Unemployment rate for one group - 15.7%; for other group - 4.7%. What's going on?
The Southern Education Foundation just released a new brief, Miles to Go - Mississippi, Pre-Kindergarten: Time to Begin, which documents the impact of education on poverty and which makes the case for Mississippi to establish a Pre-K program. The brief gives the adult unemployment rates in Mississippi by educational level, as follows:
high school dropout: 15.7%
high school/GED graduate: 10.6%
some college: 8.5%
bachelor's degree and higher: 4.7%
Those figures were as of December 2009. Education makes a huge difference even in distressed economic times.