How the AP and Politifact Bungled the Young Graduate Unemployment Story
In April the Associated Press published a story that’s gotten a lot of attention from education activists. According to the AP, a quarter of all recent college graduates are unemployed, and another quarter are “underemployed” — working part-time jobs, or jobs that don’t require a college degree. Mitt Romney has incorporated this report into his campaign speeches, in a highly distorted version that claims, as he did in Wednesday’s debate, that “fifty percent of college graduates this year can’t find work.”
It’s a huge leap from 25% to 50%, of course, but the claim hasn’t gotten a lot of pushback — in part becauseback in May the Politifact website rated Romney’s version of the stat “Mostly True.”
I wrote all this up yesterday, along with a peek at the underlying data that concluded that it wasn’t just Romney who was misstating the facts, but that the AP had screwed up too, and that Politifact had made a bad call. Yesterday afternoon I reached out to the primary source for the AP analysis, Northeastern University
It’s a huge leap from 25% to 50%, of course, but the claim hasn’t gotten a lot of pushback — in part becauseback in May the Politifact website rated Romney’s version of the stat “Mostly True.”
I wrote all this up yesterday, along with a peek at the underlying data that concluded that it wasn’t just Romney who was misstating the facts, but that the AP had screwed up too, and that Politifact had made a bad call. Yesterday afternoon I reached out to the primary source for the AP analysis, Northeastern University