SAWT BEIRUT INTERNATIONAL

| 11 December 2024, Wednesday |

Pandemic has more devastating impact on less-educated Americans, Fed survey shows

A report released on Monday by the Federal Reserve showed that coronavirus pandemic had a more disastrous impact on Americans with lower levels of education and those least equipped financially to handle such a blow.

The financial gap between adults with a bachelor’s degree and those with less than a high school degree widened during the pandemic, which caused job losses that disproportionately affected low-wage workers, according to the U.S. central bank’s annual Survey of Household Economics and Decision making.

“Even as the economy has improved, we can definitely see that some are still struggling, especially those who lost their jobs and those with less education, many of whom fell further behind,” Fed Board Governor Michelle Bowman said in a statement.

Some 89 percent of adults with at least a bachelor’s degree said they were doing at least “okay” financially, compared to 45 percent of those with less than a high school degree, according to the survey, which was conducted in November 2020. That gap increased to 44 percentage points in 2020 from 34 percentage points in 2019.

The divide also played out along racial lines, although to a lesser extent. Less than two-thirds of Black and Hispanic adults said they were doing at least “okay” financially in 2020, compared with 80 percent of white adults and 84 percent of Asian adults. The gap between white adults and Black and Hispanic adults has grown by 4 percentage points since 2017.

The overall share of adults who said they were worse off financially when compared to a year earlier rose to nearly 25 percent at the end of 2020, from 14 percent in 2019.

But despite that increase, most Americans believed they were still at least doing “okay” financially. Some 75 percent of adults said they were living comfortably or doing “okay” financially in November, a share that fluctuated throughout the year but ended at the same level as in 2019.

The survey indicated that some parents were unable to work during the pandemic because of disruptions to child care and in-person schooling. Some 9 percent of parents said they were not working and 13 percent were working less because of such disruptions as of November. That amounted to a decline of roughly 2 percentage points in the share of adults who were working overall.

    Source:
  • Reuters