Job Stability Polarization by Education Group in the U.S., 1996 to 2022
Michael Lachanski, Penn Demography/Sociology
2/3/2025 at 4 pm
Sociology Conference Room (McNeil 367) or listen in via the E&I Zoom link.
I take a demographic approach to examine changing job stability across education groups in the context of the 21st century U.S. Summary measures for the length of a job, i.e. expected tenure at hiring (ETAH), and tenure-specific decompositions of these measures, analogous to those commonly used in the study of human mortality, are estimated for the 1996 – 2022 period. I find that ETAH increased modestly for the population-as-a-whole. However, this modest increase conceals a substantial divergence in ETAH for the BA and non-BA education groups. ETAH increased for BA-holders of both sexes, but stagnated for non-BA males and actually fell for non-BA females. Most of the increase in ETAH after 2013 for the college educated was attributable to a reduction in job separation hazard in the first year on the job. Changing job displacement patterns do not appear to drive these dynamics.