Too Many Young People Left Behind
The article as it stood was long and enduring. I do not believe many of the readers at AB would complete it. What I did is grab the intro and three graphs to make the point of, we are not doing enough to educate a workforce. Labor that can meet the demands of the future. The nation is failing a large percent of its younger population. through a lack of education and adequate funding to provide for it.
Ok, I said it three times. Hopefully, you read it. “Rewrite.”
Present Economic Conditions and Post-secondary Education
Typical college costs (including tuition and fees, room and board, and allowances for books and supplies, transportation and other personal expenses) range from $27,330 for public in-state university students to $55,800 for private nonprofit college students (2019). This pricing or cost is still valid in 2024.
Grants and scholarships can relieve some of the financial distress. When taken into account, average net costs for tuition and fees at these kinds of schools are closer to $2,640 and $14,990, respectively.
The pandemic and recent increases in higher education funding may have slowed the speed of rising college costs. A recent report from Georgetown University highlights the growth in the gap between how much young workers make and how much they must pay to earn a college degree over the past several decades. The report, titled “If Not Now, When? The Urgent Need for an All-One-System Approach to Youth Policy,” breaks down seven trends that have made it difficult for workers to transition from education to the workforce since 1980.
The report; “Post secondary education policy fails to keep higher education affordable even as formal education beyond high school has become more essential. Today, two out of three jobs require post-secondary education and training. In the 1970s, three out of four jobs required a high school diploma or less. Yet while young people today need more education than ever to compete in the labor market, a college education is more expensive than in the past.”
By any stretch of reality, the system of educating our young people has failed and is failing people who need and seek a better education.
According to the researchers’ analysis of U.S. Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics and National Center for Education Statistics data for the years 1980 to 2019, college costs have increased by 169% over the past four decades. Earnings for workers between the ages of 22 and 27 have increased by 19%.
This has not changed in 2024 and has worsened.
Postsecondary education policy has failed to keep higher education affordable even as formal education beyond high school has become more essential.
The cognitive competencies in the workforce are generally a part of those with higher levels of education. Today, two out of three jobs require postsecondary education and training. In the past, three of four jobs in the 1970s required a high school diploma or less. Yet while young people today need more education than ever to compete in the labor market, a college education is more expensive than in the past.
Indeed, I would believe the costs of a college education have also outstripped the early-on earning potential. If forbearance or deferment is taken, the interest still accrues. In each case when payments restart, the payments go towards interest first until it is paid off. Long term delays in payment can make a loan difficult to pay.
The costs of higher education have risen rapidly over the past few decades, creating a cost barrier for many young people who wish to pursue a degree or credential (Figure 3). It was also possible to work one’s way through college. Today, college costs are generally too high, young people’s wages too low for working your way through college to be feasible. Consequently, more students have to take on larger amounts of debt in the form of loans to acquire a college degree.
Despite almost 40 years of continuous reforms in the K–12 system, there has been relatively little progress in making high school students’ college and career-ready.
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce
The K–12 system has adopted a college-for-all approach since the release of A Nation at Risk in Schools. The system has moved away from vocational education, which once provided workforce preparation for students who did not intend to go to college. Workforce preparation often became a dead-end track for low-income, Black, and Latino students.
Schools embraced the New Basics curriculum, which ensured more students would have the core academic background necessary for college enrollment. Yet despite the shift toward a college-preparatory curriculum, only 52 percent of high school sophomores attain a postsecondary credential within 10 years. While college enrollment rates have increased, the burden of workforce preparation has shifted to the postsecondary education system. The result left those who are unable to access or afford college even further behind. The median earnings of young adults with less education than a bachelor’s degree have declined over the past few decades, while the median earnings of young adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher have grown (Figure 5).
The collapse of the youth labor market has made it difficult for young people to attain high quality work experience.
Work experience is crucial for young adults, especially those who cannot access or complete post-secondary education. It is an important way for them to learn new skills and accumulate human capital so they can qualify for decent jobs that pay more than subsistence wages. Yet high-quality work experience is hard to find. In the 1970s, more than half of teenagers were working. In recent years, that share has been closer to a quarter.
Three recessions since the turn of the millennium—the burst of the dot-com bubble, the Great Recession, and the COVID-19 recession—have hit young workers particularly hard. Since 2000, the share of youth who are employed has declined considerably more than the share of prime-age workers who are employed (Figure 4). Even among those who can find jobs, many young people work in occupations such as food and personal services, sales, and administrative support. These occupations provide basic skills but not the higher-level general and technical skills that facilitate movement into good entry-level jobs
on promising career pathways.
Both youth labor policy and education policy have been hampered by fragmentation. Federal investment has not kept up with the growing need for services.
Different aspects of young people’s experiences are governed by different policy authorities and supported by different funding streams. The result is a fragmented approach to labor and education defined by multiple silos of policy and practice. Within education, pre-K–12 policy is governed separately from higher education policy, and labor policy operates in its own arena. Each institutional silo is subdivided into multiple silos of its own. The resulting patchwork quilt of policy and practice leaves big gaps between silos and is woefully inadequate to support young people as they navigate the many possible pathways across and within the education and training system and the workforce. In addition, public funding for education and job training has not kept up with the growing need for these services to support youth transitions to economic independence (Figure 6).
“The gap in college costs and earnings for young workers since 1980,” CNBC
Any mention in the report that Corporate America could alleviate the problem by training their own damn employees?
That would cost them money they don’t want to spend
Ten Bears:
Too late to train in the educational basics. It has to be done sooner.
@John,
A college degree does more for employers than just training. It certifies that the degree holder is a finisher. To carry a B average over four years with full loads of diverse subject matter, each of which must be completed on deadline, demonstrates qualities that are prized by many employers. Find the candidates with reliability, tenacity and stamina and the company can train them to the specific tasks.
John:
I believe the goal is to have well-rounded which goes well beyond the employer and should be done in school, grade through high school. Employers want people with a basic education. Math – 3 years, English – 4 years, History – 2 years, geography, etc. They were abandoning the basics when I left high school with 4 years of Math, the same on English which included writing and literature, History and Social studies, etc.
Having gone to college and university late in life and an academic ‘career’ such as it was through the oughts and teens, my observation is sometime around nineteen ninety post-secondary education became a for-profit industry. At least at the undergraduate level, cranking out functionally literate bachelorettes capable of operating 21st century technology without understanding how it works
Think about it: the bankers got involved and for now un-named politicians fucked us …
K-12 has to aim higher. The comment of college demonstrating that the individual is a “finisher” is valid and should be transferred downstream to where finishing 12 is a compelling demonstration of finishing. It would be a huge benefit to society if a K-12 education provided real competition to the credentials of a basic college degree.
@Eric,
I agree. Given that school systems are locally controlled and locally financed, how to you propose to make that happen?
Not sure, but possibly a quick step to start out with would simply be stricter grading. Maybe we discover the K-12 is pretty good for those that actually master the top-level material. The shock and outrage of a higher cohort of failed students might galvanize everyone involved not to let things slide in the earliest grades. Sure there has to be other stuff, but “honest measuring” would help.
@Eric,
Sure. That would work if there weren’t any taxpayer parents who object to their golden child being held back, and the teacher and principals didn’t have to answer to the school board. Lots of parents don’t give a shit about “honest measuring,” they just want junior to get the diploma. Politics matters, and all politics is local.
College is where those kids fail. College doesn’t care.
The word “possibly” is doing all the work in that first sentence. How does your model work here in the real world?
I do agree that these can be obstacles, it would not be universal by any means. My parental experience in 3 systems now is that the systems committed to honest grading schemes get the best results. “We will fail your child if it comes to that” is understood to be credible, so it rarely comes to that. So if more strict grading only works well in 30% of situations, still worth trying.
To quote Calvin, “we don’t want them to be too smart,” ” because then they start to think they have a right to an opinion about how we run things.”
JohnH and Ten Bears above have it right.
The rest of us, I am afraid, seem to endorse a blame the victim and [or] “more government money” answer, which suggests to me they have had too much education in one or the other Big Lies that are keeping the poor poor, of which there is enough evidencen all around us to leave me at least in despair.
I’m not worried about these youngsters. I have it on good authority they’ll be rolling in so much wage and salary that they won’t even notice paying more tax.
Eric
I am going to assume that is directed at me saying people won’t notice a 2% increase in their payroll tax, much less if it is introduced one tenth of one percent per year at a time.
If I am right about that (being directed at me) all I can say is you must be one of those graduate engineers or government accountants i worked with who never suspected the answer they got on their little computers was off by an order of magnitude. Educated but with no number sense whatsoever.
i think that must be related to being educated “for the test” or “the grade” instead of being invited by real educators to explore the world for the fun of it.
Or, to put it my way, the German schools produced great technicians, but people who followed the Leader. They were beat by cowboys and jewish science.
Einstein, it may have been noted here, was not a product of German education, he was a refugee from it
In the sixties, there was a push claiming students do not need more math, English, etc. The claim was they can get by on a minimal of education in what we might call the basics. The result were students who might fit the most basic of occupations.
Even if you want to be a carpenter or plumber, you still needed more math to do your measurements. angles, bills to the customer, etc. How would you do proposals for business without writing skills. Many younger people opted for less of the basics. It has come back to haunt them.
Many are going back to school for more advanced education are finding themselves having to learn basic math and writing to proceed further in advanced courses.
@Bill,
Maybe in the later 60s. Certainly in the early and mid-60s, US education was stampeded by the Soviet Sputnik launch into accelerating science/math education. I was a beneficiary of that.
Joel:
USMC thought they got Einstein after I took all of their tests. I got average grads without much strain. No advanced classes. Just 4 years of math and English. Three years of science. Etc, Etc. etc. Sent me off to Crypto – school technology. Best shot in the company and one of the best in the Bn. and I went to Crypto school. I did just about anything I wanted in the Corps. They left me alone and promoted me. Making $430 a month towards the end.
I did not work to hard at it till college. Three people had the greatest influence on me. Mr. Penfield who looked like Icabod Crane and walk like a hop with one leg dragging behind him. He taught me and the others how to read Shakespeare.
Mr. Friend in my 1st semester of college which I dropped out of, went to work on the scaffolds in Chicago, and them left for the Corps in 68. He plied me with books while I was away.
My English Prof. at Lewis U (72) helped me improved my writing ability. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
@Bill,
I wasn’t much of a scholar in high school. I took mostly high end classes, just got by, and focused on cross country, track and dating the girl who would later become my wife. College was transformational for me, and set me on my career path from which I’ll retire at the end of this month.
Bill, I don’t remember that push. I do remember a push to push “the new math.” I worked as a scab in a high school that had fancy text books with three colors of ink and lots of pictures, and even a teachers edition with interlinear in “script” so she would know how to teach..so many minutes for this so many for that.. and the kids didn’t learn a damn thing until I decided to teach geometry the way I learned it..axioms and postulates and proofs, no pictures, one color ink just the facts ma’am test, and no evidence the teacher was getting remote instructions from central planning. the kids got it the way i taught it. i tried to tell the supervisor, was told to “teach it our way.” so maybe they didn’t want the kids to learn anything. that was years before the computer made them think no one needed to learn basic arithmetic, but first graders needed to be “taught” “the associative property of addition.”
thing is, give a kid a reason to learn something and he’ll learn in a week what you won’t be able to teach him in two years if it’s drill and kill.
Dale:
I do as they were all boasting about it and that they did not need it.