Matthew Staver/Bloomberg News
High school students filling out job applications.
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
For this generation of young people, the future looks bleak. Only one in
six is working full time. Three out of five live with their parents or
other relatives. A large majority — 73 percent — think they need more
education to find a successful career, but only half of those say they
will definitely enroll in the next few years.
Multimedia
Charlie Riedel/Associated Press
The survey found that 16 percent of the classes of
2009-11 had full-time jobs. Graduates at Joplin High School in Missouri.
No, they are not the idle youth of Greece or Spain or Egypt. They are
the youth of America, the world’s richest country, who do not have
college degrees and aren’t getting them anytime soon.
Whatever the sob stories about recent college graduates spinning their
wheels as baristas or clerks, the situation for their less-educated
peers is far worse, according to a report from the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development
at Rutgers University scheduled to be released on Wednesday. The data
comes from a national survey of high school graduates who are not
enrolled in college full time, a notoriously transient population that
social scientists and other experts had been having trouble tracking.
(In the two months since the survey was conducted, a large share of
participants have had their phone numbers disconnected and could not be
reached.)
For this group, finding work that pays a living wage and offers some sense of security has been elusive.
“I want more money, and I really don’t like what I do,” said Walter
Walden, 24, of Wenatchee, Wash., one of the lucky members of this group
who has a full-time job, in this case, at a restaurant. “I had to go
back to school.” He now lives with his mother so he can take nursing
classes part time.
Workers just a few years younger than Mr. Walden have been thrust into a
daunting combination of a temporarily feeble economy and the
longer-term elimination of traditional middle-class jobs.
Americans who graduated from high school just before layoffs started to
swell — in this report, defined as 2006-8 — were having trouble making
ends meet. Just 37 percent employed were full time and another 23
percent were working part time, usually because they could not find
full-time work.
But among those who graduated after the financial crisis, the numbers
are far worse: only 16 percent of the classes of 2009-11 had full-time
jobs. An additional 22 percent were working part time, and most of them
wanted full-time work.
Despite the continuing national conversation about whether college is worth it given the debt burden it entails,
most high school graduates without college degrees said they believed
they would be unable to get good jobs without more education.
“If I ever want to get out of retail,” said Bethany McClour, 21, a
part-time worker at The Children’s Place clothing store in Medford,
Ore., “more education is definitely important.”
Getting it is challenging, though, and not only because of formidable debt levels.
Ms. McClour and her husband, Andy, have two daughters under 3 and
another due next month. She said she tried enrolling in college classes,
but the workload became too stressful with such young children. Mr.
McClour works at a gas station. He hates his work and wants to study
phlebotomy, but the nearest school is an hour and a half away.
“My mother is my day care,” Ms. McClour said. “We can’t move that far away.”
Others surveyed said college was out of reach because of the cost or family responsibilities.
Many of these young people had been expecting to go to college since
they started high school, perhaps anticipating that employers would
demand skills high schools do not teach. Just one in 10 high school
graduates without college degrees said they were “extremely well
prepared by their high school to succeed in their job after graduation.”
These young people worried about getting left behind and were
pessimistic about reaching some of the milestones that make up the
American dream.
More than half — 56 percent — of high school graduates without college
diplomas said that their generation would have less financial success
than their parents. By contrast, just 14 percent said they expected to
do better than their parents. (Another study from the Heldrich Center
found that recent college graduates were similarly pessimistic about whether their generation would surpass that of their parents.)
Many young people were just struggling to keep up with their parents.
When he graduated from high school last year, Harley Sproud, 18, started
working for the same construction company that employed his father. A
few months later, when the company ran into financial trouble, he was
let go.
“Thank God I had a buddy at Burger King who could help me out,” said Mr. Sproud, of Advance, N.C.
The frying-and-cleanup job did not exactly make full use of the skills
he learned last fall in a nine-week culinary class, but it was the best
opportunity he could find. He is now recovering from a car accident —
which required him to move back in with his parents, both for financial
and medical reasons — and is hoping to return to Burger King next month.
Like Mr. Sproud, many graduates are finding it difficult to track into
their desired lines of work. Among the group of high school graduates
surveyed by the Heldrich Center, just over half (56 percent) said they
believed they would find a “job that leads to a career” within the “next
few years.”
About the same share believed they would find work that offered health
insurance within that time frame. Slightly less than half of respondents
said the next few years would bring work with good job security or a
job with earnings that were high “enough to lead a comfortable life.”
They were similarly pessimistic about being able to start a family or
buy a home.
The online survey was conducted between March 21 and April 2, and
covered a nationally representative survey of 544 high school graduates
from the classes of 2006-11 who did not have bachelor’s degrees. The
margin of sampling error was plus or minus 5 percentage points.
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