In any market with a glut of applicants, I would expect the unemployment gap to increase between more and less qualified employees, even if the extra qualifications are not necessary for adequate or even excellent job performance.
Any easily distinguishing characteristic that even vaguely correlates to the quality of a potential employee is going to be used to help narrow down the applicant pool to a more manageable number.
Yes. A PhD can work at Starbucks in a pinch, but a guy with skills sufficient only for manual labor can't take advantage of a software engineer shortage. So, even if you presume (wrongly) that employers place no value in skills un-necessary for the job at hand and instead choose randomly among applicants, this disparity would exist.
Yes it's low educational attainment and not the natural deleveraging of an over leveraged system combined with the govt spreading the risk to parties who did not participate in that risk, that is slowing the recovery.
The Dow is not going to hit 14,000 for a while unless we re-leverage to the same insane levels. There is no recovery, this is economic reality.
It's going to take a lot of hard work for the economy to actually reach the pre-2008 levels.
I'd suggest we use the great minds in finance to produce value instead of hocus pocus. The levels from which we are basing the recovery were not real. It is the result of producing money out of thin air, hence when everyone wants it back it is not there to give back. That has nothing to do with educational attainment and everything to do with fraud. Why there are no jobs is because the gov't borrowed our money and gave it to the people who ripped us off.
Any easily distinguishing characteristic that even vaguely correlates to the quality of a potential employee is going to be used to help narrow down the applicant pool to a more manageable number.