This is an insightful article that reflects the nuances of current unemployment issues, but there is more to it than the summary would suggest that education would actually take care of the current deficit.



If one looks at the data, the labor force participation rate is lower than the long term average; the employment to population ratio is also steadily declining, while the participation rate of those aged above 55 years has been steadily growing and is now projected to touch a whopping 23% as per this report (http://www.prb.org/pdf08/63.2uslabor.pdf).



Alan Blinder's study suggests that off-shoring has the potential of shifting 30 million U.S. jobs, which was done in 2007; it needs to be seen in today's light whether this continuing import of labor is really beneficial for greater prosperity of America. The labor content of this import has moved from extreme brown collar jobs to extreme white collar jobs in recent times, which makes the problem even more complicated.



But the real question is the current mismatch between what the students are pursuing to study and take up as a career and what jobs are created in America by the corporate sector. This mismatch problem is not easy to solve as the economy could be shifting from manufacturing/service to a more specialized service sector with high content of financial services and then also come back to specialized manufacturing/other service, whereas it takes time to catch up when these shifts happen.



Procyon Mukherjee