouts, at 13.8% (perhaps 1,000% more than me) or about one out of every seven. Good thing you can’t subdivide by race and gender there, because that number could get up into the 25% range or even higher pretty quickly. And we have all heard about the narrow definition of “unemployed.”

But the best part, I thought as I sat down in my comfortable living room and took another sip of my drink, is that it is very good that white, male, college graduates are running the country. It is nice that we have inherited a system designed to benefit us, pretty much exclusively.

Because if those others were in charge, there might be some major disgruntlement with the way things are working out.

Think I’m going to get a bigger lock for the front door, just the same.