Recession Creating A Lost Generation; Young People Can't Find Jobs

BusinesWeek:

Bright, eager -- and unwanted. While unemployment is ravaging just about every part of the global workforce, the most enduring harm is being done to young people who can't grab onto the first rung of the career ladder.

Affected are a range of young people, from high school dropouts to college grads to newly minted lawyers and MBAs across the developed world from Britain to Japan. One indication: In the U.S., the unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds has climbed to more than 18 percent, from 13 percent a year ago.

Read the whole story: BusinesWeek

Comments

[my post]

WE HAVE HEALTH CARE WE HAVE HEALTH CARE CONGRATS OBAMA 4 GETTING IT DONE!

good articles; http://br.st/tU

[BernankeMadoff]

The government has put the same punch bowl out that got us into the mess in the first place. More debt and consumption and don't worry about paying it back. (Berbnanke= Greenspan II)

Good articles: http://pie.im/af30

If this is change we can believe in, count me out in 2012. Obama should not have reappointed bernanke.

[Ventoi]

A baby comes into the world as a blank slate...
everything is learned...
from the world around him or her...

everything can also be
ACTIVELY TAUGHT...

we can TEACH students to succeed...
we can also REQUIRE them to succeed...
and help them to do so...

most schools have a cumulative record file...
where work efforts and teacher comments and report cards are stored...
some for the entire duration of a child's grade school days...
some where the samples are emptied out of the file system from year to year (which I do not agree with)

especially now, in the age of computers and secure storage systems...
scanners can be used to scan student writing samples and work samples
EACH year of the education process...
each grade level in graded systems...or each year of time put in in an overall process...in non-graded systems...
to show growth, improvement...to monitor learning...to evaluate and to plan for better learning for the student...

the files could be required to be passed on to institutes of higher learning and to employers...
as zip files forwarded...or samples sent in some sort of government envelope...or set of sheets where samples are cut and paste in required 'fields'...

we learn to plan
we learn to protect ourselves
we protect our children
and help them provide themselves with the best chance for employment
later in life

and if not..
the best case for abuse of hiring practices.

[clemenj98]

Um, sorry but it's not the government's business or my employer's business what grades i got when i was in grade school, even if they were very good grades, thank you very much.

[Ventoi]

3/3. If you don't do your own paper...
you are very UNLIKELY to read your own paper...
unless you also have to present it...

so many concepts may be missed by a student...
which may not hurt his or her grade...
as they will receive the mark for the paper...
and it will make the university and the course look more positive...
and the professor...
as we, as teachers, have always been judged on what we taught...
through the regurgitation of our students...

in places where a tenure or rehire depends on an average for course marks...
some professors may feel forced to turn a blind eye to whether or not the student completed the work...
the system allows for it anyway...

employers then suffer...
by hiring students based on grades rather than effort, knowledge or ability level.

That is only a small part of the problem...
one of the parts that put the students to task...

employment and hiring methods and allowances for hiring of people...
look to be somewhat out of order, in any case.

[Ventoi]

When we move to computers and allow students to do entire essays (require them to do so, at times)
in typed print...
we lose that little edge we have
of the handwriting...

the little fear students have that a sample of their rough draft, at least,
may be copied and stored
for future plagarism or lack of involvement in the grades they are presenting later to employers...

Students who hire someone to complete papers...
or bribe, cajole, threaten or force someone...
do not show up as readily when the entire effort is type written...

Having used the computer many years as an adult, myself,
I realise that for the effort that goes into RETYPING thoughts AFTER they have been written on paper...
we lose precious time.

I am not sure if we lose credibility though...
Also...having to retype from the hand-written copy, forces us to THINK more about what we have written...
we may be using a different part of our brain...and processing system...to move the information from one medium to another...
but I have tried both...and feel I am attaining a deeper understanding when I use the 'caveman' methods (pen to paper to typewriter)

[Ventoi]

As I walked, this morning, maintaining my overall health...'
looking at the autumn leaves reflecting in the still river...
observing the fall pumpkin displays...
sidestepping puddles and water running into the drains after a recent rain,

I pondered many things...
one of these was the use of computers in education today...

having taught for years...
and having been away from the field of teaching for almost as many before attempting a brief return...

I realised that we have hurt our students, perhaps, by sometimes misusing technology...
by trusting the initiative of students...
over their inclination in their teens and early twenties...
when they are battling the evil rather than being led by the hand of Jesus himself...
to not do their own work.

[MorningGlorycoffee]

www.mikeroweworks.com

[MissingHands2]

Same main for close to 24 hours-- pathetic H P.

[tuberider]

A 50 Trillion Dollar Wealth Transfer (mostly "offshore") and he's worried that the world's youth may not be ready when the 2011/2012 "recovery" returns? Oh, they'll be ready. And the primary motivation won't be to pay for Medicare for the Baby Boomers....and they will care even less about the Raggedy Taliban (though they may be dressed like some of them). Look out for those proverbial "street smarts".

[dawnone]

This economic system is failing, as did state socialism.

[dscotese]

What's the difference? What did they call them? Bailouts? Who owns GM now? AIG? It makes we wonder why we have a government at all.

[gladys46]

Hmm .. this is interesting !!! So, the poor sub-prime takers are not the only over-reachers ...prime home loan borrowers are just as irresponsible ??

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125530360128479161.html?mod=rss_US_News

[honoursplendor]

Isn't this the same thing they said in the 90s for GenXers? I thought that was the "lost" generation for jobs? Wasn't everyone supposedly working a "McJob" no matter how educated? Wasn't this the time when college grads were moving back home with the 'rents (same as today) because jobs were tough to find and student loan debt was cripplingly high? This was the story that lead every national magazine at that time until the economy, once again rebounded, after all that time in the Bush. This story repeats itself again and again.

[hypnotoad72]

Good point. And the X'ers came of age during the ~1990 recession too.

We'll get out of the current one.

Thanks for your input (as well for others too). It's nice to read into other ideas being put into the discussion. :)

[dc2nm]

There has been quite a bit of debate for a while about the boomers taking and keeping good jobs longer. There was also more cost-of-living issues in the 90s than lack of jobs (housing costs were too high during the housing boom).. However, to compare this recession's impact on young adults to that of the 80s or 90s is not looking at the facts. Read the article. Look at labor statistics. It is the highest unemployment rate for this age group since 1948.

[RandVictims]

Let's hope these young people have more smarts and more guts than we did. I'd hope these highly-intelligent, un-programmed disenfranchised kids are planning a spectacular scheme to bring down Wallstreet and the Plutocratic terrorists who are raping us daily.

Peaceful revolution didn't work for us. Hopefully, they're bringing the violent one.

[dscotese]

Violent revolution produce large and vicious echos. I'm still working on the peaceful one. Peaceful from my side, at least. The Internet helps.

[freelyb]

I'm with you. We have to learn to play by the opposition's rules to some degree.

[graffitijoe]

They can all join the Obama volunteer corps:

http://action.barackobama.com/page/s/volunteer

Problem Solved!

[Anita-indep]

As a prof. of science at an elite University, here are my observations regarding our youth and science. Young Americans do not want to enter science to earn their Ph.D.'s, which is where the high paying, innovative jobs are. Instead, most of the Americans seek the easy way out by studying for their Master's and hoping to end up with high paying jobs at pharmaceutical companies. I recently had a job opening for a technician, and received over 150 applications!

Even the Americans who do study for their Ph.D.'s, want to enter "easy" fields, such as behavioral science, for which there will be few jobs in the future. To fill the gaps, most of us Profs. are forced to recruit students from other countries [Indians, Chinese, Europeans], who are willing to work hard and who then go on to get good jobs.

And I say all this as the mother of an unemployed 22 year college graduate [major in Government and German], who cannot find a job or even an unpaid internship. In other words, its both true that times are tough for our youth, but also that our youth choose to graduate in "unemployable" subjects.

[graffitijoe]

Good observations. We've got a lot of kids who are really good at video games though ...

[mrfreeze]

Professor, thanks for your comments. I'd like to add the following:

1) American "exceptionalism" - For the last several decades Americans have had this sense that we have "earned" some sort of 1st world bonus for.....just being us! It's an ethnocentric, narcissistic flaw in our cultural DNA. It will not serve us well in the future.
2) The parents of your students have coddled the dickens out of these kids. Many of the parents grew up with the false promise of "trickle-down" economics and a belief that our economic trajectory would always be upward.
3) Students today may very well be forced to leave the PhD programs because they are so far in debt that they must make some unhealthy economic choices. Many of the Europeans and Asians don't carry this burden. Of course, part of our cultural problems arise from a lack of savings and getting into debt.

We have gotten ourselves into a lot of trouble, and we may never see employment recover.

[hypnotoad72]

With the cost of living going up and wages, adjusted for inflation, dropping the last 30 years, "trickle-down" was definitely false and the only "trickling" has one, dirty, connotation. That's the real imbalance.

See my other post for more nuances, though it too is incomplete (e.g. offshored work for products coming back clearly show that quality and level of education are utterly meaningless, despite level of education being used as means TO offshore in the first place. It's a hoax.)

[honoursplendor]

Behavioral science is an "easy" field? Sheesh, I gotta call my therapist on that one.

[scat]

I am listening, Go on.


Oh, that will be $150.00

[hypnotoad72]

Except overseas physicists get paid a lot less. In "the new normal", it's about lowest costs, period.

Nobody is going to pull in an effort if they think they won't be well-compensated.

It works both ways. Especially when we're told Americans can't read and count, so they offshore... and the products coming back instantly prove those doing the work don't know how to count or read either. (A bookshelf should have properly written documentation. The number of grammatical, structural, and content-based errors is obscene. A bird cage should be easy to assemble; if the struts don't match up with the base, someone screwed up counting the distance between inches or centimeters or whatever standard is used. How many examples must I cite to prove to you that it's about low cost, not intellectual quality?)

Oh, you're forced to do NOTHING, by the way. You choose to hire from outside instead of encouraging from within. So don't blame everyone else. Everyone has their role to play.

The real money will be in marketing, using "the relationship era"'s philosophies. At least, until nobody has money left to spend, so say "toodles" to those relationships...

Sorry for being pithy; I'd otherwise go into proper detail to disseminate your post.

What happened to people using their God-given talents, anyway?

[dscotese]

Someone came up with the brilliant idea of making those with high "God given talents" bear all the weight. Check out Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

I quit about two years ago and it eats at me every day. I could be making twice what I'm making, and instead of taking jobs away from other people, I'd be creating them. Shrugging is the only way I can see to get back to freedom and prosperity :-(

[hypnotoad72]

"God-given talents", meaning not everybody has what it takes TO be a professor. I'm not saying you don't have a point about certain issues, but real life is a tad more complex...

[dc2nm]

Thank you. This is not just about college educated young adults. Its about hard-working blue collar young adults that can't find jobs. Construction and manufacturing jobs are all but gone. Grandma is working in WalMart and mom is now working at the drive-thru at McDonald's. Lets face it, young workers always had to learn how work ethic in the real world...they learned from their mistakes (it is not just this generation that faced these issues...adults have been complaining about this for decades). Right now, if you make one mistake, you're fired because there are plenty out there to fill that position.

And I am really sick of hearing this is like any past recession. Its not. It is the highest unemployment rate for this group since 1948.