Story highlights Demand for lower skilled workers is still down sharply, and that's tied to educational attainment, Jeffrey Sachs writes

More education, expanding the earned-income tax credit and raising living standards can help, he writes

Jeffrey Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) For those with a college degree or above, life is good. Jobs are plentiful, incomes are rising, inflation is low, health is broadly improving, and the impacts of the new information technologies -- from smartphones to e-commerce to ubiquitous information -- are generally beneficent.

For those without a college degree, the situation is starkly different. Earnings are low and often lagging behind inflation. Health conditions of less-educated whites have been deteriorating, with rising mortality from suicides, opioid addiction, and other kinds of substance abuse. It may not even pay to work, if the meager take-home pay reduces access to public benefits.

We can get a sense of the problem by looking not at the unemployment rate but at total employment relative to the total adult population. That ratio in June stood at 60.1%, meaning close to three of every five adults is working, still down sharply from the peak rate of 64.6% in early 2000. Millions of individuals without jobs are not looking for work, and are therefore not counted as unemployed.

We can get a sense of who those individuals are by looking at educational attainment. Among individuals whose highest educational attainment is a high school diploma, the employment ratio is only 54.9%. For those with a bachelor's degree or higher, the employment ratio is 72.1%. America's jobs crisis hits lower-skilled workers, essentially those with less than a bachelor's degree.

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