Here are three reports you should know about this month.

1. Manufacturing is the top industry for good jobs for workers without a bachelor’s degree in 35 states. But the industry is shifting. Workers with postsecondary education now outnumber workers with a high school diploma or less in the manufacturing industry, according to a report from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce. Automation, globalization and a more networked economy have paralleled a shift in worker education requirements. Workers with a high school diploma or less declined from 79 percent of the manufacturing workforce in the 1970s to just 43 percent in 2016. Over the same period, the share of the manufacturing workforce with some college education but no degree grew to 26 percent, and the share of workers with bachelor’s degrees grew to 30 percent.
2. In the last year, more than 1 million Direct Loan borrowers entered default. In a new report, The Institute for College Access & Success (TICAS) explores the latest federal data on student loan delinquency and default. Students who are single parents, Black, first generation, independent, and who have family incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level are all less likely than their peers to graduate and more likely to default. A higher number of those who default also attended a for-profit institution.  Another finding is that borrowers with higher debts are actually less likely to default. Borrowers with less than $10,000 in federal undergraduate loans are about 50 percent more likely to experience default than those with total debt of at least $10,000.
3. After a slowing down of enrollment decreases over the past few years, new national figures show that spring-to-spring enrollments this year took a tumble. Enrollments at public two-year colleges dropped 3.4 percent this spring, a significant drop from the 2.0 percent decrease in spring-to-spring enrollments between 2017 and 2018, according to a National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) Research Center report. Public two-year colleges saw a 2.5 percent drop in spring 2017 enrollments and a 3.3 percent dip in spring 2016. Enrollments for students under age 18 continued to rise, however, even though the numbers were small.