South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Rortybomb argues that high levels of joblessness among recent college graduates gives the lie to arguments about structural unemployment and point to a generation that is being written off.

First, the shocking graph that points to a “Lost Generation” in the making…

Second, a discussion of what the trend line means …

This is a cohort with mobility, fresh college degrees, low health care costs, low wage rigidity, etc. etc. I don’t put the flashlight here to ignore the pain that those without college degrees have in this economy. But if young people with college degrees can’t survive in the post-recession era, nobody can.  And this dynamites the idea that education alone, instead of monetary and fiscal policy, are the way out of our current high unemployment.
—
I’ve been on the kick of watching the employment rates of 20-24 year olds with college degrees as a barometer for our economy’s health for some time. Some people on the right get that this is going to kill a generation – David Frum in particular has done great work. But in general I point out that everyone on the right is always screaming about the Europeanization of the U.S. economy. Ironically, they have been screaming about the part where we could get universal health care and some decent trains, and not the part where the young generation who are supposed to start building their careers, innovating and creating the future of the economy are sitting idle. The part where a generation becomes permanently detached from the formal labor markets. An economy of insiders and outsiders.

——–
While it is not customary for Policy Points to comment on reports and analyses to which it links, this entry deserves discussion. Rortybomb is right that the inability of an economy to absorb young talent is an alarming one that augers poorly for future well-being. The inability also shows that divorcing calls for increasing levels of educational attainment from efforts to improve labor market conditions is a strategy doomed to failure. Unless adequate employment opportunities exist for new graduates, calls for young people to acquire more education are false bills of goods, especially when viewed in light of escalating college costs.

Without a commitment to adequate job creation, calls for more higher education only will breed cynicism (and debt) on the part of the young. It also will debase education by turning time spent in higher education from a practical endeavor one with intrinsic personal and social rewards into a half-way house where individual students manage to avoid unemployment for a few years in a way that artificially lowers the unemployment rate.

In Policy Points’ view, higher education is extremely important and efforts at improving access and success deserve support. Yet access and attainment  are not enough. Without a commitment to strong labor market policies,  not every graduate will have a chance to put their educations to good use. In such an environment, a diploma will effectively function as a lottery ticket that provides students with little more than a chance at the kinds of jobs once considered to be the norm.