A college degree is generally a good bet, but it’s not enough to protect you from poverty.

The Census Bureau’s annual report on income and poverty released Wednesday highlights this depressing fact. Among bachelor’s degree recipients, roughly 3.6 million or 4.8% were living in poverty in 2017, according to the Census Bureau. That’s up from 3.3 million and 4.5% in 2016. Bachelor’s degree recipients were the only educational cohort to see the number or the share of people in poverty rise among their ranks.

It’s still too early to tell whether the uptick in bachelor’s degree recipients living in poverty is a true trend or a statistical blip. The 0.3 percentage point increase in the share of college-educated Americans in poverty is about the same as the report’s margin of error for that finding. Still, “this is something we want to watch,” said Doug Webber, an economics professor at Temple University.

What’s more, the mere fact that millions of college-educated Americans are living in poverty adds another data point to the increasingly complicated picture of a college degree’s value in the labor market. On the one hand, a degree is more necessary than ever to succeed in today’s economy — those with a bachelor’s degree or above are the least likely to be in poverty, according to the Census Bureau; on the other hand, getting a degree still involves some risk.

“While workers with a college degree in general have lower unemployment rates, higher earnings, lower poverty rates and, on average, they have much better outcomes, those are averages,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “It’s a worthwhile reminder that there are people with college degrees that are living in poverty — they can’t find a job with good wages, they can’t find a job at all.”……more here