STARs are workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes rather than through a four-year college degree.
Over the past four decades, income inequality grew significantly between workers with bachelor’s degrees and those with high school diplomas (often called “unskilled”). Rather than being unskilled, we argue that these workers are STARs because they are skilled through alternative routes—namely their work experience.
In this paper, we contribute to this literature by calculating a dissimilarity index to examine racial occupational segregation between 1980 and 2019, comparing Black and white workers with and without bachelor’s degrees and by developing a Monte Carlo simulation, where we compare the observed levels of segregation to predicted levels of racial occupational segregation by education under race-neutral conditions.
In today’s dynamic labor market, apprenticeships are a vital tool for employers to find diverse, skilled talent for their hard-to-fill roles. They’re also on the rise: 40% of all occupations with registered apprenticeships are new since 2010, even expanding into jobs where paid training had been rare. Increasingly, employers are also creating programs on their own to meet their specific requirements.
“STARs upend long-held conventions about which workers we call ‘skilled.’ We believe that a better understanding of STARs has massive implications for employers managing the skills gap, for policy-makers who want to improve labor market outcomes, and for the millions of Americans who, it turns out, have the potential to thrive in higher-wage work. A community of scholarship is needed to accelerate the work about this talent pool.”
Dr. Erica Groshen, Former Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Chair,
Opportunity@Work STARs Insights Advisory Panel
