I’m writing a report on the growth/decline of skilled and non skilled labor in the USA. The numbers for manufactoring jobs by educational atainment would be perfect for me, but I can’t seem to get them anywhere, or pull them out of the system. Any help would be appreciated.
IPUMS-USA provides microdata, which are representative of the actual population and can be used to produce estimates of actual population figures. Of interest to your research, the variable IND1990 records the Industry in which a person works (values 100-392 correspond to manufacturing), EMPSTAT indicates whether or not a respondent was currently employed at the time of the survey, and EDUC reports the highest year of school or degree completed. If you are unfamiliar with IPUMS microdata, these online tutorials and the FAQ page should help you get started.
If you simply need summary tables rather than microdata, the NHGIS project, which is also housed in the Minnesota Population Center, offers many of the Census summary tables going back to 1790 at several different geographic levels. While NHGIS is primarily focused on mapping data, the summary tables can be extracted independent of shape files as .csv files with optional descriptive headers.
Hope this helps.