The job market is bleak even for millennials with college degrees. For those without, it's a different world.
Facing the future with a college degree is like being in a lifeboat on a roiling sea.
Facing the future with a high school degree is like being in the water.
If you're a member of the millennial generation - ages 18 to 34 - who never got beyond 12th grade, expect hard times, say people who study the transition from youth to adulthood.
"There's nothing for these kids," said Maria Kefalas, a St. Joseph's University sociologist. "Absolutely nothing."
Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, put it this way: "It's remarkable how much trouble they're in."
It's not simply the recession and its robust half-life that stymie high-school-only young people.
Thirty years of jobs moving from Main Street to Mumbai and elsewhere; of the American workplace being wired with robots and computers that perform the jobs that factory workers and office clerks once did; of neutered unions, shrunken wages, and diminished benefits - all of this has changed the nature of work and has made people who use their hands, backs, and working-class smarts nearly as obsolete as VCRs.
"I don't see a future or an ability to retire," said Brian Haney, 31, an unemployed Northeast Philadelphia resident with only a high school degree. "There'll be one low-wage job after another ahead of me. It's just a nightmare."
The national unemployment rate for people ages 18 to 19 with only high school degrees is 22.7 percent, according to new, non-seasonally adjusted calculations by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; for people 20 to 24, it's 16.4 percent; for those 25 to 34, 10.4 percent. Throughout the United States, overall unemployment is currently 7.7 percent.
In Philadelphia, some 23 percent of people with only high school diplomas ages 18 to 34 were without work between 2007 and 2011, the highest rate in the region. That's compared with 4.8 percent unemployment among similar-aged Philadelphians with bachelor's degrees, according to census data analyzed for The Inquirer by economist Paul Harrington, director of the Center for Labor Markets and Policy at Drexel University.
Thirty years of jobs moving from Main Street to Mumbai and elsewhere; of the American workplace being wired with robots and computers that perform the jobs that factory workers and office clerks once did; of neutered unions, shrunken wages, and diminished benefits - all of this has changed the nature of work and has made people who use their hands, backs, and working-class smarts nearly as obsolete as VCRs.
"I don't see a future or an ability to retire," said Brian Haney, 31, an unemployed Northeast Philadelphia resident with only a high school degree. "There'll be one low-wage job after another ahead of me. It's just a nightmare."
The national unemployment rate for people ages 18 to 19 with only high school degrees is 22.7 percent, according to new, non-seasonally adjusted calculations by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; for people 20 to 24, it's 16.4 percent; for those 25 to 34, 10.4 percent. Throughout the United States, overall unemployment is currently 7.7 percent.
In Philadelphia, some 23 percent of people with only high school diplomas ages 18 to 34 were without work between 2007 and 2011, the highest rate in the region. That's compared with 4.8 percent unemployment among similar-aged Philadelphians with bachelor's degrees, according to census data analyzed for The Inquirer by economist Paul Harrington, director of the Center for Labor Markets and Policy at Drexel University.
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