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The Outlook for College Graduates by Mark Mittelhauser page 4 Educational upgrading. Many of the new openings created by growth reflect a related phenomenon - educational upgrading. When organizations restructure or change, they rely on workers in certain occupations to assume new responsibilities. As a result of a reduction of the number of middle managers, for example, firms have shifted some managerial responsibilities to other workers. One result of this trend is that some workers classified as secretaries may now be training new employees, performing research, or working with spread-sheets - tasks often associated with skills developed in college. Along with the new duties may come new titles, such as administrative assistant or administrative aide, but these workers might still be counted as secretaries in government surveys. As educational requirements are upgraded, subsequent job openings are considered to be new openings in college-level jobs.
BLS estimates educational upgrading by tracking changes in educational attainment for occupations which require college degrees. For most of these occupations, including professional specialty, technician, nonretail sales, and executive, administrative, and managerial occupations, projections of educational upgrading are developed by analyzing the trend of college-educated workers in each occupation. For the remaining occupations with college-level jobs, such as farm managers, secretaries, and police and detectives - those in which it is not assumed college-educated workers need a degree to perform their jobs - estimates are based on analyses of trends in CPS surveys which track degree requirements for each occupation. Of the 750,000 college-level job openings projected to arise annually between 1996 and 2006 due to economic growth, about 160,000 - 1 in 5 - will result from educational upgrading. This is significantly lower than during the previous 10-year period, in which 250,000 openings were estimated to have arisen annually due to upgrading. Occupational distribution of upgrading is the major reason for this downturn. Upgrading is occurring slowly in the occupational groups that include most college-level jobs, while groups with relatively few college-level jobs are increasingly producing more job openings for college graduates. For example, marketing and sales and administrative support occupations are projected to provide 40 percent of openings due to upgrading between 1996 and 2006, yet these 2 groups supplied only 13 percent of college-level jobs in 1996.
Replacement openings. Replacement openings are job openings that arise as workers leave the labor force to retire, take a break, return to school, or raise a family. By leaving the labor force, these workers create openings for other college-educated workers. BLS uses data on age distribution and labor market behavior to develop net replacement rates; these rates are used to estimate the number of openings resulting from separations each year and to project the number of labor force entrants needed to replace workers who leave the labor force. Replacement openings will be an important source of college-level job openings as the baby-boom generation enters age groups with higher rates of retirement. The number of expected openings arising annually from replacement needs is projected to increase from 219,000 over the 1986-96 period to about 380,000 annually between 1996 and 2006 (See chart 4). Openings due to replacement needs are expected to mirror the distribution of college-level jobs across major occupational groups. Professional specialty and executive, administrative, and managerial occupations will account for about four of every five replacement openings, while other openings will be distributed across the remaining occupational groups.
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