The Coloradoan – BY ROBERT MOORE
The Fort Collins-Loveland area’s highly educated workforce is giving the region some protection against the skyrocketing unemployment plaguing the country, a CSU economist said.
The area’s unemployment rate reached a seasonally adjusted 6.4 percent in March, up from a revised 6.2 percent in February and the 3.9 percent rate a year ago, according to state figures released Friday.
By comparison, the state unemployment rate rose to 7.5 percent in March, the highest since May 1987, and the national rate was 8.5 percent.
The current economic crisis has disproportionately affected jobs that require lower education levels, so communities with higher education levels haven’t been hit as hard, said Martin Shields, the regional economist for Colorado State University and the Northern Colorado Economic Development Corp.
“This is a relatively high-education county. According to the Census Bureau, 41.6 percent of the county’s population 25-plus years of age has at least a bachelor’s degree. The U.S. rate is 27 percent,” Shields said.
“Nationally, the U.S. unemployment rate for people with a bachelor’s degree or more is about 4.3 percent. Compare this to the 10 percent rate for people with a high school degree but no college,” he said. “Simply put, places with higher education rates tend to have lower unemployment rates.”
Even though the Fort Collins-Loveland unemployment rate is comparatively low, the data released Friday contain some worrisome trends.
The state revised downward its estimate of nonfarm jobs in the Fort Collins-Loveland area for February to 134,500, or 400 fewer than previously estimated. That means the number of area jobs declined by 100 compared to February 2008, marking the first year-over-year decline in regional jobs in more than five years.
That trend continued in March, with a preliminary estimate of 135,300 nonfarm jobs, or 300 fewer than in March 2008. That included a loss of 900 jobs in the private sector, offset by a gain of 600 government jobs.
Shields also noted that the unadjusted unemployment rate – which doesn’t take into account historical seasonal hiring trends – continued to rise in February and March. In most years, the unadjusted unemployment rate peaks in January as holiday season jobs end and then begins to decline in the following months.
The seasonally unadjusted unemployment rate for Fort Collins-Loveland was 6.8 percent in March, up from 6.6 percent in February and 6.2 percent in January.
The area’s March seasonally unadjusted rate was the highest in 19 years of records maintained by the state, surpassing the 6.6 percent rate in January 1992.