Here’s a message for recent high school graduates:Finding a good job has likely never been harder. Especially if you’re trying to start a full-time career according to a Kansas City Star article.
New numbers show that employment of 18- and 19-year-olds is at historic lows.
Ten years ago,half of all young people that age had a job,regardless of the time of year. This year,just slightly more than one in three is working.
The unemployment rate in May for those older teens who wanted a job was a whopping 23.5 percent.
Such a high teen jobless rate is a huge driver of the nation’s overall unemployment rate. The jobless rate of workers 20 and older in May was 7.6 percent. But adding in all the unemployed teens boosts it to 8.2 percent.
Single mom Britney Monasmith doesn’t need the statistics to tell her a job search in this economy is hard. Throughout her late teen years she bounced from job to job,never getting enough hours or enough pay to make a decent living.
Now in her early 20s,she’s finally landed in a Certified Nursing Assistant training program through the Full Employment Council because she lost her last job after it was outsourced to a foreign country.
“I’d been looking for work since January,” said the young Raytown woman. “It seemed like a lot of employers didn’t even want to look at me.”
Several recent reports reveal that a dearth of teen employment opportunity isn’t simply a problem of summer jobs disappearing for the young. Dwindling employment among older teens is a year-round,long-term trend for many reasons:
• College enrollment has been ratcheting higher,from under 45 percent of recent high school graduates in 1989 to about 60 percent last year.
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