Black people will never thrive until we dismantle the racist white cisgender patriarchy that rules society!
(Edit: Sorry for the off topic drivel - this post was entirely tongue in cheek, please don’t mistake me for some kind of social justice warrior)
White kids with college degrees are just as downwardly mobile in NC, so your argument that suggests this is some kind of pandering social issue looks pretty suspicious.
The sad fact is NC has the worst median income for any 4 year college grad in the country, and the cost of living is higher than many other states, so millennials and zoomers often will be much are better off financially going somewhere else.
Where do you see NC has the worst median income of any state? That’s hard to believe.
I too would like to see that data, but I’d also wonder what the context is relative to the sort of colleges from where the degrees are awarded. I doubt that Duke, UNC, NC State, and other upper tier public & private universities in NC have the lowest salaries, but there are tons of colleges with not so stellar reputations conferring degrees across the state.
With a quick google search, I found this story that lists 2 of the 9 worst colleges in America as being in NC: Fayetteville State & Shaw.
Yes, the only way that stat could ever be true is if it’s because NC just has so many colleges compared to other states.
https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-Bachelor-Degree-Salary-by-State
Here you go: 50th out of 50 with a median salary of 46,000.
“Because we have so many colleges compared to other states…”
NC is middle of the pack in terms of overall percentage of people with college degrees, so that doesn’t hold up.
And no, NC does not have the lowest median salary overall, just for 4 year degrees. Post-grads and those without a college degree are doing better than some places.
There’s a nuance to this report that I didn’t understand when the link wasn’t yet provided to read. It’s not that the graduates of NC 4 year colleges aren’t prepared to earn more; it’s that the jobs offered in NC to 4 year degree holders is lowest. Hmm???..and NC is Forbes’ best place to do business…No wonder, NC businesses pay their new graduate employees worst in the nation. What’s better for business than low labor costs? Getting a cheap, highly educated employee, sounds like a wet dream for an employer.
How on earth did St. Augustines not make this list?
With the qty of graduates, why pay more?
That isn’t my opinion but, we need more demand for the pool of graduates to get the pay higher.
Yes, graduates of NC colleges are doing better on average, because many of them are not living here.
The allure of NC in the past half century has been the cheap, exploitable workforce that is still highly skilled.
“With the pool of graduates”
And yet NC is nowhere near the state with the highest number of college grads. The states with the highest percentage of college grads tend to pay their grads better–even adjusting for cost of living.
Just perusing the Bureau of Labor Stats site shows NC is above several states in median income for all occupations (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia). Now that’s all occupations, but spot-checking some individual occupation categories seems to confirm the gap remains similarly in most fields regardless of educational requirements.
There is perhaps somewhere in the massive government depository of stats that does break down state median-income by education attainment levels. Until then I wouldn’t worry about ziprecruiters.com.
Here is the BLS link: May 2020 State Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates
There is a lot of junk info on internet. Anyone can setup a website and claim to be an “expert” in any subject or make up data supporting any position. If you do not know a site is reliable then check other sources for related information that backs up the claims. Also if site is one you do not know, use Whois to check who owns the site and how long it’s been around. If something seems off (fishy) then need to do lot’s of research before repeating it. Use you logical mind not emotional mind.
“Everywhere you look, you find what you’re looking for”
My guess is that jobs posted for new grads in areas other than the Triangle, Metrolina, and the Triad probably pay a lot lower.
I have to be skeptical of the statistical weight of manually checking a half dozen occupations against a few other states, vs an aggregation of thousands of openings.
More dire news that corroborates previous postings…
Charlotte experienced wage declines from 2014 to 2016. 3rd worst city on the list for downwards income mobility. This says nothing about the Triangle of course, but that is not a good sign. A similar series of rationalizations could be done with this of course. Perhaps it’s a change in the census area for the metro, adding poorer counties. That sort of thing happens when you go city by city. And since it’s household income it could simply be caused by the decline in relationships/marriage happening pretty much everywhere. Though, then the question becomes why is Charlotte doing so much worse while other states are making gains despite this trend? Etc. Etc.
Remember that Charlotte is heavily weighted in banking and it was hit particularly hard by the great recession. I don’t know that one can automatically assume that its proximity to the Triangle spells gloom and doom. Also, this article is from more than 3 years on data that is from nearly 5 years ago.
I gave the stats if you felt like checking. For fun I looked at Mississippi and NC. There were over 20 overarching categories of occupations ranging from Legal to Management to Installation, Maintenance, & Repair to Personal Services. In all the categories there was only one in which Mississippi had a higher median hourly salary: Farming, Fishing, & Forestry. It accounts for the jobs of less than one-half of 1% for either state.
Across-the-board, Mississippi jobs make less than their NC counterparts. Another example, of the over 30 manager subcategories ranging from CEOs to property managers, I think there were only 2 where Mississippi has a slight advantage (postmasters and education administrators not involved in preschool/elementary/secondary/post secondary administration). We are talking in job subcategories which may have a couple hundred people in the entire state. Suffice to say, I think the truth is probably not as dire as that website would have us believe.
There are many facets of handwringing we could engage in, because all of the tools we have to observe this phenomenon are somewhat crude. There are indeed plenty ways to cut the cake to make NC look better than the absolute poorest state–one with significantly fewer people with college degrees or advanced degrees–whose largest employer is Wal-Mart, while NC’s largest employer is the UNC system… having the 11th worst median household income among the states and some of the worst income mobility isn’t a performance to be proud of.
It is still an apples to oranges comparison, since one is a measure of open positions and one is a measure of all existing positions. NC could have pretty good legacy careers in STEM fields, but if the only new positions opening in recent years are time-limited, no benefits positions earning less than they did 20 years ago, and less than equivalents in other states, that can be easily obfuscated by older cohorts who came here from different states, and took a bigger income with them during the move.
