Employment-Population Ratios for Men Ages Twenty to Thirty-Four with Less Than a High School Degree, 1980 to 2008

Conventional data sources indicate that less than 42 percent of black male dropouts were employed on any given day in 2008—a drop of over 20 percentage points since 1980. As bleak as these numbers may seem, this figure shows that including inmates in estimates of employment-population ratios suggests that employment rates among young, black, low-skill men have actually fallen by more than 50 percent since 1980.

Source: Author's calculations of data from Pettit, Sykes, and Western (2009)
Pettit, Becky, Bryan Sykes, and Bruce Western. 2009. "Technical Report on Revised Population Estimates and NLSY-79 Analysis Tables for the Pew Public Safety and Mobility Project." Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University.