At year-end for workers, it’s ho ho ho hum
Nonfarm payroll jobs decreased in November to 315,000—a drop of more than 1,000 jobs since January. But the total number of employed Vermonters, both payroll workers and those who are self-employed, has held steady for most of 2016, up less than 1 percent since the start o
f the year.
Race matters
Newly released U.S. Census data show that nearly a quarter of black Vermonters live in poverty, as do 20 percent of those who check two or more races on the Census form. More than a quarter of the 1,900 American Indians and Alaska Natives in Vermont are poor—the highest percentage of any category. The poverty rate is lowest for white Vermonters: 11 percent. Although the sample size for nonwhites is small, the estimates take in five years of data, increasing the reliability of the picture.
More college degrees
More Vermonters had high school diplomas in 2015 than a decade earlier. Since 2005, the proportion of Vermonters without a high school degree has shrunk, while the share with a four-year college degree has grown. The U.S. as a whole has also seen improvement in both the share completing high school and those finishing college, but Vermont remains better educated than the nation.
