Young People On the Margins
1. Introduction
“Welfare” is a patchwork of dozens of programs that provide benefits primarily to
low-income individuals. It is a common consensus that the government should help
the poor, however, there is also a frequently debated controversy over what form
should these help take. In the United States, most welfare expenditures for the poor
are designed to increase their current consumption level and to improve their living
situation. In contrast, some programs have been designed to enhance their ability to
support themselves in the long run. In this paper, one of the main aims of this paper is
to put forward several policy proposals concerning the establishment of welfare and
programs preparing young adults for labor market in disadvantaged families. We shall
argue that in this context education and job-training programs can play a key role. The
growing importance of education and job-training programs can hardly be
exaggerated. In the past several decades, there has been a sizeable increase in
inequality in workers’ earnings in the United States. Among the principal explanations
is a dramatic shift in the type of skills that are valued in the labor market. In a high
technology and information economy, employers placed a higher standard on
communication and cognitive skills. Although this explanation is not rigorously
studied, we have previous evidences settled about how education and experience are
playing a more important role in the labor market. According to Levy and Richard’s
“U.S Earnings Levels and Earnings Inequality”, inequality began growing within
groups of workers with similar levels of education, experience, and other important
characteristics in the early 1970s, and by 1979, the differences in earnings began
increasing between groups defined by education and experience.
While much attention has focused on how welfare insurance programs like
unemployment insurance help labor market outcomes, less attention has been paid to
the possible role of education and job-training programs. Therefore, in this paper, we
will examine how important and efficient are education and job-training programs to
prepare young people ready for the labor market. Equally important, this paper
presents a policy proposal for enhancing the provision and finance of education and
job-training programs broadly to positively help young people. The aim of the
proposal is to outline a set of complementary institutional changes that would permit
an expansion of the range of recipients while at the same time promoting economic
activities.
2. Background
Today, education and economic opportunities are more closely linked to each
other than before. According to Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education
Requirement through 2018, about two-thirds (63 percent) of all jobs (including
both new and replacement jobs) will require at least some postsecondary
education or training by 2018, while in 2008, the percentage was 59 percent and
just 28 percent in 1973(Carnevale, Smith, Strohl 2010). These quantified
projections strike us with a implication that workers with at least postsecondary
education will be more competitive and will have access to a wider range of
opportunities and occupations, whereas candidates with no more than high
school diploma would be concentrated in low-income jobs like working in
service industries.
As noted above, demand for post-secondary education in the labor market is
increasing- and it is technology that is driving this trend and it will continue to
increase. During recent decades, computer and computer-related inventions are
leading the information revolution and transforming the US economy into a
technology economy. This change in economic landscape comes with a favor of
workers with high education because they have more expertise needed to handle
more complex works. Equally important, computer-based economy adds new
values of individual contributions that were simply not emphasized in previous
economic eras. In the previous industrial economy, the dominant standard was
measured on the base of maximizing efficiency and profit at a given level of
output—commodity-based productivity. While now, in the technology economy,
productivity is still supreme, but it has been joined by a new set of competitive
standards including quality, customization, speed, novelty, social responsibility
and etc. (Carnevale 1991). As we talked about why should the government be
involved in education, one of the positive externalities from education is
productivity (Gruber). According to Gruber, social benefits from higher
productivity can occur through two channels, one is to raise the productivity of
coworkers, and the other is to collect higher tax revenues for the government.
Therefore, one of the most fundamental obligations and significant tasks of
our society is to prepare its young people ready to do productive work and lead a
prosperous lives as grown-ups this knowledge-based economy. This means
preparing all young people with a solid foundation of literacy, analytical skills
and for their career development.
3. Public Policy Between Education and employment
In this section, we will consider the role of public policy in improving
connections between education and employment. We place particular concerns
on the education and employment of students in poor school districts in which a
majority of students come from disadvantaged, low-income, low-wealth families.
