The Relationship between College Attainment and Union Membership at the State Level, 2005-2019

M.P.P. ; Bachelor’s degree holders as a share of United States labor force participants grew steadily from 2005 to 2019. During this period, workers with at least some tertiary education became a larger share of the national workforce than workers with any other level of educational attainment. Over the same period, union membership at the national level declined. Relatively little research exists on the relationship between college attainment and union membership, although two recent studies analyzed this relationship at the individual level. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on union membership and from the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics on educational attainment, I perform a state-level analysis of the relationship between college attainment rates and union membership rates. My results suggest that there is a small and negative, though statistically insignificant, relationship between these variables at the state level within my sample as a whole. However, I find statistically significant evidence of a small, negative relationship between college attainment and union membership in states with high levels of manufacturing jobs.