Today’s Daily Data Discussion will focus on markets with the strongest health and education section employment in the country, at least in terms of the markets that we’re studying and tracking in our database. 

As always, a reasonable question would be to ask why think about this sector’s employment numbers?  Surely you heard the very sobering employment numbers last week, and the prognostications of the pundits suggesting that the employment picture is likely to get worse.  We for the most part agree that employment overall will likely get worse as the economy demonstrates more and more evidence of recessionary behavior.

Interestingly employment in the health and education sector has continued to grow, and most markets around the country have very robust employment in education and health.  In the markets we study, on average 14.9% of total market employment is in this sector.  While it would be foolish in today’s economy to declare any sector “recession-proof”, due to the nature of the jobs in the sector it is probably fair to say most of these jobs are “recession-resistant”. 

It should be noted when thinking about this sector that in some markets with large universities and university health centers those employees are counted in this sector, though in other markets those same types of employees are counted in the government employee sector. 

Here are the markets in our database as of today with the highest percentage of employees in the education and health sector (calculated as a percentage of total employment in the market) –

1)  Columbia, MO  42.9%
2)  Iowa City, IA  42.8%
3)  Rochester, MN  38.9%
4)  Charlottesville, VA  38.5%
5)  Hattiesburg, MS  29.3%

Database Average:  14.9%
Database Median:  13.8%

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at markets with the lowest percentage of total employment in the education and health sector.

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