U.S. Census Bureau

Your chioce of college major can have major financial implications.

Think carefully about your college major: A bad decision could cost you $1 million.

A new Census Bureau report finds that engineering majors can make over $1 million more in the course of a lifetime than those who major in fields like psychology and education.

The median, or midpoint, of earnings for engineering majors who work full-time, year-round, was $91,611 per year, the report found. Education majors had the lowest median earnings among the degree categories included in the survey, at $50,902 per year.

Business majors fell somewhere in the middle, with median full-time earnings of $66,605.

Men had higher earnings than women in every degree category. Those who worked in the private sector also tended to make more than those who work in government. Many education majors work for the government as public school teachers.

The report is based on 2011 American Community Survey, an annual sample of more than 3 million American households, and looked at people ages 25 and over with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

It comes as many Americans are heading to college – or back to college – in the hopes of improving their job prospects amid a tight job market.

In general, experts say that’s a smart move: A college degree usually puts you on the path to higher earnings and more job security over the course of a lifetime.

Still, in recent years it’s also left many Americans burdened with debt. That’s why experts say it’s more important than ever to make sure you choose a field of study that is likely to lead to a good job.

Of course, not everyone has a passion for, or ability to do, work in the more lucrative fields of science and engineering.

For those with a passion for education, there may be a silver lining. A separate report released this year by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that education majors enjoyed among the strongest job prospects because the unemployment rate is low in the teaching profession.

Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office

The tough job market has been so hard on some Americans that they have dropped out of the running altogether.

But here’s a surprising twist: Generally, that’s not been true of older Americans.

The labor force participation rate, or the number of Americans who are working or looking for work, has declined in recent years for every age group except those who are 55 and older, according to a report released this week by the Government Accountability Office.

Older Americans generally have a lower labor force participation rate than other age groups, and for good reason: That’s the point in life when most people retire.

But the percentage of older Americans who are choosing to remain in the labor force, or to get back in it, has steadily been rising over the past 20 years and even continued to increase over the course of the recession and recovery.

About 40 percent of workers age 55 and over were working or looking for work in 2011, the GAO analysis found, compared to about 30 percent in 1990.

That’s in contrast to young and prime-age Americans, who have seen declines in labor force participate rates in recent years.

A closer look at the data shows that the real increases are coming from some of the oldest workers. Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley University, noted that labor force participation among 55- to 64-year-olds has generally been flat in the last five years, at about 64 to 65 percent.

But for workers 65 and over, labor force participation has increased from 15.5 percent in 2007 to 18.4 percent now. Levine’s analysis was based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

There are a number of potential reasons why the labor force participation rate has increased for people who we traditionally think of as being in retirement age.

One explanation may be that older workers are choosing to work longer to make up for investment losses and other financial woes as a result of the recession. Some people age 65 and older also may be getting back into the labor force because they can’t make ends meet on Social Security and retirement savings.

The GAO report said other factors keeping older workers at work may include better health and life expectancies, the increasing number of older women in the labor force and the need to stay at work to retain health benefits.

That a larger chunk of older people are working doesn’t diminish how tough the recession has been on people aged 55 and over, Levine notes.

Although the unemployment rate for older workers has generally been lower than the broader population, a job loss in that age range can be particularly devastating. That’s because it generally takes older workers longer to find a new job, and that long gap in employment just before retirement age can have a harsh impact on their retirement plans.

The GAO report to the Senate’s Special Committee on Aging focused mainly on the effect of long-term unemployment on older workers.

In testimony before the committee last week, the National Employment Law Project noted that many older workers face the double-whammy of a big employment gap and a resume that gives away their age. Both can be a turnoff to some potential employers.

Levine, who has done extensive research into older workers and the recession, said many people in that age range are “limping across the finish line.”

“They find some way to make ends meet from whenever they lose their job at 58 or whatever, and finally when they get to 62, Social Security provides them with a lifeline,” he said. “It provides a means of getting by.”

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OECD

Americans are getting a better deal on taxes than many other countries.

If you just filed your taxes this month, chances are you’re not feeling a huge amount of goodwill toward the U.S. tax system.

Still, you may want to hold off on those plans to move overseas to avoid the tax man.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development this week released a tax comparison for typical wage earners in it 34 member countries, mainly the world's wealthier, democratic countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Surprise: Most of them are paying a lot more than you.

The OECD report looked at the total labor costs for full-time, private sector workers – that is, gross wages plus whatever taxes the employer is required to pay on that employee’s behalf. Then they calculated how much of that total went to federal, state or regional taxes.

In the U.S., an estimated 29 percent of the average worker’s total labor costs went toward taxes last year.

That’s far lower than Belgium, Germany, Hungary and France, where taxes accounted for about half of an average worker’s labor costs.

There are a few countries where workers are getting more of a tax break. The countries with the lowest tax bills included Mexico, New Zealand and Chile, where just 7 percent of the average worker’s total costs went to taxes.

The OECD found that taxes increased in 26 of the 34 OECD countries last year. The U.S. was one of the few countries to see a decrease because of cuts in Social Security contributions. That offset the end of the Making Work Pay tax credit.

For comparison purposes, the calculations assumed the average worker was single and without children. The OECD did separate calculations for other individuals and families with children in its full report.

Matthias Rumpf, a spokesman for the OECD, said the U.S. ranks lower than average in part because it does not have compulsory health care. That means Americans’ health care costs aren’t included in their total taxes.

The OECD also didn’t include mortgage interest rate deductions in its calculation, in part because it’s difficult to make assumptions about how much a person would pay and thus deduct.

Do you think Americans should be paying more or less in taxes? Discuss it in the comments below or on our Facebook page.

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National Women's Law Center

The difference between a man's paycheck and a woman's paycheck may have something to do with where people live.

A new analysis from the National Women’s Law Center finds that the pay gap between men and women varies widely among the  states.

Looking at full-time, year-round wages, the gap is smallest in Washington, D.C., where women earn 91 cents for every dollar men earn, and widest in Wyoming, where women earning just 64 cents for every dollar men earn.

Vermont and California also boasted small wage gaps between men and women, while Louisiana and Utah were among those with the largest wage gaps.

Demographic and economic factors help explain some of the disparity.

Many people who live in Washington work for the federal government, where wage gaps tend to be smaller than in private industry, said Fatima Goss Graves, vice president of education and employment for the National Women’s Law Center.

People who live in the nation's capital also may be younger, she added, and the wage gap is smaller among younger workers.

By contrast, in Wyoming there may be more jobs in traditionally male-dominated industries such as coal mining. The state is also largely rural and much more sparsely populated.

But Graves argues that such factors don’t account for the entire gap.

“There’s always a portion that cannot be explained away,” she said.

Economist Mike Montgomery with IHS Global Insight said demographic differences in various states could have a lot to do with the  wage gap. States with a homogeneous labor market – where men and women do similar jobs – could have a much narrower gap because opportunities are more equal.

The overall gap between men’s and women’s median earnings has improved as more women have entered the labor market, but a disparity remains.

That’s partly because men and women choose different career paths, but pay gaps persist even for people in the same jobs.

The median weekly income for female physicians and surgeons is just 71 percent of what men take home, for example. Even in traditionally female-dominated professions, such as nursing and teaching, women generally take home less than men each week, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The National Women’s Law Center used the most recent 2010 data from the American Community Survey, which is conducted by the Census Bureau, to compile its analysis. Its findings are close to what the Census Bureau itself found when it did a similar analysis a couple of years ago.

Economic Policy Institute

The economy has been adding jobs lately, but not government jobs.

More than half a million, local, state and federal jobs have been cut since the recession ended in June 2009, according to an analysis released this week by the Economic Policy Institute.

That's the opposite of what happened following the previous three recessions and could be part of the reason why this recovery has been so weak, particularly when it comes to jobs. The government reported Friday that the unemployment rate fell slightly, to 8.2 percent in March, as the economy added 120,000 jobs, much fewer than had been expected.

Despite the government job cuts, more than 20 million people work in the public sector, making it a key part of the overall jobs picture.

In previous recessions, the public sector saw a percentage gain in jobs once the economy began to grow again, according to EPI’s analysis of government data. This time, there’s been a percentage loss.

Josh Bivens, the economist with EPI who compiled the data, said the biggest job losses this time have come from state and local governments. Those employers have had to deal with a drop in tax revenue, in part because of the housing bust, along with an increase in the need for social services and support programs such as unemployment insurance and Medicaid.

“States have two options when they’re faced with a looming budget gap: Raise taxes or cut spending, which means cutting jobs,” Bivens said. “It does seem like they’ve gone the spending cut route, judging from these numbers.”

The federal government also has cut jobs in certain sectors, such as the Postal Service, and faces the looming prospect of more cuts in areas such as defense. Overall, however, federal government employment is about the same as in mid-2009. The analysis excluded Census workers, who were hired temporarily by the government from late 2008 to late 2010.

There could be good news on the horizon for people want to get – or keep – a government job. In recent months, the pace of public-sector job losses has started to slow, and there has even been some net hiring in areas such as state and local education.

In the March unemployment report released Friday, there was a net gain in state government education jobs, but local education jobs recorded another drop from the previous month.

“The hope is that eventually this swings from negative to positive,” Bivens said. “I don’t expect it to continue to drag.”

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Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

The recession and drawn out recovery has prompted a lot of discussion about whether entitlement programs ranging from unemployment insurance to food stamps help people in need or keep people from helping themselves.

A recent analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which advocates for low-income families, offers some insight into that issue by showing who exactly is using these government benefits.

The answer: Mostly the 65-plus crowd, but also disabled people and working Americans.

Using the 2010 federal budget and U.S. Census data , the CBPP finds that 53 percent of all government entitlements are going to people who are over 65 years old.

Another 20 percent of the benefits went to disabled people, while 18 percent were going to people in a working household. The data was for the government’s 2010 fiscal year.

That means that 9 percent of entitlements went to people who were not elderly, disabled or living in a household in which someone had worked at least 1,000 hours in a year.

The analysis included Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, SNAP (otherwise known as food stamps), Social Security Insurance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the school lunch program, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the refundable component of the Child Tax Credit.

Taken together, that accounts for $1.8 trillion of the approximately $2.1 trillion in benefit costs the government paid out in the 2010 fiscal year, according to the researchers. The report said most of the remaining money went to federal and veteran retirement benefits, which it excluded from its calculation.

In addition, the report included about $130 billion in state funding for benefits such as Medicaid.

The main analysis did not include programs for which Congress must set funding levels each year, including low-income housing and energy assistance programs and WIC, which provides nutrition to low-income moms and young children. However, the authors said when they did the analysis with those benefits it didn't change the calculations substantially.

Of course, it makes sense that older Americans are getting a large chunk of benefits because that’s who Medicare and Social Security are aimed at.

Most of the 9 percent of payouts going to people who were not working, elderly or disabled were unemployment benefits, medical care payments, Social Security survivor benefits and payouts for people who opted to take Social Security between ages 62 to 64.

The report noted that there are likely others who would like to be getting government benefits but aren’t because there’s a limit to how much is given out for certain benefit programs.

U.S. Census Bureau

The U.S. Census Bureau this week released a report looking at what counties have the highest level of household income inequality. The counties in the darkest blue have the highest disparity.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the growing gap between rich and poor Americans. A new government report sheds light on where the gap is the widest.

In general the South is home to the biggest concentration of counties with high levels of household income inequality, according to a Census Bureau report released Thursday.

Sparsely populated East Carroll Parish, La., topped the list with the highest level of income inequality of any county under a formula that considers whether wealth is concentrated in just a few hands or more evenly distributed. It was followed by another small Southern county: Edwards County, Texas.

But income inequality is hardly limited to small, rural counties.

No. 3 on the list was New York County, N.Y., also known as the borough of Manhattan, a place where rich and poor famously live nearly side by side in many neighborhoods.

Overall the nation's biggest metropolitan areas tended to have elevated levels of income inequality, according to the report.

If you want to live in a place where there is a narrower gap between rich and poor neighbors, you may want to head to the middle of the country. Counties in the Midwest had much lower levels of household income inequality, according to the report.

Overall, household income inequality has grown by 18 percent since 1967, although the trend has slowed more recently, the report said.

The report was based on government household income surveys conducted between 2006 and 2010 that asked about income of all people ages 15 and older living in each household.

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U.S. Cenusu Bureau

Amid all the chatter recently about whether President Barack Obama is a “snob” for wanting Americans to be educated or Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorumis anti-education for critizing Obama, many may have missed an important milestone.

The Census Bureau reported last week that a record 30 percent of Americans ages 25 and older have at least a bachelor’s degree. The data, from March 2011, marks first time ever that such high a proportion of Americans have had at least a four-year degree, and it follows decades of gradually improving higher education rates.

In the long term, experts say, that’s good news for the U.S. economy. After all, the majority of the U.S. economy is service-oriented, and that means many Americans who want to get ahead need to find ways to succeed in white-collar settings. Many also believe a highly educated, innovative workforce is one of several key ingredients succeeding against global competitors.

“The future of the U.S. economy is not assembling the computer. The future of the U.S. economy is coming up with a novel design for a semiconductor that gets into a computer, that will then be assembled in some emerging economy,” said Adolfo Laurenti, deputy chief economist with Mesirow Financial.

And yet, such long-term thinking may not feel so great to the many Americans out there who have a degree but either don’t have the job they want – or don’t have a job at all.

The unemployment rate for college graduates, which stood at 4.2 percent in February, is half the unemployment rate for high school grads but still high by historical norms. Also, although a college degree also generally leads to much higher lifelong earnings, many young grads in particular are feeling squeezed these days by low starting salaries.

“(There are) people who are very disappointed that, yes, they can get a white-collar job but that does not imply the financial success that it used to imply for their father’s generation,” Laurenti said.

In addition, many are burdened by student loan debt from earning that degree.

Another issue that has slowly been gaining attention over the past few years is whether every kid should be aiming to go to college. Manufacturers in particular are increasingly complaining that they can’t find skilled workers to run the more complex, sophisticated factories that are now the norm in America.

These people are calling for a return to the type of vocational training that fell out of favor over the past few decades, amid a push to get more kids to go to college.

Laurenti, the economist, said he is tentatively encouraged by more discussion about how to provide that kind of training to keep those types of factories running. But he thinks high schools need to be doing more to help prepare kids who would do well in those type of skilled factory jobs.

“They are not much interested in people with a bachelor’s degree in political science, but it’s not enough to get people who drop out of high school, either,” he said.

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Bureau of Labor Statistics

Big companies are also the big heavyweights when it comes to employment, according to new data released this week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

About 46 percent of Americans who work for a private company are employed by a firm with 500 or more employees, according to the most recent BLS data from March of 2011. That translates into approximately 50 million workers, the BLS said.

About 28 percent, or 30.4 million Americans, are working for a company with 49 employees or less, while about 26 percent, or 28.3 million, are working for a company with 50 to 499 employees.

The big employers also have seen the biggest growth in employment over the past two decades, according to the BLS.

As of March of 2011, the smallest companies by employee size were employing about 11 percent more people than in April of 1990, according to the data. Employment at the mid-sized firms is up 13 percent over that time period, while the largest employers have seen employment jump by 29 percent.

“The small size class is fairly flat whereas a lot of the growth is coming in the large firms,” said Nathan Clausen, an economist with the BLS.

Clausen said it doesn’t appear that growth in the bigger companies is coming from small companies getting bigger. Although that happens, he said, it’s also true that larger companies get smaller. That means they’re basically canceling each other out.

Still, he said government economists are just beginning to take a more detailed look at the data, to try to figure out what's behind these trends.

Already, they are finding some interesting things.

For example, Clausen said, in the early 1990s the leisure and hospitality industry was dominated by smaller employers. But in the mid-1990s, larger employers quickly began dominating that industry.

That makes sense to anyone who travels regularly and has seen larger hotel and other chains become much more prevalent.

Clausen said the economists also noticed that during the Internet bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s, much of the employment growth came not from small employers but from large ones.

That may have been because the startups that got so much attention during that time were snapped up by big firms. Or it may have been because the small employers created a lot of business for the big ones by ordering their products and using their services.

Clausen noted that the data looked narrowly at jobs, so it’s not clear whether the startups were contributing more to the economy in other ways.

“Startups maybe were generating more income, but in terms of jobs … the jobs were being created not in the startups in the large companies,” he said.

Do you like the perks and advancement opportunities at big companies, or prefer the intimacy of a smaller employer? Share your thoughts on Facebook.

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Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

When it comes to churning out young workers with college degrees in math and science, the United States lags well behind other advanced democracies, ranking just behind Turkey and Spain, according to a new analysis.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development analyzed education rates in its member countries and found that the U.S. is below average in the relative number of 25- to 34-year-old workers who have a degree in so-called STEM fields such as science, engineering, computing and statistics.

That’s a potential problem because research has shown that innovation in any economy depends on how many workers have such degrees, said Ronald Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute.

“It is something that we should be concerned about,” Ehrenberg said

There are about 1,472 math and science grads for every 100,000 employed 25- to 34-year-olds in the United States, according to the data. The compares to more than 3,555 in Korea, which leads the chart, according to the OECD figures based on 2009 data.

The United States falls between Spain and Iceland on the chart, and is noticeably lower than the OECD average. The figures do not reflect how many people with STEM degrees are actually employed in their field or using the skills they learned.

Jobs available for graduates with degrees in math, science and engineering tend to pay well, said Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce. But there are plenty of ways in which American culture dissuades its most promising kids from going into those fields.

For starters, many young Americans believe they can make more money with a degree in a business, finance or a related field, Carnevale said. Americans also seem to place more value on jobs in those fields.

“(If you’re) a smart high school kid, doing well, your image of what you want to do is not to wear a white smock every day and sit on a stool with a beaker,” Carnevale said. “You’re in a culture that drives you toward more convivial and more social kinds of work, and it pays better.”

Young Americans may also not be getting enough exposure to math and science, said Cornell’s Ehrenberg.

At the K-12 level, he said, it can be tough to recruit great math and science teachers because college graduates who specialize in those areas can probably find better-paying work outside teaching.

In addition, some students may have a hard time finding the right role models in college math and science departments, said Ehrenberg, who noted that many science and math faculties are dominated by white and Asian men.

Ehrenberg said many colleges and universities have tried to recruit faculty from more diverse backgrounds and to develop more family-friendly policies to retain women and non-traditional students in the fields.

“I think role models do matter,” Ehrenberg said.

For now, at least, Carnevale said many companies are simply poaching talented young science and math graduates from other countries. But as those countries ramp up their own businesses, that may be tougher to do.

Still, he said it also may be hard to fight the biases that have come to value lucrative non-scientific fields such as finance and law.

“A labor market is a social institution as well as an economic one,” he said.

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Bureau of Labor Statistics

We already know that one key way to make more money and stay employed is to get more education.

Now a new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics adds another piece of evidence that it usually pays off, literally, to shoot for that master’s degree or higher.

The BLS this week released a detailed forecast for how it expects the job market to change in the current decade (the '10s?).

Among the findings: Jobs that require some sort of postsecondary degree for entry are expected to grow at the fastest clip from 2010 to 2020.

The report found that jobs that require a masters’ degree or more are projected to grow by 21.7 percent over that decade, to a little more than 2.4 million total jobs, compared with just 12.2 percent growth in jobs that require only a high school diploma.

The number of jobs that require a doctoral or professional degree will grow by 19.9 percent, to nearly 5.3 million, while the number that require a college degree is expected to grow 16.5 percent to a total of 25.8 million.

Despite the higher rate of growth, there will still be fewer total jobs requiring those advanced degrees, and many more that just require a high school degree.

The BLS predicts that by 2020 about 69.7 million jobs, or nearly 43 percent of the total, will only require a high school diploma to get in the door.

Of course, plenty of people who are college educated are working as baristas, store managers and other positions that may not require a college degree.

Overall, the Labor Department expects about 20.5 million new jobs to be created between 2010 and 2020 as the job market picks up steam after a deep recession and weak early recovery. Last year the economy created about 1.6 million new jobs, according to preliminary figures.

Many of the net new jobs to be added in coming years will be in health care and social assistance fields, reflecting our aging population and increased medical needs.

Other industries expected to see big job growth will be playing catch-up from the recession. For example, the outlook calls for about 1.8 million new construction jobs to be created in coming years, making it one of the sectors with the highest job growth. But the BLS notes that even if the projections are correct and construction employment reaches nearly 7.4 million, that will be fewer jobs than before the recession began in 2007.

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Do you think it pays to get a graduate degree or higher level or education? Share your thoughts on our Facebook page.

John Schoen, msnbc.com

Manufacturing accounts for 9 percent of the U.S. workforce, compared with 28 percent in 1960 and 12 percent just a decade ago.

President Barack Obama is on the road this week touting a plan to bring jobs back to the United States, in part by bolstering manufacturing here.

It’s no secret that’s a tough challenge.

The United States has lately seen an increase in manufacturing jobs, something Obama noted in his State of the Union address Tuesday. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 330,000 manufacturing jobs have been created over the past two years, bringing the total to nearly 11.8 million as of December.

Still, that is a nearly 2 million short of the 13.7 million manufacturing jobs that existed when the economy went into recession in December 2007. And it’s far fewer than in the late 1970s, when more than 19 million Americans -- out of a much smaller work force -- were employed in manufacturing, which was seen as a key path to a middle-class life.

Manufacturing may be bouncing back, but it is returning in a far different form. The recession washed out many inefficent companies, leaving behind operations that even leaner and more highly automated. That means they can make do with fewer workers even as they increase production.

As a recent series of stories in The New York Times has highlighted, successful companies like Apple have prospered largely by mastering a global supply chain that depends on sending work overseas to take advantage of low-cost labor.

Obama is hoping that tax breaks and other incentives will help encourage manufacturers to keep jobs here, or even bring some back. Time will tell whether that is true.

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