Charts of the week: Non-working men, for-profit education, generic drugs

Click on the links or on the charts to go to the full research.

23% of non-working prime-age men live in cities

While much of the rhetoric in recent elections have focused on rural job loss and unemployment, a report from Alan Berube in the Metropolitan Policy Program shows that cities contain more out-of-work men than other types of communities. “An estimated 2.9 million non-working males ages 25–54 lived in big cities in 2010–2014,” Muro explains.

NEARLY HALF of students enrolled in for-profit institutions of higher education are over 30

Research from the Hamilton Project at Brookings details how, in 2015, 3.5 million students over the age of 30 were enrolled in undergraduate degree programs. Almost half of students at for-profit institutions are over 30. “Enrolling in an institution of higher education as an adult—after spending a year or more working an entry-level job, in response to job loss, or to reskill for a changing economy—can be a valuable human capital investment.”

GENERIC DRUGS COMPRISE 89% of the US Drug Market

A joint paper from the Center for Health Policy and the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at Brookings highlights the increasing prevalence of generic drugs in the pharmaceutical market. Projections show that, by 2020, “generics will comprise roughly 91 percent of U.S. prescriptions.”

Sam Dart contributed to this post.