Beyond College For All: Career Paths for the Forgotten Half

Chapter 1. Pathways to Adulthood: Reversing the Downward Spiral of the Youth Labor Market

1 Chapter 1 Pathways to Adulthood: Reversing the Downward Spiral of the Youth Labor Market A crisis is emerging in the American labor market. Young people who do not get college degrees have been called the “forgotten half” because society offers them no way to enter adult roles (Howe 1988). They either experience enormous difficulty getting jobs or take dead-end jobs that offer low status, little training, and pay too low to support a family (Osterman 1980; Althauser and Kalleberg 1981; NAS 1984). Among new high school graduates, 26 percent of whites and 56 percent of blacks still had no job four months after graduating from high school (NCES 1993, 82). Moreover, another study found that most graduates who got jobs (58.3 percent) were only continuing the same dead-end jobs that they already held during high school (Nolfi 1978). Obviously, high school graduation does not give these students access to better jobs. Moreover, their difficulties do not end quickly, and their early problems may hurt their career many years later (D’Amico and Maxwell 1990; Lynch 1989). Even at age thirty, a large portion of high school graduates continue to hold low-paying, high-turnover jobs (Osterman 1995).1 College is often viewed as the solution. Like many political leaders, President Clinton urged all student to attend college, and high school officials in some communities have stressed college preparation, while dismantling vocational programs. This college-for-all approach has clearly had an impressive impact in raising students’ plans. A national survey finds that nearly all seniors (95 percent) plan to attend college (National Educational Longitudinal Survey, NELS 1992). Unfortunately, school officials who embrace college-for-all programs, 2 Beyond College for All rarely examine what happens to these students in subsequent years. Only 28 percent of young adults, age thirty to thirty-four, have a B.A. degree or higher, and another 8 percent have an associate’s degree (NCES, 1999, table 8). What happens to students between high school and age thirty? Instead of bragging about students’ high expectations, school officials should be considering the long-term effects of the college-for-all approach. We shall follow a cohort of high school seniors for ten years after their graduation to see which ones follow through on their educational plans and whether earnings benefits follow (see chapter 3, this volume). The youth labor market also poses difficulties for employers. Employers complain that high school graduates have poor basic skills in reading, writing, and mathematics, and that as a result they are incapable of handling good jobs (CED 1985; Marshall and Tucker 1993; NCEE 1983). Many employers are so concerned that they are providing basic skills education programs for their workers (Eurich 1985). These problems will become more serious because demand is projected to increase, particularly in jobs requiring the higher skills that youths lack, but the number of young people is not increasing. As one analyst (Howe 1988, 30) described the double-edged nature of the problem: “Unless workforce basic skills are raised substantially, and quickly, we shall have more joblessness among the least skilled, accompanied by a chronic shortage of workers with advanced skills.” Even in today’s strong labor market, youths still have difficulty in getting jobs with advancement opportunities, and employers have great difficulty in hiring workers with good skills and work habits. Many business and labor groups foresee “labor market disruptions” for some sectors of the economy. The projected skill shortage suggests that we can no longer afford such serious educational failure, nor can we squander the potential labor force contributions of new high school graduates in long periods of unemployment and aimless job turnover. Although the strong labor market reduces unemployment, it does not solve employers’ skill shortages, and it does not give unskilled youths good jobs that pay enough to support a family. Moreover, a strong labor market will not last forever. Even low unemployment rates do not solve the underlying difficulties of employers and youths. These problems are not inevitable; indeed, other nations have managed to avoid them. Germany and Japan have had dramatically lower youth unemployment rates than the United States over long periods of time (Hess, Petersen, and Mortimer 1994, 5; Hamilton and Hurrelmann 1994; U.S. Department of Education 1987). In addition, while Pathways to Adulthood 3 American youths were two and a half times more likely to be unemployed than adults in 1965, and...