More people in the Triangle are getting jobs as unemployment dropped significantly in August to its lowest point in about five years, The News & Observer reported Wednesday.

In July, the jobless rate was 7.2 percent, but has now fell to 6.6 percent in August—dropping to its lowest since November 2008, according to the N.C. Department of Commerce.

Michael Walden, professor of agricultural economics, said although the Triangle suffered because of the recession, unemployment has continued to improve since 2010.

“The triangle has the exact kind of economy that will do well in the future,” Walden said. “It is primarily an economy based on higher education. There’s a constant flow of graduates, and businesses love that. There’s a perfect marriage between the kinds of businesses that’ll thrive in this kind of economy and the type of workforce available.”

Walden said there is still room for improvement, but plenty to be optimistic for.

“At one point in the 1990s, the unemployment rate was below two percent,” Walden said. “So we’re in the six’s, which is still high by our standards, but we are rapidly going in the right direction. The triangle will likely add around 30,000 jobs, the unemployment rate will continue to go down, and I think we could easily be in the low five percent rate sometime next year.”

David Zonderman, professor and associate department head of history, said while the Triangle and other metropolitan areas in the state continue to improve, other areas in the state continue to suffer from stagnant growth and high unemployment.

“We’re not immune to the national economy,” Zonderman said. “As the national economy is slowly recovering, North Carolina’s will slowly improve too. What I’m more concerned with is, is there a way to improve quicker, and get unemployment numbers in other parts of the state down? The farther eastern and western parts of the state are much more agrarian, and don’t have large research universities and research campuses, so their economies are much slower to change and slower to grow.”

Zonderman said that he is also concerned with some of the recent tax restructuring—cutting corporate income taxes and creating a flat individual tax rate. He said that it will not necessarily translate into jobs.

“We’ve got 30 years of evidence that if you give rich people tax breaks, they aren’t going to necessarily go out and create jobs,” Zonderman said. “When corporations look at which state to move to, the corporate tax rate is only one thing they consider; there’s much more they look at.”

Zonderman said the state should instead increase public investments in universities, public schools, roads and other infrastructure projects, as these are all critical factors which major corporations take into consideration when deciding whether or not to open their doors up to workers in North Carolina.

 “Anyone who knows [the Research Triangle Park] knows that it didn’t fall from the sky and someone just didn’t throw a dart at the map,” Zonderman said. “People here in North Carolina were smart enough to go to corporations saying ‘if you come here, we’ve got cheap land, and we’ve got cheap land smacked between three research universities.” There’s nowhere else in the state that can make that conjunction of three research universities within half an hour’s drive from each other.”

The state’s other metro areas have also made significant headway in improving unemployment.