Education Jobs Update: Friday, June 2023

4 graphs on the state of the education labor market

Happy National Donut Day to all who celebrate.

It’s also the first Friday of the month, which labor economists call “Jobs Friday.” It’s when the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes their monthly report on “The Employment Situation” across the U.S. To add a cherry on top, earlier this week the BLS released its monthly Job Opening and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) data.

For my purposes today, I’m going to walk through the latest BLS data as it pertains to education, especially public education jobs.

Up first: what I like to think of as the recovery graph. This shows how public K-12, public higher ed, and private-sector day care providers are recovering from the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The graph starts in February 2020, just before the job losses began to hit. Private day care providers suffered the steepest job losses, amounting to a 36% decline in just a couple of months.

The public education sector suffered smaller declines of around 9%, but their recovery has been slower.

As of the latest May data, public K-12 is still down 1.5% (117,000 fewer jobs), public higher ed is down 3.2% (83,000 jobs), and child day care providers are down 4.8% (50,000 jobs).

When you look at this graph, remember two things: 1. These numbers count all employees equally, whether they’re a part-time cafeteria worker or a full-time classroom teacher; the count of “full-time equivalent” (FTE) employees declined by a smaller amount. And 2. Student enrollment levels have fallen even faster than employment numbers, meaning we currently have more employees per student than we did coming into the pandemic.

The next graph shows the same recovery trajectory, but it compares local public education (K-12 school districts) versus employment in all other types of local government. In education we tend to lose sight of comparisons like these, but this graph is an important reminder that local governments have been operating pretty similarly, whether that’s in education or not (think of police and fire departments, parks, libraries, etc).

That’s a nice segue to the next two graphs.

In education, we’ve been very focused on “teacher shortage” stories and the growing gap between how many people school districts are able to hire versus how many they would like to hire.

In fact, this gap actually started to emerge prior to the pandemic. You can see it in the graph below. Job openings (in red) in public education used to be just slightly above new hires (in green), but that gap has been widening over time.

Unfortunately the BLS JOLTS data lumps together all public education, including K-12 and higher ed. That super-sector represents about 10.4 million workers as of the most recent data. Within that total, K-12 makes up about three-fourths of it (7.9 million) and higher ed represents the remainder (2.5 million.) K-12 classroom teachers are the largest single component of the larger group.

From this national data, we can’t tell which roles are the most in-demand or which ones are the easiest or hardest to fill. (For questions like these, I’d recommend checking out Dan Goldhaber and his team’s work on teacher hiring trends across Washington state.)

Still, we do know that it’s a very tight labor market generally speaking. Unemployment rates are low and the prime-age employment rate is hovering near all-time highs. There isn’t a deep bench of unemployed people out there waiting around to find a job.

To get some perspective on the magnitude of the labor shortages in education, the graph below adds in the job openings and hire data for other state and local government employers. It has the same lines for public education as above, and the graph is on the same scale, but this time I’ve added in dotted lines to show the job openings and hiring rates for other non-education state and local government employers.

As you can see, education is far from unique in facing labor shortages. In fact, the labor shortages we read about in public education are much smaller than what other sectors of government are facing.

Like these charts? Have other questions that you’d like me to tackle? Leave comments or send me an email at chad-dot-aldeman-at-gmail.com.