The Struggle of Young Families

Twenty million young Americans never attend college, and increasingly they face limited prospects for good jobs and wages high enough to raise families without straining. Now two new reports remind policy-makers that these youths and their families are important, and they suggest ways to improve young workers’ opportunities. The task that the reports outline is formidable but possible.

The William T. Grant Foundation has financed a two-year study on youth and America’s future chaired by former U.S. Commissioner of Education Harold Howe II. Its finding that many young families are sliding economically is reinforced by another report from the Children’s Defense Fund and the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. Together they draw a statistical picture that may surprise Americans:

--Since 1973 the income of young families has dropped as sharply as it did in the Great Depression from 1929 to 1933; income for families headed by a 20- to 24-year-old declined by 27.4%, while income for all families dropped by about 1%.

--Young families have always struggled because they are having children in years when their income is lowest. But the gap between the income of these families and the rest of American families has widened in the last 20 years.

--As young men’s earnings have dropped over the last 15 years, so have their marriage rates. Blacks, Latinos and those with the least education were hit the hardest. Even for young black college graduates who head families, median earnings declined nearly one-third between 1973 and 1986.

Both reports urge greatly improved job training and child care to help with some of the most fundamental problems of young families. The Grant Foundation commission points out, by comparison, that students who go from high school to college receive public and private help in the form of scholarships and grants totaling about $20,000 or more while “young people not going to college are starved for support.”

“Only about 5% of those eligible for federally supported job training receive it, usually for only about four months, totaling only $1,800 to $2,300 per student,” it said. To start correcting this imbalance, the commission urges the spending of $250 million for each of the next five years in order to establish experimental programs that would offer every young person in target areas a chance for training after high school.

The report also makes a strong case for creating more service programs to instill the value of citizenship in young people, either through voluntary programs while they are in high school or as paid jobs to do conservation tasks or help others after high school.

Both groups stress the need for improving the quality of child care and increasing its supply. Even if corporations elect not to operate their own day-care centers, they could provide more help than they do now by operating referral services for employees, providing subsidies for the cost of child care or contributing to a regional center that their employees could use. The Children’s Defense Fund report especially stresses the importance of federal support for child care--a move that died in the last Congress but that must be resurrected.

Politicians always talk about the American dream. If they were to go through these reports and carry out even a portion of the suggestions that they contain, they could start making the dream a reality again for millions of neglected young Americans.