Huge changes have occurred in the circumstances of young adults in the US, and in what expectations are for future employment opportunities. These realities have stimulated numerous ideas for what might be instituted to address the problems. Few of them seem to believe that our present educational and workforce training apparatus will endure; most imagine some different way of doing things.
Some solutions suggested include:
Restructuring HS into a balance of academic learning, and “hands on” learning or OTJ learning. In this model internships and apprenticeships are emphasized and provided by some huge public private cooperation where the funding and the rules of engagement are jointly managed by school districts and businesses. The businesses could well include small scale startups as well as tech giants, and everything in between, including non profits and other NGOs.
Sometimes the above public private learning opportunities are enfolded into a ubiquitous national program of required service for all young adults, where the service involves some form of community support role which might be a federal program. Those serving would learn by doing, and probably also learn through some form of “instruction” or online modules, and get a survival wage while doing so, and perhaps partial or full forgiveness of school loans.
Below is an article from Forbes, that notes large statistical changes in young adult participation in paid work. It does also note the emphasis currently on “extra curricular activities, as well as unpaid community service, which tempers his statistical point somewhat. He doesn’t want to count those experiences as equivalent to those one gets “paid for”. Perhaps he has a point, but then again, young adults today are doing activities that create learning and maturity, but apparently not in the “Good Old Fashioned” way of high school summer jobs, and internships of the past.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Why-Arent-Graduates-Ready-For-Work-Theyre-The-Least-Working-Generation-In-U.S.-History.pdf”]Kudos to Gary for the link.