Eden Teichman, a sophomore at UNC-Chapel Hill, knew she needed to find a job by August.

Teichman wanted extra money to take some of the burden off her parents, who are paying for her college education.

Luckily for her, the job application process was easy. She says that the UNC-CH work-study database had hundreds of open jobs to choose from. She saw multiple listings on Facebook and heard from friends about jobs off-campus.

One of the available jobs peaked her interest the most: a studio art assistant at Morrison Dormitory. It took her two hours to apply for the job and one week to hear back from the employers.

She got the job. Her boss called her to tell her she was the No. 1 candidate.

“I was surprised with how easily it was to get a job, and how much after I got the job they helped set everything in place,” Teichman said. “With my other experiences, I had to go to over 10 different restaurants and have interviews, and it was harder than this. It just feels easier now.”

Teichman’s experience may be indicative of the falling unemployment rate in North Carolina recently.

The state’s unemployment rate dropped a notch to 3.9 percent in August, decreasing from July’s revised rate of 4.1 percent.

The rate, which was reported by the North Carolina Department of Commerce Sept. 21, fell 0.5 of a percentage point from last year’s rate.

This marks the steady decline in the unemployment over the last few years. The number is 5.2 percentage points away from the 9.1 percent in August 2012.

The drop in percentage of the North Carolina rate was echoed by the growth of nonfarm payrolls, which increased by 1,600 jobs from July to August, amounting to 4,525,600 jobs.

This growth is less than that of June to July, in which there was an increase of 10,400 jobs, resulting in 4,528,000 total jobs in state.

In August, there were gains in professional and business services jobs, followed by trade, transportation and utilities. These increases were by 4,900 and 1,800 jobs, respectively.

Michael Walden, an economist at N.C. State University and an author of several books on the state’s economy, said that professional and business service jobs is typically a big category when the economy is growing.

He said the takeaway of the state employment situation is the continued growth in not only high paying jobs, but also lower paying jobs like construction, hospitality and manufacturing.

“I think the most positive change in North Carolina is the increase we have seen in middle paying jobs” Walden said. “It’s important because we have seen the middle class shrink nationally. You usually can’t make the higher leap from low paying to higher. The fact that we are seeing expansion in the middle is good for income mobility.”

Walden also said the second big, positive change in the year was a somewhat reduction of the urban-rural divide.

“It refers to the fact that most of low growth job rate has been in metropolitan areas, like Charlotte,” Walden said. “Recently, there has been a big jump of jobs in rural areas. In metropolitan areas, the labor market is very tight and you have to look at a second market in rural areas. It’s very good that the job growth has been there last year.”

Despite its increase of jobs this month, the North Carolina unemployment rate is still higher than its neighbors, including South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Georgia. For example, South Carolina reported a rate of 3.4 percent and Virginia reported a rate of 3.0 percent.

The national rate remained unchanged at 3.9 percent. Last month, the North Carolina rate was higher than the national rate.

The U.S. unemployment rate has fallen to record lows in recent months, and North Carolina is mirroring this pattern. The lowest annual unemployment rate on record for the state is 3.2 percent, recorded in 1999.

Rita Balaban, an economics professor at UNC-CH, says that if the unemployment rate keeps falling below full employment, there may be cause of concern.

The current employment rate in North Carolina indicates that the economy has exceeded full employment. If unemployment falls too drastically, employers will need to compete to higher workers and push wages up too quickly. This will result in rising inflation.

Back in 2000, Balaban was working in Charleston, South Carolina. She said unemployment rate was about 2.2 percent. A lot of her students had jobs, and she wondered why they were working so much.

“They were like ‘it’s unbelievable out there,” she said. “They said ‘if you work in Banana Republic for two weeks, they give you a $500 signing bonus. The Gap was offering that, Williams-Sonoma was offering that, and all these different places were offering that.”

As a result, her students would work somewhere for two weeks, get their signing bonus and quit. Then the cycle would repeat. Her students were making “big bucks.”

“That’s what happens in an economy when unemployment gets too low,” she said. “There’s a big difference between that and 3.9, but that’s the danger of it. Anything less than that and it’s uh oh there is going to be a bidding war in terms of wages. Like a car going too fast down the highway— something is going to bust.”

Balaban says, as a result, most economists predict that there will be a recession in 2020.

“We need more incentives to keep the unemployment rate from falling much more,” she said. “It might sound awful but we should start tapping the breaks now, before we hit that wall.”

The next unemployment update is scheduled for Wednesday, Oct. 3, when the county unemployment rates for August 2018 will be released.