According to new analysis from the Burning Glass Institute think tank, the unemployment gap between non-college-educated and college-educated workers has shrunk. In fact, for non-college-educated workers, this may be the best job market in years. The news has been met with celebrations from the conservative and business press, and is being taken as evidence that Donald Trump’s economic strategy is working to benefit blue-collar workers. The trouble with this narrative is that it’s not true.

While unemployment rates for non-college workers are lower than they have been in decades, these workers are still in a much worse job market than their college-educated peers. Even the Wall Street Journal was forced to admit as much. In its news story, the paper sheepishly points out a “wrinkle” that complicates the exuberant reports: “On an absolute scale, it is still easier to find a job with a college degree.”

In fact, college-educated workers have an unemployment rate of around 2.7%, while workers without any college education have a rate of 4.7%. Worse, non-college-educated workers aren’t making more money compared to their college-educated counterparts. While it might be easier to find a job today than it was in the recent past, it’s just as likely to be a low-wage job. What was also buried in the widely lauded jobs report was the fact that over a third of the new jobs added were in low-wage sectors such as food service.

This enthusiasm for the jobs numbers is predicated at least partly on the mistaken view that as AI and other technology cannibalise office work, blue-collar employees will benefit. The college-educated wage premium has indeed crumbled in the last five years, but the wage chiselling of knowledge-workers hasn’t resulted in a hydraulic wage increase for manual workers. Overall, college-educated workers still command a substantial wage advantage, making on average 62% more per week than their hourly-waged counterparts. And that education-based wage gap is actually greater than it was 20 years ago. So much for the blue-collar boom.

There is an exception here among skilled trades: electricians, robotics technicians, wind turbine mechanics, solar panel installers, HVAC techs and the like. A wave of retirements has created a temporary labour shortage among select trades and this, combined with Joe Biden’s historic public investments in infrastructure and the massive privately-funded data centre build-out, has resulted in a wage jump. Skilled-trades workers have seen their wages increase by 30% in just the past four years. The problem is that neither the investment wave nor the retirement wave is set to last.

It is clearly a good thing that trades workers are seeing a wage hike, and it proves that it’s not as hard to raise blue-collar wages as elite economists insist. There just need to be big investments in the real economy. But with such a small pool of workers feeling those income gains, the broader economy will remain weak. As AI threatens to eliminate entry-level jobs for new college grads, a larger share of college-educated applicants will start to chase fewer jobs, putting downward pressure on the growth potential of the economy as a whole.

Without major structural changes, the most likely scenario is that the college wage premium will continue to slip away without any corresponding increase for the vast majority of manual workers. That would result in an even greater concentration of income at the very top, an even larger pool of workers — college- and non-college-educated alike — competing for fewer living-wage positions in the middle of the labour market, and an even greater share of discouraged workers at the bottom who opt to drop out of the job market entirely.

At the very same moment the business press declares a jobs boom for the blue-collar class, workers’ actual share of income sits lower than ever at 53%. Meanwhile, corporate profits’ share of GDP just hit a new record. The truth is that it’s not workers who are winning — it’s Wall Street. And if the loss of college-educated spending power isn’t replaced by an increase in aggregate demand, we’re not looking at a jobs boom at all, but staring down an economic bust.