In the United States, the long pathway from kindergarten to the job market is an obstacle course that sets up tens of millions of young people for failure, particularly those who are Black or brown. Now, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, young people are navigating a disrupted education system or looking for jobs during the third economic downturn in the past 20 years. We need a radically different vision for the transition to adulthood, and we need it now.
From spring 2019 to spring 2020, unemployment among young adults spiked from 8.4% to 24.4%. Even before the pandemic, the youth labor market was in crisis, with the percentage of young people employed or looking for work at historic lows. In 2018, more than 4 million 16- to 24-year-olds were “opportunity youth,” neither in school nor employed. As many as one in three young adults may now fall into this group—over 10 million people.
Meanwhile, our K-12 and postsecondary education systems are deeply stratified by race and class. While high school graduation rates have risen overall, they are lower for Black, Latino or Hispanic, and low-income students. And the K-12 system disproportionately shunts young people of color (especially Black students) into the school-to-prison pipeline, contributing to systemic issues of overpolicing and mass incarceration.
At the postsecondary level, only 60% of students who enroll in a two- or four-year program earn a degree within six years. One book described many students as facing “coin-toss odds of success” once they enroll.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
President-elect Joe Biden—himself a beneficiary of an era of cheap tuition and plentiful jobs—can initiate a new era of opportunity by promising education and employment for all young people.