what job and education opportunities young

U.S. Department of Education

U.S. Department of Education Launches New Initiative to Support Career-Connected Learning and Increase Job Pathways for Young Americans

Today, the U.S. Department of Education (Department) announced the launch of Raise the Bar: Unlocking Career Success, a new Biden-Harris Administration initiative supported by the Departments of Commerce and Labor to increase and expand access to high-quality training programs to help young Americans pursue jobs in today’s in-demand fields, and be prepared for careers of the future.

This new effort unites key agencies of the Biden-Harris Administration to strengthen the connection between K-12 education, postsecondary education, and workforce programs. With the support of the $120 billion dollars dedicated to K-12 education in the American Rescue Plan (ARP) and Perkins funding , the Administration is ensuring the next generation is building the skills necessary to fill high-paying jobs like those created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and CHIPS and Science Act . This includes expanding access to skills-based learning and training pathways, like Registered Apprenticeships in key industries such as advanced manufacturing, automotive, and cybersecurity.

As part of today’s launch, the Department is announcing $5.6 million dollars in Perkins funding for a new program to expand work-based learning opportunities for students and this morning will issue new guidance on how federal funds can be used to develop and expand career pathway programs, including Registered Apprenticeships. As part of this new initiative, the Department will host regional summits with students, educators, employers, and other stakeholders to learn about practices that have led to success and challenges that must be addressed.

“It’s time we bridge the divide between our K-12 systems and our college, career, and industry preparation programs, which leave too many students behind and perpetuate inequities in our most diverse, underserved, and rural communities,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona . “An education system reimagined for the 21st century engages youth of all ages in the power of career-connected learning and provides every student with the opportunity to gain real-life work experience, earn college credits, and make progress towards an industry credential before they graduate high school. Today, the Biden-Harris team is raising the bar with new investments and resources to support intentional collaboration between schools, colleges, workforce development agencies and industry partners and build clearer pathways for students to rewarding careers and lifelong success.”

In support of today’s launch, the First Lady Jill Biden, Secretary Miguel Cardona, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, and U.S. Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh will travel to northwest suburban Chicago, Illinois to meet with students enrolled in a career-connected learning program at Rolling Meadows High School. The Secretaries and the First Lady will also visit Aon’s Chicago facility hosted by the Chicago Apprenticeship Network to highlight the value of Registered Apprenticeship, particularly in non-traditional industries and corporate careers with a focus on underrepresented populations and communities in key sectors of technology, finance, insurance, and banking. The visits coincide with the first day of National Apprenticeship Week, marking the 85th Anniversary of the National Apprenticeship Act.

“America is home to some of the world’s brightest and most ambitious students, and we owe it to them to set them up for success,” said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo. “Career-connected education programs are essential to the success of the American economy and will spur a new generation of researchers, engineers, and manufacturers in critical industries. In launching this initiative, these programs and their graduates will enable us to continue outcompeting and out-innovating the rest of the world.”

“During National Apprenticeship Week, the Biden-Harris administration is highlighting Registered Apprenticeship as a proven and industry-driven training model to address some of our nation’s most pressing workforce challenges,” said U.S. Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh. “The federal initiative announced today will further support private-public partnerships that help youth across the country access a college education, good-paying jobs, and strong pathways to the middle class.”

Today’s announcements include:

Investing $5.6 million in Perkins funding for schools to expand work-based learning opportunities

The Department announced that it will launch the “Career Z Challenge: Expanding Work-Based Learning Opportunities” competition in Spring 2023. The competition will foster multi-sector partnerships and expand work-based learning opportunities for students. Semi-finalists and finalists will be eligible to receive targeted technical assistance including professional development support, webinars and training, as well as a portion of a prize pool.

Providing new guidance to schools on using American Rescue Plan funds to expand career pathways for students to pursue in-demand jobs and support Registered Apprenticeships

The Department will publish a Dear Colleague Letter that provides information on how schools can use ARP funds to develop and expand career pathway programs and help more students pursue careers in in-demand fields.

This initiative builds on President Biden’s FY 2023 Budget proposal, which invests $200 million in Career-Connected High Schools and supports competitive grants to grow and build models of this bold vision. Funding would also support partnerships between local educational agencies, institutions of higher education—including community colleges—and employers, to encourage earning college credit while in high school through dual enrollment in core content and career and technical coursework; work-based learning opportunities; and academic and career counseling. President Biden’s FY 2023 Budget proposal also includes $1.4 billion for Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs. This includes an increase of $20 million for CTE state grants that would expand access to career-connected programs for more students.

For more information on work the Department is doing to strengthen college and career pathways sign up for our newsletter here.

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We asked young people about work and skills. Here's what they told us

Young people report high levels of optimism about the future. Image:  Rendy Novatino / Unsplash

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• We polled 11,000 young people around the world and spoke to a small group of them about the future of work and skills.
• Almost two-thirds are optimistic they will get the job they want.
• They say the pandemic has bolstered their resilience, but that today's education system is not giving them the skills they need.
• And that soft skills are just as important as technical abilities.

In a world of social disparities, where education has been severely disrupted by COVID-19 and the spectre of climate change looms, young people could be forgiven for being pessimistic about their futures. However, our new poll shows high levels of optimism about the chance of having the career they want. Young people know the challenges, but are confident they can overcome them.

Conducted through UNICEF’s U-report platform – a messaging tool that empowers young people to speak out on issues that matter to them – the poll found that 63% of the almost 11,000 youth across 136 countries who took the survey believe it is likely they will have the career they want in the future.

So why are many young people so positive? And what would the almost two in five young people who are pessimistic like to see to help them achieve their potential? On World Youth Skills Day, we spoke with a small group of youth to help understand what is driving this optimism and what challenges they are worried about. Here is what we learned from them.

Building resilience and adaptability through the pandemic

I wish life was a game which came with instructions, but unfortunately we don’t have that roadmap that can tell us exactly what we should do to get to where we want to be.

A topic we talked about was the impact of the pandemic on young people. Participants agreed that because the past year has been so challenging, it has taught them to manage through uncertainty.

“The pandemic has given us a crash-course in resilience and adaptability,” said 23-year old Sana Farooq, the co-founder of a social enterprise in Pakistan called The Red Code.

“Being flexible and adaptable is something we’ve all had to get used to,” added 22-year old Praise Majwafi, a social entrepreneur from South Africa.

Having been forced to manage through a very challenging year may have given many young people the confidence that if they can overcome this, they can overcome anything.

“In the face of hardship, we always have the possibility to stagnate or to thrive. And that’s the motto I wake up to every day; thrive to survive,” said 25-year old Andrea De Remes, co-founder of an e-learning education platform called Erandi Aprende, which provides resources, tools and educational programmes to get young girls aged 8-12 interested in science and technology. “I think the youth have the power, tools and opportunities to make that happen.”

Today’s education system isn’t fully meeting the needs of young people

I feel like I am learning all the theory and the content which is really important, but not the practical skills I will need later in the field, which is a huge miss.

When asked what would make the biggest difference for them to achieve their career goals, 32% of the young people who took the U-report poll selected job-ready skills programmes in school, ahead of things like access to on-the-job training (28%), access to relevant online resources (20%), and a good mentor (19%).

“The one thing that would make the biggest difference to me is to actually learn the skills that the job market will require from me once I graduate from university,” said 21-year old Ulises Brengi, a landscape architecture student from Argentina.

Insights like this should inform how education systems and youth programmes are designed and rolled out, working alongside policies designed to create jobs and encourage entrepreneurship.

Soft skills are just as important as technical abilities

We are feeling disconnected, and what does it come down to? It’s about communication. And more than anything for me, it’s about active listening.

Learning job-ready skills isn’t just about acquiring the technical abilities to do the job; soft skills are just as important. We all agreed that to be successful, young people will need to become lifelong learners and build strong soft skills such as leadership, creativity and communication.

“As an extrovert, I sometimes struggle to take a backseat and sit down and listen to people,” said Andrea. “That’s something I want to work on.”

Sana spoke about the importance of active listening, too. “Every day, I interact with people with disabilities, with community leaders, with women and with children. Listening to them is key as it’s the only way to begin to understand the problems they are facing,” she said.

The same principle applies when designing upskilling solutions for youth. The only way to create sustainable skills programmes is by involving young people themselves. By continuing to listen to them, businesses, governments, international organizations and other stakeholders can better understand the challenges young people are facing and engage them in the development of solutions.

Young people are the key to a better future

Praise shared a powerful vision for the future, one in which youth are at the centre of global progress. “In the hands of the largest generation of young people in history, the potential for global progress is unlimited,” she said. “And through purposeful engagement and collaboration, nothing can stand in our way.”

We couldn't agree more. And we are both committed to doing what we can to help young people succeed through our involvement in Generation Unlimited , a global multi-sector coalition aimed at helping 1.8 billion young people transition from school to work by 2030.

Let’s all work together to make Praise’s vision a reality.

You can watch highlights from our session here .

The session was just one expression of our shared commitment to helping address the growing gap between the skills people have and those they need for the new digital world. PwC and UNICEF are collaborating in support of Generation Unlimited to help upskill millions of young people around the world. Among the founding partners of the WEF’s Reskilling Revolution Platform , our organisations are contributing to the initiative to provide better jobs, education, and skills to one billion people by 2030.

PwC refers to the PwC network and/or one or more of its member firms, each of which is a separate legal entity. Please see www.pwc.com/structure for further details.

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Education Policy

Building back better: a national plan for youth employment, prioritizing young people for an equitable recovery.

Photo Credit: Artem Podrez (via Pexels)

Brent parton, taylor white, may 18, 2021.

More than half of all Americans are millennials, Gen Z, or younger. These are the most racially diverse generations in the history of the nation. Our economic viability depends on their access to early work experience, civic engagement opportunities, educational pathways, and jobs that allow them to earn an income while they learn and build careers. In contrast, low wages, insufficient hours, and involuntary disconnection from work drive high poverty rates that dampen young people’s prospects and harm the whole country. Moreover, disconnection from school and work increases after high school – the problem does not naturally resolve itself. One analysis found that one percent of 18-year-olds, were disconnected, rising to 5% at age 20 and 12% at age 26.

• According to the Brookings Institution’s 2019 report Meet the Low-Wage Workforce , people ages 18–24 account for 24 percent of all low-wage workers. More specifically, 7 million of these workers are not in school and do not have a post-secondary degree, leaving them with very limited job prospects. They have median hourly wages of $8.55 and median annual earnings of $12,700. Many young people rely on these low wages to meet their own basic needs, support their families, or pay for their education.
• In 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the poverty rate for youth ages 18–24 was 13.3 percent —well above the rate of 10.5 percent among all adults.
• Among young people who were unemployed in July 2020, over half were out of work due to the pandemic.
• Millions of young adults carry overwhelming education debt, which threatens their economic stability far into their futures. Disparities in student debt load also perpetuate long-standing racial wealth gaps.
• Freshmen enrollment in higher education declined 13.1 percent in fall 2020, driven by an unprecedented 21 percent decline at public two-year colleges.
• As of July 2020, young people of color were suffering unemployment rates over 45 percent. Experts estimate that the number of opportunity youth (those ages 16–24 who are not working or in school) will top six million as a result of the pandemic.

Ages 16 through 24 are critical development years when young people begin to take on adult responsibilities. Employment is an important part of youth development, and early exposure to the world of work through summer and year-round employment, internships, and service opportunities is a key predictor of consistent employment in adulthood. High rates of youth unemployment have plunged many into financial crisis and presage long-term challenges to economic security. Unemployment rates are even higher among youth of color, deepening existing racial inequities that will require significant, targeted investments to reverse.

Source: https://www.clasp.org/why-we-cant-wait-economic-justice

Federal investments in workforce development have plummeted over the last 20 years, leaving millions of people without resources to connect or reconnect to the workforce or advance their careers. In today’s economy, careers with family-sustaining wages require more education and higher-level skills than ever before, yet federal investments reach only a fraction of youth and young adults seeking economic opportunity.

To support youth and their communities in recovering from the COVID-19 crisis, Congress must consider the loss of connection to critical work experiences and income over this past year and its long-term impacts. Congressional response in the Great Recession understandably focused on quick wins but failed to seize the opportunity to address the long-standing challenges youth have faced as they try to gain a foothold in a rapidly changing economy. The inadequate federal response had brutal and lasting consequences for young adults and the economy as a whole. Due to the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, our country is once again at risk of losing the professional and economic potential of an entire generation. In this recovery, we can and must do better.

Lessons from Federal Youth Investment in the Great Recession

Inadequate funding to level of need: In the Great Recession, a $1.2 billion investment in youth services included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) served 355,000 young adults through summer employment. To date, however, there is no evidence that the employment effects for participants were long lasting. Drawing lessons from ARRA implementation , future efforts should not only increase funding levels for young people, but also broaden the scope of services and tools that can mobilize additional public and private investment in youth beyond summer employment programs.

Disconnect between youth employment strategies and educational advancement and attainment: While ARRA offered funds for young people to access paid work experience, those experiences did not offer a platform for further classroom education and on-the-job training to prepare for a career. Furthermore, investments in education and training, particularly in community colleges, were not adequately targeted to youth or connected to the labor market. Future efforts must focus on paid work as an initial reconnection strategy, but long-term success depends on linking paid work experiences to investments in structured education and training opportunities. This will ensure the response serves as a building block to future education and career goals.

Lack of vision and coordination across government: Without a clear national strategy and interagency coordination, our country missed opportunities to leverage youth stimulus dollars with other discretionary federal education and workforce resources. To meet young people’s near- and long-term needs, future efforts must include a clear national plan for expanding strategies that effectively blend paid work experience with the attainment of postsecondary credentials.

Principles of a Comprehensive Federal Youth Employment Strategy

For better results, we need a national plan for meeting young people’s immediate needs, while also taking steps to clear their paths to success in the economy of the future. A national strategy should articulate a set of clear policy goals that center race and gender equity in a whole-of-government approach to mobilizing leadership and resources. The strategy should provide relief for young people today, promote an equitable national recovery, and reimagine how we support transitions from education to employment and integrate youth into the labor market. To that end, we have organized the following recommendations into three focus areas: relief, recovery, and reimagining education-to-employment transitions.

Policies and programs across these areas must address race explicitly by prioritizing people of color for services, actively remove structural barriers to participation and access, collect data to support analysis and accountability for equity measures, and be informed and driven by the people they are designed to support. We believe federal investment and action for youth must be guided by the following principles:

• Expand opportunities for historically oppressed communities and those that have experienced systemic underinvestment: Policies must prioritize young adults facing the greatest barriers to employment, adopt performance measures that encourage serving these young people, and reflect our understanding of the effects of trauma and opportunities for healing.
• Ensure community-driven and data-informed solutions: Investments should support community-based solutions, capacity-building for local systems and programs, and local decision-making. Solutions should build on the wisdom and experience of communities that have developed effective interventions and innovations that can be expanded. Funding should provide resources to support strong local conveners or intermediaries, thriving local service ecosystems, and a healthy workforce of youth-serving professionals.
• Enhance interagency and cross-system alignment at the federal level: Better federal coordination is necessary to help state and local jurisdictions carry out effective strategies and service delivery models that meet the full range of youth needs.
• Engage young people through co-design: Youth voice and leadership are at the heart of positive youth workforce development. Effective programs recognize youth as assets and listen to their experiences to understand what they need. With opportunities, training, support, and financial compensation, young people can be invaluable contributors to the design of programs and policies at the federal level.

Recommendations for Relief

The American Rescue Plan (ARP) included several provisions that are critical to many youth, including:

• Increasing and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) , which will help keep young workers (including non-custodial parents and those without children) out of poverty. This is a fitting form of pandemic relief for youth, since cashiers, home health aides, delivery people, and other essential workers are more likely to be youth and young adults.
• Extending unemployment insurance enhancements from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act so youth and young adults, including working high school and college students, can access unemployment relief.
• Removing harmful provisions in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) , so young people will not lose these basic benefits.

Despite this progress, however, the ARP did not succeed in raising the minimum wage, eliminating the subminimum wage for youth and those with disabilities, or improving the federal financial aid system to better support low-income students—all issues that affect young people’s ability to achieve economic security.

Recommendations for Recovery

To avoid a repeat of the painfully slow national recovery from the Great Recession, the federal government must leverage all of its powers as an investor, purchaser, and employer to support the employment of workers in high-quality, well-paid jobs. Federal recovery efforts directed at job creation must prioritize youth through targeted investments and new federal policies that support their connections to work and learning. These policy actions should include the following:

• Connect young people to work through a new, federal subsidized jobs program . Access to paid work is critical for national recovery and as a building block for long-term economic success, particularly for young adults from low-income backgrounds . Congress must work with the Biden-Harris administration to advance the American Jobs Plan and enact an equity-centered national subsidized employment program in any recovery legislation. Congress must prioritize and target investments to youth and young adults, and should also support capacity-building for localities and organizations to improve program design, operations, and assessment.
• Include young people in pathways to careers and infrastructure investments proposed in the American Jobs Plan. The U.S. Departments of Energy and Transportation, in coordination with the Domestic Policy Council and the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor, should identify job roles necessary to support transit infrastructure and climate change mitigation, and develop quality career pathways to prepare youth for those jobs. Further, they must ensure that these pathways emphasize integrated education and training and subsidized employment and prioritize youth and young adults who have been historically excluded from economic opportunity. The Connecting Youth to Jobs Act  recently introduced Reps. Jesús “Chuy” Garcia and Marcy Kaptur provides a good starting point for structure and implementation.
• Establish a national youth on-the-job learning initiative. Congress should develop and fund a dedicated on-the-job training (OJT) initiative that reimburses employers for up to 75 percent of wages paid for up to 12 months for hiring youth who are also participating in an eligible education and training program. Under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), Governors and local workforce development boards are permitted (but not required) to use a portion of their funding to offer wage reimbursements of up to 75 percent for OJT contracts that target eligible youth WIOA participants. Additionally, while the U.S. Department of Labor's discretionary National Dislocated Worker Grants can be used to support OJT, youth without an employment history are not the target population. Congress can improve youth access to OJT by providing dedicated funds to incentivize private, for-profit, not-for-profit, and public sector employers to hire young people and reconnect them to work and learning. Wage subsidies should be available only for jobs that pay at least $15 an hour and which include opportunities to earn college credit or industry credentials at no cost to the worker. Hazardous occupations as defined under the Fair Labor Standards Act should be ineligible for wage subsidies for workers under 18 years of age, and employers receiving subsidies should be forbidden from laying off existing workers.
• Fund state and local intermediary organizations to coordinate dramatic expansion of paid work experience aligned to postsecondary education and training pathways. Studies of youth employment programs indicate that intermediary organizations and community-based partnerships can be key to connecting more youth to meaningful employment experiences and supporting their success. Even without Congressional action, the Biden-Harris administration can guide new and existing investments in intermediaries by setting new baseline standards for employment program quality, including paid work experience that is aligned with postsecondary education and training. Investments in state and local intermediaries, including community colleges, could be targeted to organizations coordinating paid work experiences for youth in critical fields such as IT, manufacturing, energy, and the care economy.
• Increase aid for youth services. State and local governments need additional support for youth services offered in partnership with community-based organizations, educational institutions, and other programs. While many young people were eligible for earlier stimulus payments, they have faced difficulties navigating overwhelmed and overburdened public systems. In fact, according to data analysis by CLASP, during the pandemic more than 90 percent of unemployed young people were unable to access any income . Community-based organizations and educational institutions often step in to help them access available resources, without additional funding to do so.
• Clear definitions for program outcomes in key areas such as employment, industry-recognized credentials, Registered Apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship, and youth entrepreneurship.
• A full summary of federally supported youth employment programs that state and local governments should integrate into recovery strategies.
• Analysis of how workforce programs across agencies (including DOL, DOT, ED, DOI, HHS, and HUD, for example) can and should integrate pathways for youth to advance equity.
• Clarification on use of WIOA, Federal Work-Study, and TANF funds to subsidize wages for young people.
• Guidance on how states and regions can blend and braid existing federal resources and additional funding made available through COVID relief and recovery investments to support innovative programming for youth.
• Identification of administrative, regulatory, and legislative changes, similar to those made available through the Performance Partnership Pilots for Disconnected Youth (P3), that more effectively align federal investments in support of high-quality youth programs.

Recommendations for Reimagining Education-to-Employment Transitions

Government and the private sector have failed to respond to labor market changes that have made it more difficult to secure stable, well-paid jobs with only a high school diploma. It is time to reset public expectations about what we owe our young people to prepare them to thrive in a 21st-century economy. Across the U.S., state and local leaders are developing and implementing strategies to reimagine the design of the traditional high school, strengthen career and technical education, and expand access to apprenticeship and other earn-and-learn opportunities. These efforts, cutting across industry, K–12, and higher education, share the goal of providing young people affordable postsecondary options. A coherent national investment strategy should:

• Provide funding through community leads (local education agencies, community colleges, municipal agencies, or other intermediaries) to strengthen the local bridging ecosystem.
• Use flexible funding that includes access to college and career readiness programs and supports evidence-based counseling and retention supports.
• Include support for a range of bridging programs, including those focused on in-school youth , those focused on reengaging youth who left school without a diploma , those focused on workforce strategies such as youth apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship, and blended programs such as the federal GEAR UP program .
• Include a range of workforce, skills-building, and career pathways strategies.
• Strengthen provisions for education and employment pathways to better serve opportunity youth .
• Support interventions that mitigate the employment consequences of incarceration for youth and young adults.
• Provide for services that help young people navigate education and workforce opportunities available to them.
• Eliminate barriers to participation for undocumented immigrant youth.
• Invest $100 million over four years in state career and technical education (CTE) systems to support innovation in credit for work-based learning. To support long-term success and mobility for students, particularly in fields where a college degree remains a prerequisite for career advancement (e.g., in health care, IT, education, engineering, or business and finance), the Biden-Harris administration should build on DOL’s Registered Apprenticeship-College Consortium and launch a major national initiative to support college credit for Registered Apprenticeship and other work-based learning. If apprentices could acquire credit for rigorous learning in the workplace, credential completion and employment could be accelerated dramatically. Innovations are piecemeal across the U.S., but the Biden-Harris administration can support broad-based innovation by dedicating use of CTE National Activities Fund to provide grants to state and local CTE systems that develop credit-bearing Registered Apprenticeship programs, in partnership with education and industry partners. The Department of Education can use specialized accreditation authority to support innovations in postsecondary accreditation. A multi-year grant program could generate data to explore broader policy and investment implications for federal financial aid.
• Outline critical entry-level job roles with prospects for advancement, and core competencies and credential requirements to enter these roles.
• Develop national competency standards for youth-focused apprenticeship programs and register them with the U.S. Department of Labor.
• With support from the U.S. Department of Education, engage relevant accreditors to support college credit through on-the-job learning.
• Updated joint guidance from the Departments of Labor and Education and support for interagency activities aimed at developing high-quality youth apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships. (The Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship identifies a high-quality youth apprenticeship as one that is career-oriented, equitable, portable, adaptable, and accountable.)
• A requirement that at least 20 percent of the NAA’s proposed $3 billion in Congressional appropriations over five years for Registered Apprenticeship intermediary activities be set aside for intermediary partnerships focused on expanding youth apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships.
• A national pre-apprenticeship registration system, mirroring the system used for Registered Apprenticeships, to provide quality controls and monitor programs’ success at deliverable equitable outcomes.
• Awarding 48-month grants to states to bring education, workforce, and industry leaders together to develop priority opportunity pathways that provide paid work experiences for high school and community college students.
• Identifying and incentivizing clear intermediary strategies that connect employers and education partners to grow and expand Registered Apprenticeship and work-based learning opportunities.
• Developing and implementing articulation agreements that provide high school and college credit for on-the-job learning and Registered Apprenticeship programs.
• Improving cross-system data quality to link education and labor market outcomes.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated persistent inequities in our systems of education and work with significant and far-reaching consequences for young people. Without dramatic action, our country risks losing the professional and economic potential of our most diverse generations yet. We must act now to provide immediate relief, expand federal rescue efforts, and reimagine a coherent national approach to supporting equitable, effective education-to-employment transitions for youth.

Endorsements

• Kimberly A. Green , Advance CTE*
• Annelies M. Goger and Martha Ross , Brookings Institution*
• Sarah Miller , Center for Workforce and Economic Opportunity, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta*
• Kisha Bird , Duy Pham and Noel Tieszen , CLASP*
• Larry Good and Jeannine La Prad , Corporation for a Skilled Workforce
• Alexander Afranie , Jobs For the Future (JFF)*
• Carl Van Horn , John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University
• Amanda Cage , National Fund for Workforce Solutions
• Thomas Showalter , National Youth Employment Coalition*
• Brent Parton and Taylor White , New America*
• Kaya Ceci and James Haynes , OIC of America*
• Lashon Amado and Kimberly Pham , Opportunity Youth United*
• Jeremy Ly , Urban Alliance*
• Jane Oates , Working Nation
• Jesse Barba , Young Invincibles*
• Doug Ierley , YouthBuild USA* *Indicates Member of the BETS Youth Workgroup Individual endorsements are not indicative of organizational endorsements.

About the BETS Taskforce

The Better Employment and Training Strategies Taskforce (BETS) is a coalition of more than 40 leading practitioners and experts working to modernize the United States' outdated patchwork of workforce policies. The five BETS workgroups were convened in November 2020 to develop recommendations aimed at informing the incoming Biden-Harris administration and the 117th Congress on issues and policy options related to unemployment insurance, workforce development, job quality, youth employment, and federal jobs initiatives.

The BETS Taskforce was convened by Prof. Stephen Crawford of the George Washington Institute of Public Policy , Stuart Andreason of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta , and Larry Good of Corporation for a Skilled Workforce .

The above document is the final product of the youth employment workgroup chaired by Kisha Bird , of the Center for Law and Social Policy , and Taylor White and Brent Parton of the Center on Education & Labor at New America (CELNA).

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Millions of young people need better job skills. here's how businesses can help, executive director of unicef's article regarding the annual meeting of the world economic forum..

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Globalization, technology, expanding webs of trade and commerce, automation and the rise of artificial intelligence are changing labour markets at a rapid, uneven pace around the world. As a global community, we must ask ourselves: are we preparing the world’s young men and women for this changing world of work? Are they getting the education and skills they need for the jobs that are available? And - crucially - for those jobs that haven’t been invented yet?

These are important and consequential questions. There are 1.8 billion people aged between 10 and 24 on the planet. Every month, 10 million young people reach working age, ready to begin productive lives. Some will continue with education, others will enter the workforce.

What will they find?

They will discover that the world is  not  creating 10 million new jobs every month. there are 71 million unemployed young people worldwide, and a further 156 million working young people live on less than $3 per day..

They will find a dramatic mismatch between the skills they possess and the jobs that are available. In other words: yesterday’s skills don’t match today’s job market. In the poorest countries, they will find that the vast majority of opportunities are limited to the informal sector. In high-income countries, they will find that technology and low-cost production have erased jobs, closed factories and narrowed opportunities.

Many young people will find that they lack the foundational skills they need to succeed. Globally, six in ten children and adolescents do not achieve minimum proficiency in reading and math, and 200 million adolescents are out of school worldwide.

If they’re girls, they will meet additional barriers. Discrimination and societal norms that lock girls out of education and job opportunities also give rise to early marriage and pregnancy, which dramatically reduce young women’s ability to “learn and earn” as they become adults. This is an injustice and a tragic waste of potential.

This skills crisis paints a bleak picture, not just for young men and women looking for opportunities and a better future, but also for entire countries and regions looking for economic growth and social stability. However, this picture is not inevitable. We can change it, if we work together to close the skills gap in a number of areas.

Young people need  foundational skills , such as literacy and numeracy, ideally through 12 years of quality education.

They need  transferable skills , such as problem-solving, confidence-building, team-building and communication.

They need  job-specific skills , such as carpentry, coding, accounting, green technology, modern agriculture or engineering.

They increasingly need  entrepreneurial skills , especially in low-income countries, where the informal sector is dominant.

And they definitely need  digital skills  to participate in the global economy, which is driven by information and communications technology.

Without these skills, millions of young people will be either unemployed or trapped in low-skilled work. The Fourth Industrial Revolution will pass them by.

Of course, governments have a role to play. They must invest in improving the quality, relevance and gender-responsiveness of education, so that young people can get the foundational and transferable skills they need before they enter the workforce.

But we also need businesses to join the effort. Here are four ways that your company can help close the skills gap, and give young people the ladders of opportunity they need to reach their potential.

1. Increase the quality and number of the apprenticeships and mentorships you offer

Seek out new opportunities in your operation to train young people from your communities, particularly disadvantaged youth. Offer hands-on mentorships and apprenticeships, combined with training in the  specific skills  that your business needs. By opening your doors to these young people, you're not only shaping tomorrow’s workforce, you’re identifying potential talent for your business in the years ahead.

2. Partner with local schools and community groups to improve education, while strengthening the 'school-to-work' transition

Can you work with local schools to build new programmes focused on the skills of greatest need, whether carpentry or coding? Can your employees organize events at schools or community centres to provide advice and share their own career paths with young people? Can you develop talent strategies that match promising young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, particularly girls, with opportunities in your business?

3. Champion gender equality and family-friendly policies

Ensure that your policies and practices support women and parents in your workplace, and that young women have a voice in the decision-making process at every level. Young women deserve a chance to contribute, and your business deserves to benefit from their skills and ideas.

4. Join Generation Unlimited, our new global partnership to identify and scale-up solutions

We need your expertise, innovations and market reach as we link young people with quality education, skills and on-the-job training. Do you have any products, technologies or innovations that could be modified or scaled up to connect young people to education or new skills? Let us know at  genunlimited.org .

The skills gap will not close by itself. Let’s work together to give young people the foundational, transferable and job-specific skills they need.

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The World Bank Group is the largest financier of education in the developing world, working in 94 countries and committed to helping them reach SDG4: access to inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030.

Education is a human right, a powerful driver of development, and one of the strongest instruments for reducing poverty and improving health, gender equality, peace, and stability. It delivers large, consistent returns in terms of income, and is the most important factor to ensure equity and inclusion.

For individuals, education promotes employment, earnings, health, and poverty reduction. Globally, there is a  9% increase in hourly earnings for every extra year of schooling . For societies, it drives long-term economic growth, spurs innovation, strengthens institutions, and fosters social cohesion.  Education is further a powerful catalyst to climate action through widespread behavior change and skilling for green transitions.

Developing countries have made tremendous progress in getting children into the classroom and more children worldwide are now in school. But learning is not guaranteed, as the  2018 World Development Report  (WDR) stressed.

Making smart and effective investments in people’s education is critical for developing the human capital that will end extreme poverty. At the core of this strategy is the need to tackle the learning crisis, put an end to  Learning Poverty , and help youth acquire the advanced cognitive, socioemotional, technical and digital skills they need to succeed in today’s world. 

In low- and middle-income countries, the share of children living in  Learning Poverty  (that is, the proportion of 10-year-old children that are unable to read and understand a short age-appropriate text) increased from 57% before the pandemic to an estimated  70%  in 2022.

However, learning is in crisis. More than 70 million more people were pushed into poverty during the COVID pandemic, a billion children lost a year of school , and three years later the learning losses suffered have not been recouped .  If a child cannot read with comprehension by age 10, they are unlikely to become fluent readers. They will fail to thrive later in school and will be unable to power their careers and economies once they leave school.

The effects of the pandemic are expected to be long-lasting. Analysis has already revealed deep losses, with international reading scores declining from 2016 to 2021 by more than a year of schooling.  These losses may translate to a 0.68 percentage point in global GDP growth.  The staggering effects of school closures reach beyond learning. This generation of children could lose a combined total of  US$21 trillion in lifetime earnings  in present value or the equivalent of 17% of today’s global GDP – a sharp rise from the 2021 estimate of a US$17 trillion loss. 

Action is urgently needed now – business as usual will not suffice to heal the scars of the pandemic and will not accelerate progress enough to meet the ambitions of SDG 4. We are urging governments to implement ambitious and aggressive Learning Acceleration Programs to get children back to school, recover lost learning, and advance progress by building better, more equitable and resilient education systems.

Last Updated: Mar 25, 2024

The World Bank’s global education strategy is centered on ensuring learning happens – for everyone, everywhere. Our vision is to ensure that everyone can achieve her or his full potential with access to a quality education and lifelong learning. To reach this, we are helping countries build foundational skills like literacy, numeracy, and socioemotional skills – the building blocks for all other learning. From early childhood to tertiary education and beyond – we help children and youth acquire the skills they need to thrive in school, the labor market and throughout their lives.

Investing in the world’s most precious resource – people – is paramount to ending poverty on a livable planet.  Our experience across more than 100 countries bears out this robust connection between human capital, quality of life, and economic growth: when countries strategically invest in people and the systems designed to protect and build human capital at scale, they unlock the wealth of nations and the potential of everyone.

Building on this, the World Bank supports resilient, equitable, and inclusive education systems that ensure learning happens for everyone. We do this by generating and disseminating evidence, ensuring alignment with policymaking processes, and bridging the gap between research and practice.

The World Bank is the largest source of external financing for education in developing countries, with a portfolio of about $26 billion in 94 countries including IBRD, IDA and Recipient-Executed Trust Funds. IDA operations comprise 62% of the education portfolio.

The investment in FCV settings has increased dramatically and now accounts for 26% of our portfolio.

World Bank projects reach at least 425 million students -one-third of students in low- and middle-income countries.

The World Bank’s Approach to Education

Five interrelated pillars of a well-functioning education system underpin the World Bank’s education policy approach:

• Learners are prepared and motivated to learn;
• Teachers are prepared, skilled, and motivated to facilitate learning and skills acquisition;
• Learning resources (including education technology) are available, relevant, and used to improve teaching and learning;
• Schools are safe and inclusive; and
• Education Systems are well-managed, with good implementation capacity and adequate financing.

The Bank is already helping governments design and implement cost-effective programs and tools to build these pillars.

Our Principles:

• We pursue systemic reform supported by political commitment to learning for all children. 
• We focus on equity and inclusion through a progressive path toward achieving universal access to quality education, including children and young adults in fragile or conflict affected areas , those in marginalized and rural communities,  girls and women , displaced populations,  students with disabilities , and other vulnerable groups.
• We focus on results and use evidence to keep improving policy by using metrics to guide improvements.   
• We want to ensure financial commitment commensurate with what is needed to provide basic services to all. 
• We invest wisely in technology so that education systems embrace and learn to harness technology to support their learning objectives.   

Laying the groundwork for the future

Country challenges vary, but there is a menu of options to build forward better, more resilient, and equitable education systems.

Countries are facing an education crisis that requires a two-pronged approach: first, supporting actions to recover lost time through remedial and accelerated learning; and, second, building on these investments for a more equitable, resilient, and effective system.

Recovering from the learning crisis must be a political priority, backed with adequate financing and the resolve to implement needed reforms.  Domestic financing for education over the last two years has not kept pace with the need to recover and accelerate learning. Across low- and lower-middle-income countries, the  average share of education in government budgets fell during the pandemic , and in 2022 it remained below 2019 levels.

The best chance for a better future is to invest in education and make sure each dollar is put toward improving learning.  In a time of fiscal pressure, protecting spending that yields long-run gains – like spending on education – will maximize impact.  We still need more and better funding for education.  Closing the learning gap will require increasing the level, efficiency, and equity of education spending—spending smarter is an imperative.

• Education technology  can be a powerful tool to implement these actions by supporting teachers, children, principals, and parents; expanding accessible digital learning platforms, including radio/ TV / Online learning resources; and using data to identify and help at-risk children, personalize learning, and improve service delivery.

Looking ahead

We must seize this opportunity  to reimagine education in bold ways. Together, we can build forward better more equitable, effective, and resilient education systems for the world’s children and youth.

Accelerating Improvements

Supporting countries in establishing time-bound learning targets and a focused education investment plan, outlining actions and investments geared to achieve these goals.

Launched in 2020, the  Accelerator Program  works with a set of countries to channel investments in education and to learn from each other. The program coordinates efforts across partners to ensure that the countries in the program show improvements in foundational skills at scale over the next three to five years. These investment plans build on the collective work of multiple partners, and leverage the latest evidence on what works, and how best to plan for implementation.  Countries such as Brazil (the state of Ceará) and Kenya have achieved dramatic reductions in learning poverty over the past decade at scale, providing useful lessons, even as they seek to build on their successes and address remaining and new challenges.  

Universalizing Foundational Literacy

Readying children for the future by supporting acquisition of foundational skills – which are the gateway to other skills and subjects.

The  Literacy Policy Package (LPP)   consists of interventions focused specifically on promoting acquisition of reading proficiency in primary school. These include assuring political and technical commitment to making all children literate; ensuring effective literacy instruction by supporting teachers; providing quality, age-appropriate books; teaching children first in the language they speak and understand best; and fostering children’s oral language abilities and love of books and reading.

Advancing skills through TVET and Tertiary

Ensuring that individuals have access to quality education and training opportunities and supporting links to employment.

Tertiary education and skills systems are a driver of major development agendas, including human capital, climate change, youth and women’s empowerment, and jobs and economic transformation. A comprehensive skill set to succeed in the 21st century labor market consists of foundational and higher order skills, socio-emotional skills, specialized skills, and digital skills. Yet most countries continue to struggle in delivering on the promise of skills development. 

The World Bank is supporting countries through efforts that address key challenges including improving access and completion, adaptability, quality, relevance, and efficiency of skills development programs. Our approach is via multiple channels including projects, global goods, as well as the Tertiary Education and Skills Program . Our recent reports including Building Better Formal TVET Systems and STEERing Tertiary Education provide a way forward for how to improve these critical systems.

Addressing Climate Change

Mainstreaming climate education and investing in green skills, research and innovation, and green infrastructure to spur climate action and foster better preparedness and resilience to climate shocks.

Our approach recognizes that education is critical for achieving effective, sustained climate action. At the same time, climate change is adversely impacting education outcomes. Investments in education can play a huge role in building climate resilience and advancing climate mitigation and adaptation. Climate change education gives young people greater awareness of climate risks and more access to tools and solutions for addressing these risks and managing related shocks. Technical and vocational education and training can also accelerate a green economic transformation by fostering green skills and innovation. Greening education infrastructure can help mitigate the impact of heat, pollution, and extreme weather on learning, while helping address climate change. 

Examples of this work are projects in Nigeria (life skills training for adolescent girls), Vietnam (fostering relevant scientific research) , and Bangladesh (constructing and retrofitting schools to serve as cyclone shelters).

Strengthening Measurement Systems

Enabling countries to gather and evaluate information on learning and its drivers more efficiently and effectively.

The World Bank supports initiatives to help countries effectively build and strengthen their measurement systems to facilitate evidence-based decision-making. Examples of this work include:

(1) The  Global Education Policy Dashboard (GEPD) : This tool offers a strong basis for identifying priorities for investment and policy reforms that are suited to each country context by focusing on the three dimensions of practices, policies, and politics.

• Highlights gaps between what the evidence suggests is effective in promoting learning and what is happening in practice in each system; and
• Allows governments to track progress as they act to close the gaps.

The GEPD has been implemented in 13 education systems already – Peru, Rwanda, Jordan, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Islamabad, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sierra Leone, Niger, Gabon, Jordan and Chad – with more expected by the end of 2024.

(2)  Learning Assessment Platform (LeAP) : LeAP is a one-stop shop for knowledge, capacity-building tools, support for policy dialogue, and technical staff expertise to support student achievement measurement and national assessments for better learning.

Supporting Successful Teachers

Helping systems develop the right selection, incentives, and support to the professional development of teachers.

Currently, the World Bank Education Global Practice has over 160 active projects supporting over 18 million teachers worldwide, about a third of the teacher population in low- and middle-income countries. In 12 countries alone, these projects cover 16 million teachers, including all primary school teachers in Ethiopia and Turkey, and over 80% in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Vietnam.

A World Bank-developed classroom observation tool, Teach, was designed to capture the quality of teaching in low- and middle-income countries. It is now 3.6 million students.

While Teach helps identify patterns in teacher performance, Coach leverages these insights to support teachers to improve their teaching practice through hands-on in-service teacher professional development (TPD).

Our recent report on Making Teacher Policy Work proposes a practical framework to uncover the black box of effective teacher policy and discusses the factors that enable their scalability and sustainability.

 Supporting Education Finance Systems

Strengthening country financing systems to mobilize resources for education and make better use of their investments in education.

Our approach is to bring together multi-sectoral expertise to engage with ministries of education and finance and other stakeholders to develop and implement effective and efficient public financial management systems; build capacity to monitor and evaluate education spending, identify financing bottlenecks, and develop interventions to strengthen financing systems; build the evidence base on global spending patterns and the magnitude and causes of spending inefficiencies; and develop diagnostic tools as public goods to support country efforts.

Working in Fragile, Conflict, and Violent (FCV) Contexts

The massive and growing global challenge of having so many children living in conflict and violent situations requires a response at the same scale and scope. Our education engagement in the Fragility, Conflict and Violence (FCV) context, which stands at US$5.35 billion, has grown rapidly in recent years, reflecting the ever-increasing importance of the FCV agenda in education. Indeed, these projects now account for more than 25% of the World Bank education portfolio.

Education is crucial to minimizing the effects of fragility and displacement on the welfare of youth and children in the short-term and preventing the emergence of violent conflict in the long-term. 

Support to Countries Throughout the Education Cycle

Our support to countries covers the entire learning cycle, to help shape resilient, equitable, and inclusive education systems that ensure learning happens for everyone. 

The ongoing  Supporting  Egypt  Education Reform project , 2018-2025, supports transformational reforms of the Egyptian education system, by improving teaching and learning conditions in public schools. The World Bank has invested $500 million in the project focused on increasing access to quality kindergarten, enhancing the capacity of teachers and education leaders, developing a reliable student assessment system, and introducing the use of modern technology for teaching and learning. Specifically, the share of Egyptian 10-year-old students, who could read and comprehend at the global minimum proficiency level, increased to 45 percent in 2021.

In  Nigeria , the $75 million  Edo  Basic Education Sector and Skills Transformation (EdoBESST)  project, running from 2020-2024, is focused on improving teaching and learning in basic education. Under the project, which covers 97 percent of schools in the state, there is a strong focus on incorporating digital technologies for teachers. They were equipped with handheld tablets with structured lesson plans for their classes. Their coaches use classroom observation tools to provide individualized feedback. Teacher absence has reduced drastically because of the initiative. Over 16,000 teachers were trained through the project, and the introduction of technology has also benefited students.

Through the $235 million  School Sector Development Program  in  Nepal  (2017-2022), the number of children staying in school until Grade 12 nearly tripled, and the number of out-of-school children fell by almost seven percent. During the pandemic, innovative approaches were needed to continue education. Mobile phone penetration is high in the country. More than four in five households in Nepal have mobile phones. The project supported an educational service that made it possible for children with phones to connect to local radio that broadcast learning programs.

From 2017-2023, the $50 million  Strengthening of State Universities  in  Chile  project has made strides to improve quality and equity at state universities. The project helped reduce dropout: the third-year dropout rate fell by almost 10 percent from 2018-2022, keeping more students in school.

The World Bank’s first  Program-for-Results financing in education  was through a $202 million project in  Tanzania , that ran from 2013-2021. The project linked funding to results and aimed to improve education quality. It helped build capacity, and enhanced effectiveness and efficiency in the education sector. Through the project, learning outcomes significantly improved alongside an unprecedented expansion of access to education for children in Tanzania. From 2013-2019, an additional 1.8 million students enrolled in primary schools. In 2019, the average reading speed for Grade 2 students rose to 22.3 words per minute, up from 17.3 in 2017. The project laid the foundation for the ongoing $500 million  BOOST project , which supports over 12 million children to enroll early, develop strong foundational skills, and complete a quality education.

The $40 million  Cambodia  Secondary Education Improvement project , which ran from 2017-2022, focused on strengthening school-based management, upgrading teacher qualifications, and building classrooms in Cambodia, to improve learning outcomes, and reduce student dropout at the secondary school level. The project has directly benefited almost 70,000 students in 100 target schools, and approximately 2,000 teachers and 600 school administrators received training.

The World Bank is co-financing the $152.80 million  Yemen  Restoring Education and Learning Emergency project , running from 2020-2024, which is implemented through UNICEF, WFP, and Save the Children. It is helping to maintain access to basic education for many students, improve learning conditions in schools, and is working to strengthen overall education sector capacity. In the time of crisis, the project is supporting teacher payments and teacher training, school meals, school infrastructure development, and the distribution of learning materials and school supplies. To date, almost 600,000 students have benefited from these interventions.

The $87 million  Providing an Education of Quality in  Haiti  project supported approximately 380 schools in the Southern region of Haiti from 2016-2023. Despite a highly challenging context of political instability and recurrent natural disasters, the project successfully supported access to education for students. The project provided textbooks, fresh meals, and teacher training support to 70,000 students, 3,000 teachers, and 300 school directors. It gave tuition waivers to 35,000 students in 118 non-public schools. The project also repaired 19 national schools damaged by the 2021 earthquake, which gave 5,500 students safe access to their schools again.

In 2013, just 5% of the poorest households in  Uzbekistan  had children enrolled in preschools. Thanks to the  Improving Pre-Primary and General Secondary Education Project , by July 2019, around 100,000 children will have benefitted from the half-day program in 2,420 rural kindergartens, comprising around 49% of all preschool educational institutions, or over 90% of rural kindergartens in the country.

In addition to working closely with governments in our client countries, the World Bank also works at the global, regional, and local levels with a range of technical partners, including foundations, non-profit organizations, bilaterals, and other multilateral organizations. Some examples of our most recent global partnerships include:

UNICEF, UNESCO, FCDO, USAID, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:  Coalition for Foundational Learning

The World Bank is working closely with UNICEF, UNESCO, FCDO, USAID, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as the  Coalition for Foundational Learning  to advocate and provide technical support to ensure foundational learning.  The World Bank works with these partners to promote and endorse the  Commitment to Action on Foundational Learning , a global network of countries committed to halving the global share of children unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10 by 2030.

Australian Aid, Bernard van Leer Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Canada, Echida Giving, FCDO, German Cooperation, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, Conrad Hilton Foundation, LEGO Foundation, Porticus, USAID: Early Learning Partnership

The Early Learning Partnership (ELP) is a multi-donor trust fund, housed at the World Bank.  ELP leverages World Bank strengths—a global presence, access to policymakers and strong technical analysis—to improve early learning opportunities and outcomes for young children around the world.

We help World Bank teams and countries get the information they need to make the case to invest in Early Childhood Development (ECD), design effective policies and deliver impactful programs. At the country level, ELP grants provide teams with resources for early seed investments that can generate large financial commitments through World Bank finance and government resources. At the global level, ELP research and special initiatives work to fill knowledge gaps, build capacity and generate public goods.

UNESCO, UNICEF:  Learning Data Compact

UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank have joined forces to close the learning data gaps that still exist and that preclude many countries from monitoring the quality of their education systems and assessing if their students are learning. The three organizations have agreed to a  Learning Data Compact , a commitment to ensure that all countries, especially low-income countries, have at least one quality measure of learning by 2025, supporting coordinated efforts to strengthen national assessment systems.

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS):   Learning Poverty Indicator

Aimed at measuring and urging attention to foundational literacy as a prerequisite to achieve SDG4, this partnership was launched in 2019 to help countries strengthen their learning assessment systems, better monitor what students are learning in internationally comparable ways and improve the breadth and quality of global data on education.

FCDO, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:  EdTech Hub

Supported by the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the EdTech Hub is aimed at improving the quality of ed-tech investments. The Hub launched a rapid response Helpdesk service to provide just-in-time advisory support to 70 low- and middle-income countries planning education technology and remote learning initiatives.

MasterCard Foundation

Our Tertiary Education and Skills  global program, launched with support from the Mastercard Foundation, aims to prepare youth and adults for the future of work and society by improving access to relevant, quality, equitable reskilling and post-secondary education opportunities.  It is designed to reframe, reform, and rebuild tertiary education and skills systems for the digital and green transformation.

Bridging the AI divide: Breaking down barriers to ensure women’s leadership and participation in the Fifth Industrial Revolution

Common challenges and tailored solutions: How policymakers are strengthening early learning systems across the world

Compulsory education boosts learning outcomes and climate action

Areas of focus.

Data & Measurement

Early Childhood Development

Financing Education

Foundational Learning

Fragile, Conflict & Violent Contexts

Girls’ Education

Inclusive Education

Skills Development

Technology (EdTech)  

Tertiary Education

Initiatives

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• Tertiary Education and Skills Program
• Service Delivery Indicators
• Evoke: Transforming education to empower youth
• Global Education Policy Dashboard
• Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel
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Collapse and Recovery: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Eroded Human Capital and What to Do About It

BROCHURES & FACT SHEETS

Flyer: Education Factsheet - May 2024

Publication: Realizing Education's Promise: A World Bank Retrospective – August 2023

Flyer: Education and Climate Change - November 2022

Brochure: Learning Losses - October 2022

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Global Education Newsletter - April 2024

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The Human Capital Project is a global effort to accelerate more and better investments in people for greater equity and economic growth.

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Youth Employment: A Foundation for Mental Health and Well-Being

Youth Employment Webinar

DOL held a webinar on this topic on May 14. Check out the recording .

The U.S. Department of Labor knows the workforce system is an important partner in supporting the mental health of young people, and that good jobs are a critical component of well-being and security. We are committed to equipping the workforce system with resources and connections to ensure that youth employment programs are a bridge to the wellness services young people need.

Tell us how you are going to support #YouthMentalHealth by submitting a response below .

There are many ways our communities can step up to help young people. Here are just a few actions we can take together.

Young People

Young people are important advocates and leaders in their own, and their peers’, mental health and well-being experiences. Here are some important steps young people can take to protect, improve, and advocate for their mental health and that of their family, friends, and neighbors.

Young people can:

• Need help now? Call 988 or use the 988 Lifeline Chat and Text to connect with a caring crisis counselor for emotional support.  
• Ask for help. Find and talk to a mental health care provider .
• Support friends and peers – there is power in asking and listening .
• Explore careers in mental health and wellness services.
• Behavioral Health Resources for Teens and Young Adults (HHS)
• Youth Mental Health (HHS)
• Ask for accommodations that may be needed to succeed at work.
• Begin identifying the people who you would like to be part of your support network and develop a plan .
• Know their rights under the federal parity law.
• Practice your youth development and leadership skills by joining a youth committee and sharing your ideas. Find a youth committee in your area .
• Learn about workplace protections for children and teens .
• Learn about resources to help you secure your financial future as a young person with a disability.

Workforce System

The workforce system plays a critical role in creating no wrong door approach to supportive services, including mental health services. From frontline staff to workforce system leaders, we can all take steps to ensure the workforce system contributes to identifying and responding to the mental health and well-being needs of young people.

The Workforce System can:

• For example, WIOA can support Mental Health First Aid Training: Mental Health First Aid (SAMHSA)
• Integrate youth mental health and well-being discussions into the intake and assessment process to identify potential needs.  Enable youth to be successful in the program by addressing those needs through mental health services or through referrals to mental health professionals.
• For example, identify and connect with local Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) technical assistance partners at National Training & Technical Assistance Center (for rural areas ).
• Use Summer Youth Employment Programs as an opportunity to share mental health, wellness, and know your rights resources with youth and young adults.
• Provide Guided Group Discovery services to assess interests, skills and conditions of employment for young people with mental health conditions.

Learn more about how practitioners are implementing these strategies.

• Policy brief “Leveraging State Policy to Support Positive Mental Health and Employment for Youth with Marginalized Racial Identities” issued by the Center for Advancing Policy on Employment for Youth (CAPE-Youth).
• Policy brief “ Improving Mental Health Service Delivery Including Coordinated Specialty Care for Youth with a First Episode of Psychosis ” issued by the CAPE-Youth.

Policy Makers

Policy makers can encourage programs and supportive practices in the workplace that help mitigate employment disparities and encourage more young people, including those from underserved communities, to work and contribute to their well-being.

Policy makers can:

• Encourage workforce systems to incorporate supports to promote positive mental health.
• Expand access to mental health benefits generally and culturally responsive mental health care in particular.
• Expand access to and develop holistic mental health programs in schools to help students access needed health services without facing stigmatization, attain higher education, and enter the workforce.
• Take steps to align policy, program, and funding infrastructure to increase access to effective service models, such as the Individual Placement and Support (IPS) and customized employment models, to improve employment and education outcomes for youth and young adults with mental health conditions.
• Policy Framework on Workforce Mental Health issued by the Mental Health Matters: National Task Force on Workforce Mental Health Policy (created by the U.S. Department of Labor’s State Exchange on Employment & Disability (SEED).

From recruiting to hiring to onboarding to retention to professional development to benefits practices – employers have many opportunities to create an onsite culture that fosters well-being, including for young people.

Employers can:

• Know your legal obligations. For example, most employers are required to provide employees with reasonable accommodations and workplace supports, such as adjustments or modifications, to enable people with disabilities, including mental health conditions, to perform job essential functions effectively and efficiently. Similarly, coverage of mental health benefits through employment-based health plans must comply with the federal parity law.
• Develop and implement anti-bullying and anti-stigma campaigns to build awareness about mental health and improve workplace culture .
• Federal employers looking to hire college students and recent graduates with disabilities may register for a Workforce Recruitment Program account. Visit WRP.gov and click Employers Register Now to get started.
• Guide on “ Fostering a Mentally Healthy Workplace ” issued by the Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP).
• Toolkit on " 4As: Provide ACCOMMODATIONS to Employees " issued by Employer Assistance and Resource Network on Disability Inclusion (EARN).

Any links to non-federal websites on this page provide additional information that is consistent with the intended purpose of this federal site, but linking to such sites does not constitute an endorsement by the U.S. Department of Labor of the information or organization providing such information. For more information, please visit https://www.dol.gov/general/disclaim .

Tell us what your community is doing to ensure young people have the resources and opportunities they need to realize their full potential.

Share Your Story

Please respond to the #YouthMentalHealth Call to Action solicitation below. Please share what you are comfortable sharing. Comments received will be reviewed by the Department. While we intend to engage with you on submissions, be aware that information contained in submissions may be made public.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] .

Additional Resources

• DOL's Mental Health at Work Resources to assist young people
• DOL's Youth Services Youth Mental Health Resource Hub
• ODEP's Mental Health Friendly Work Culture page
• Fact Sheet and Gender-Based Violence and Harassment in the World of Work ( Español )
• Behavioral Health Resources for Teens and Young Adults | The Administration for Children and Families (hhs.gov)
• Youth Mental Health — Current Priorities of the U.S. Surgeon General (hhs.gov)

Webinar on Youth Employment: A Foundation for Mental Health and Well-Being

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County Offices to Close for Memorial Day

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EDD Announces Workforce Training Grants to Help Young Adults

NR No. 24-19 Contact: Loree Levy/Greg Lawson 916-654-9029 [email protected]

What You Need to Know: California is investing in education and workforce training programs to meet the needs of opportunity youth or young adults (ages 18-28) who are not active in education, employment, or training. This 100 percent federally-funded investment provides opportunities for these young adults to access pathways to new careers and financial self-sufficiency.

SACRAMENTO – The Employment Development Department (EDD) announced today that it has awarded federally-funded grants to 10 organizations through the Opportunity Young Adult Career Pathway Program. Awardees will use grant funds to design and implement projects aimed at empowering young adults from underserved communities to obtain high-quality, well-paying jobs that offer opportunities for advancement. 

“This program will help capable, young adults find valuable job training and career opportunities,” said EDD Director Nancy Farias.

Participants will have access to certification programs, on-the-job training, work-based learning opportunities, personalized career planning, and mentorships. These opportunities will ensure that participants are better-prepared for relevant and in-demand careers in industries, including healthcare, construction, information, technology, public service, and science and engineering. The programs focus on quality jobs and trauma-informed case management support.

Grant awardees will work with employers, educational institutions, public agencies, and community-based organizations to support the workforce development needs of their young adult participants. Services will include industry-focused training and education, career development, and job placement.

“Knowing the barriers that young adults and younger workers face, we are excited for an opportunity to reinforce their sustained optimism and build upon their resilience with quality opportunities,” said Rebecca Evans, Executive Director, Workforce Development Board of Ventura County. “This funding allows access for young adults to learn in a safe environment and to advance on a career pathway to earn life sustaining wages. These projects will also yield strong outcomes for employers who have the opportunity to develop the skills they need and recruit a stronger workforce. In our region the win-win of having young adults participate in paid internships throughout Ventura County will provide younger workers with experience and learning while also providing employers a pipeline of local talent with skills and abilities.”

The programs will also include support services and personalized case management, so participants are empowered to overcome barriers, achieve economic stability, and remain engaged in their education and training. 

“This grant will allow our young adults to benefit from the training and support services needed to obtain the necessary skills to succeed in the workplace,” said Dr. Nohemy Ornelas, Vice Chancellor of Educational and Student Support Services at the San Bernardino Community College District.

Please refer to the table below for contact information and to learn more about the services they provide.

The Opportunity Young Adult Career Pathway Program award is funded by a grant of $ 17,697,313.88 (100 percent federal funds) from the U.S. Department of Labor.

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What Do Students at Elite Colleges Really Want?

Many of Harvard’s Generation Z say “sellout” is not an insult.

Credit... Jeff Hinchee

Supported by

By Francesca Mari

• Published May 22, 2024 Updated May 24, 2024

The meme was an image of a head with “I need to get rich” slapped across it. “Freshmen after spending 0.02 seconds on campus,” read the caption, posted in 2023 to the anonymous messaging app Sidechat.

The campus in question was Harvard, where, at a wood-paneled dining hall last year, two juniors explained how to assess a fellow undergraduate’s earning potential. It’s easy, they said, as we ate mussels, beets and sautéed chard: You can tell by who’s getting a bulge bracket internship.

“What?” Benny Goldman, a then-28-year-old economics P.h.D. student and their residential tutor, was confused.

One of the students paused, surprised that he was unfamiliar with the term: A bulge bracket bank, like Goldman Sachs , JPMorgan Chase or Citi. The biggest, most prestigious global investment banks. A B.B., her friend explained. Not to be confused with M.B.B. , which stands for three of the most prestigious management consulting firms: McKinsey, Bain and Boston Consulting Group.

While the main image of elite campuses during this commencement season might be activists in kaffiyehs pitching tents on electric green lawns, most students on campus are focused not on protesting the war in Gaza, but on what will come after graduation.

Despite the popular image of this generation — that of Greta Thunberg and the Parkland activists — as one driven by idealism, GenZ students at these schools appear to be strikingly corporate-minded. Even when they arrive at college wanting something very different, an increasing number of students at elite universities seek the imprimatur of employment by a powerful firm and “making a bag” (slang for a sack of money) as quickly as possible.

Elite universities have always been major feeders into finance and consulting, and students have always wanted to make money. According to the annual American Freshman Survey , the biggest increase in students wanting to become “very well off financially” happened between the 1970s and 1980s, and it’s been creeping up since then.

But in the last five years, faculty and administrators say, the pull of these industries has become supercharged. In an age of astronomical housing costs, high tuition and inequality, students and their parents increasingly see college as a means to a lucrative job, more than a place to explore.

A ‘Herd Mentality’

At Harvard, a graduating senior, who passed on a full scholarship to another school, told me that he felt immense pressure to show his parents that their $400,000 investment in his Harvard education would allow him to get the sort of job where he could make a million dollars a year. Upon graduation, he will join the private equity firm Blackstone, where, he believes, he will learn and achieve more in six years than 30 years in a public-service-oriented organization.

Another student, from Uruguay, who spent his second summer in a row practicing case studies in preparation for management consulting internship interviews, told me that everyone arrived on campus hoping to change the world. But what they learn at Harvard, he said, is that actually doing anything meaningful is too hard. People give up on their dreams, he told me, and decide they might as well make money. Someone else told me it was common at parties to hear their peers say they just want to sell out.

“There’s definitely a herd mentality,” Joshua Parker, a 21-year-old Harvard junior from Oahu, said. “If you’re not doing finance or tech, it can feel like you’re doing something wrong.”

As a freshman, he planned to major in environmental engineering. As a sophomore, he switched to economics, joining five of his six roommates. One of those roommates told me that he hoped to run a hedge fund by the time he was in his 30s. Before that, he wanted to earn a good salary, which he defined as $500,000 a year.

According to a Harvard Crimson survey of Harvard Seniors, the share of 2024 graduates going into finance and consulting is 34 percent. (In 2022 and 2023 it exceeded 40 percent. The official Harvard Institutional Research survey yields lower percentages for those fields than the Crimson survey, because it includes students who aren’t entering the work force.)

These statistics approach the previous highs in 2007, after which the global financial crisis drove the share down to a recent low of 20 percent in 2009, from which it’s been regaining ground since.

Fifteen years ago, fewer students went into tech. Adding in that sector, the share of graduates starting what some students non-disparagingly refer to as “sellout jobs” is more than half. (It was a record-shattering 60 percent in 2022 and nearly 54 percent in 2023.)

“When people say ‘selling out,’ I mean, obviously, there’s some implicit judgment there,” said Aden Barton, a 23-year-old Harvard senior who wrote an opinion column for the student newspaper headlined, “How Harvard Careerism Killed the Classroom.”

“But it really is just almost a descriptive term at this point for people pursuing certain career paths,” he continued. “I’m not trying to denigrate anybody’s career path nor my own.” (He interned at a hedge fund last summer.)

David Halek, director of employer relations at Yale’s Office of Career Strategy, thinks students may use the term “sell out” because of the perceived certainty: “It’s the easy path to follow. It is well defined,” he said.

“It’s hard to conceptualize other things,” said Andy Wang, a social studies concentrator at Harvard who recently graduated.

Some students talk about turning to a different career later on, after they’ve made enough money. “Nowadays, English concentrators often say they’re going into finance or management consulting for a couple of years before writing their novel,” said James Wood, a Harvard professor of the practice of literary criticism.

And a surprising number of students explain their desire for a corporate job by drawing on the ethos of effective altruism : Whether they are conscious of the movement or not, they believe they can have greater impact by maximizing earnings to donate to a cause than working for that cause.

But once students board the prestige escalator and become accustomed to a certain salary, walking away can feel funny. Like, well, walking off an escalator.

Financial Pressures

The change is striking to those who have been in academia for years, and not just at Harvard.

Roger Woolsey, executive director of the career center at Union College, a private liberal arts college in Schenectady, N.Y, said he first noticed a change around 2015, with students who had been in high school during the Great Recession and who therefore prioritized financial security.

“The students saw what their parents went through, and the parents saw what happened to themselves,” he said. “You couple that with college tuition continuing to rise,” he continued, and students started looking for monetary payoffs right after graduation.

Sara Lazenby, an institutional policy analyst for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that might be why students and their parents were much more focused on professional outcomes than they used to be. “In the past few years,” she said, “I’ve seen a higher level of interest in this first-destination data” — stats on what jobs graduates are getting out of college.

“Twenty years ago, an ‘introduction to investment banking’ event was held at the undergraduate library at Harvard,” said Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “Forty students showed up, all men, and when asked to define ‘investment banking,’ none raised their hands.”

Now, according to Goldman Sachs, the bank had six times as many applicants this year for summer internships as it did 10 years ago, and was 20 percent more selective for this summer’s class than it was last year. JPMorgan also saw a record number of undergraduate applications for internships and full-time positions this year.

The director of the Mignone Center for Career Success at Harvard, Manny Contomanolis, also chalked up the change, in part, to financial pressure. “Harvard is more diverse than ever before,” Mr. Contomanolis said, with nearly one in five students eligible for a low-income Pell Grant . Those students, he said, weigh whether to, for instance, “take a job back in my border town community in Texas and make a big impact in a kind of public service sense” or get a job with “a salary that would be life changing for my family.”

However, according to The Harvard Crimson’s senior survey, as Mr. Barton noted in his opinion column, “The aggregate rate of ‘selling out’ is about the same — around 60 percent — for all income brackets.” The main distinction is that students from low-income families are comparatively more likely to go into technology than finance.

In other words, there is something additional at play, which Mr. Barton argues has to do with the nature of prestige. “If you tell me you’re working at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, that’s amazing , their eyes are going to light up,” Mr. Barton said. “If you tell somebody, ‘Oh, I took this random nonprofit job,’ or even a journalism job, even if you’re going to a huge name, it’s going to be a little bit of a question mark.”

Maibritt Henkel, a 21-year-old junior at Harvard, is an economics major with moral reservations about banking and consulting. Ms. Henkel sometimes worries that others might misread her decision not to go into those industries as evidence that she couldn’t hack it.

“Even if you don’t want to do it for the rest of your life, it’s seen kind of as the golden standard of a smart, hardworking person,” she said.

Some students have also become skeptical about traditional avenues of social change, like government and nonprofits, which have attracted fewer Harvard students since the pandemic, according to the Harvard Office of Institutional Research.

Matine Khalighi, 22, founded a nonprofit to award scholarships to homeless youth when he was in eighth grade. When he began studying economics at Harvard, his nonprofit, EEqual, was granting 50 scholarships a year. But some of the corporations that funded EEqual were contributing to inequality that created homelessness, he said. Philanthropy wasn’t the solution for systemic change, he decided. Instead, he turned to finance, with the idea that the sector could marshal capital quickly for social impact.

Employers encourage this way of thinking. “We often talk about the fact that we work with some of the biggest emitters on the planet because we believe that’s how we actually affect climate change,” said Blair Ciesil, the global leader of talent attraction at McKinsey.

The Recruitment Ratchet

Princeton’s senior survey results are nearly identical to The Crimson’s Senior Survey: about 38 percent of 2023 graduates who were employed took jobs in finance and consulting; adding tech and engineering, the rate is close to 60 percent, compared with 53 percent in 2016, the earliest year for which the data is available.

This isn’t solely an Ivy League phenomenon. Schools slice their data differently, but at many colleges, a large percentage of students pursue these fields. At Amherst , in 2022, 32 percent of employed undergrads went into finance and consulting, and 11 percent went into internet and software, for a total of about 43 percent. Between 2017 and 2019, the University of California, Los Angeles, sent about 21 percent of employed students into engineering and computer science, 9 percent into consulting and nearly 10 percent into finance, for a total of roughly 40 percent

Part of that has to do with recruitment; the most prestigious banks and consulting firms do so only at certain colleges, and they have intensified their presence on those campuses in recent years. Over the last five years or so, “the idea of thinking about your professional path has moved much earlier in the undergraduate experience,” Ms. Ciesil said. She said the banks first began talking to students earlier, and it was the entrance of Big Tech onto the scene, asking for junior summer applications by the end of sophomore year, that accelerated recruitment timelines.

“At first, we tried to fight back by saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no, sophomores aren’t ready, and what does a sophomore know about financial modeling?’” said Mr. Woolsey at Union College. But, he added, schools “don’t want to push back too much, because then you’re going to lose revenue,” since firms often pay to recruit on campus.

The Effective Altruist Influence

The marker that really distinguishes Gen Z is how pessimistic its members are, and how much they feel like life is beyond their control, according to Jean Twenge, a psychologist who analyzed data from national surveys of high school students and first-year college students in her book “Generations.”

Money, of course, helps give people a sense of control. And because of income inequality, “there’s this idea that you either make it or you don’t, so you better make it,” Ms. Twenge said.

Mihir Desai, a professor at Harvard’s business and law schools, wrote a 2017 essay in The Crimson titled “ The Trouble With Optionality ,” arguing that students who habitually pursue the security of prestigious employment foreclose the risk-taking and longer-range thinking necessary for more unusual or idealistic achievements. Mr. Desai believes that’s often because they are responding to the bigger picture, like threats to workers from artificial intelligence, and political and financial upheaval.

In recent years, he’s observed two trends among students pursuing wealth. There’s “the option-buyer,” the student who takes a job in finance or consulting to buy more time or to keep options open. Then there’s what he calls “the lottery ticket buyer,” the students who go all-in on a risky venture, like a start-up or new technology, hoping to make a windfall.

“They know people who bought Bitcoin at $2,000. They know people who bought Tesla at $20,” he said.

Some faculty see the influence of effective altruism among this generation: In the last five years, Roosevelt Montás, a senior lecturer at Columbia University and the former director of its Center for the Core Curriculum, has noticed a new trend when he asks students in his American Political Thought classes to consider their future.

“Almost every discussion, someone will come in and say, ‘Well, I can go and make a lot of money and do more good with that money than I could by doing some kind of charitable or service profession,’” Mr. Montás said. “It’s there constantly — a way of justifying a career that is organized around making money.”

Mr. Desai said all of this logic goes, “‘Make the bag so you can do good in the world, make the bag so you can go into retirement, make the bag so you can then go do what you really want to do.’”

But this “really underestimates how important work is to people’s lives,” he said. “What it gets wrong is, you spend 15 years at the hedge fund, you’re going to be a different person. You don’t just go work and make a lot of money, you go work and you become a different person.”

Inside the World of Gen Z

The generation of people born between 1997 and 2012 is changing fashion, culture, politics, the workplace and more..

A younger generation of crossword constructors is using an old form to reflect their identities, language and world. Here’s how Gen Z made the puzzle their own .

For many Gen-Zers without much disposable income, Facebook isn’t a place to socialize online — it’s where they can get deals on items  they wouldn’t normally be able to afford.

Dating apps are struggling to live up to investors’ expectations . Blame the members of Generation Z, who are often not willing to shell out for paid subscriptions.

Young people tend to lean more liberal on issues pertaining to relationship norms. But when it comes to dating, the idea that men should pay in heterosexual courtships  still prevails among Gen Z-ers .

We asked Gen Z-ers to tell us about their living situations and the challenges of keeping a roof over their heads. Here’s what they said .

What is it like to be part of the group that has been called the most diverse generation in U.S. history? Here is what 900 Gen Z-ers had to say .

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What Is an Associate Degree? Requirements, Costs, and More

Associate degrees open paths to new job opportunities and can be used to transfer into bachelor's degree programs.

An associate degree is a two-year college degree that you can obtain from a community college, junior college, online university, or some four-year institutions in the US. In terms of education, an associate degree falls between a high school diploma and a bachelor's degree.

Students go on to do different things with their associate degree: some transfer into a bachelor’s degree program, while others choose to go directly into the workforce. You can also earn your associate degree after working for several years; it can be the first step to a new career or help you advance in your current one.

Read on to understand key facts about earning your associate degree, and the important factors—like educational and professional goals—you should consider as you decide whether it's the right choice for your future.

Associate degrees: Key facts

Earning your associate degree is typically more affordable and takes less time than earning your bachelor's degree. It can also help you forge new career paths in professional fields such as medicine, engineering, and computer science. Let's review the basics of what it costs—and what it takes—to get an associate degree.

Admissions requirements

Admissions requirements vary from college to college, but you'll generally need to meet the following conditions in order to gain entry to an associate degree program:

Be 18 years of age by the time you begin your first day of class

Have a high school diploma, or have passed a General Education Development test (GED) or an equivalent test

Meet GPA requirements established by some community colleges

While tuition levels vary between colleges and programs, the average tuition for one year in an associate degree program is $3,800 in 2021, according to the College Board [ 1 ]. That’s for public in-district schools—meaning you’re a resident in the district the associate degree program is located.

Compare that with the average tuition for a year in a bachelor’s degree program, which is $10,740 for public in-state schools, $27,560 for public out-of-state schools, and $38,070 for private nonprofit schools.

Financial aid

Students enrolled in an associate degree program might be eligible for federal financial aid, as long as the institution is accredited . You can submit a FAFSA application to see if you qualify to receive federal aid or federal student loans. For the 2021-2022 school year, 56 percent of community college students received aid, while 33 percent received federal grants [ 2 ].

How long it takes

It generally takes full-time students about two years earn an associate degree, though it can take longer for part-time students. If you prefer to work while earning your associate degree, you'll be in good company. More than four million community college students attended part-time in 2021 (compared to 2.2 million full-time attendees) and 72 percent of them worked [ 2 ].

How many credits is an associate degree?

In order to graduate, you’ll typically need to complete the 60 course credits required (or 90 if your college is on the quarter system), and maintain a minimum GPA set by your college or department. Learn more about college credits and how they're measured .

Read more: Should You Go Back to School? 7 Things to Consider

Types of associate degrees

The most common types of associate degrees are:

Associate of Arts (AA): Associate programs focused on business, humanities, arts, or social sciences are often called Associate of Arts degrees. An AA may be a stepping stone to transfer to a bachelor’s degree.

Associate of Science (AS): Associate programs in a field related to science or math are often called Associate of Science degrees. Along with an AA, the AS is typically recommended by schools for students who want to transfer to four-year programs.

Associate of Applied Science (AAS): Associate programs that focus on technical and vocational skills are often called Associate of Applied Science programs. These programs are generally designed to prepare students for a specific occupation or work in a specific field after graduation. Fields can include computer science technology, hospitality management, paralegal studies, law enforcement, welding, among many others. Although it’s less common to use an AAS degree to transfer into a bachelor’s program, some four-year degree programs have begun accepting them for transfers.

What can you do with an associate degree?

Once you earn your associate degree, you have two options to consider. You can extend your education and apply to a bachelor's degree program, or you can pursue jobs in the medical, engineering, computer science, or legal fields, among many others.

Transfer to a bachelor's degree program

If you're interested in continuing your education, you can apply to bachelor's degree programs after you earn your associate degree, and begin completing courses in your declared major .

In fact, a number of students earn their associate degree at a lower-cost community college before transferring to a four-year college or university to finish their bachelor's. Remember that for in-state students, the average annual cost of attending a community college was $3,800 in 2021, compared to $10,740 for a public four-year school, which can amount to a significant savings over two years or more [ 1 ]. 

Earning your associate degree before deciding to pursue your bachelor's also gives you time to:

Build up study skills: If you’ve been out of school for a while and want to brush up on your study skills, or your high school GPA didn’t quite meet admission requirements for a four-year degree, an associate program can give you a boost. Not all community colleges have a GPA requirement for admissions.

Get more time to explore: If you’re not sure what you want to study, attending a community college for general studies courses can give you time to explore courses that might interest you before you fully commit to getting a bachelor’s degree in a subject.

Enjoy added flexibility: Many community colleges keep working people in mind and offer courses at night or on weekends. If you’re working or have family to take care of, starting off with an associate degree could bring you the flexibility you need.

If you’re hoping to start a degree, and factors like affordability and flexibility are important, online bachelor’s degrees may be another option. Online bachelor’s degrees are available in a wide range of topics, like computer science or psychology.

Pursue a career

You can explore new career opportunities with your associate degree—often with higher salaries than a high school diploma will yield. Associate degree holders in the United States earn a median income of $938 per week compared to $781 for high school graduates [ 3 ].

Here is a brief snapshot of some of the jobs you can typically start with an associate degree. They’re expected to grow at least as fast as average, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics [ 4 ], and the median salaries in the US are at least $40,000.

Keep in mind that employers for some positions—like registered nurses—might prefer bachelor’s degree holders but may also hire associate degree graduates.

Read more: How to Get Your First Job: A Guide

Differences between associate and bachelor’s degrees

There are benefits to pursuing any kind of higher education, be it an associate degree or bachelor's degree. Holding an academic degree can lead to more career opportunities and higher salaries. If you're unsure which degree is right for you, here are important differences to compare:

Data on average annual tuition and weekly earnings comes from the College Board and the Bureau of Labor Statistics respectively [ 1 , 3 ].

Which is better: Associate degree or bachelor's degree?

The best degree will be the one that helps you achieve your goals—either personal, educational, or professional. While there are a number of careers you can pursue with an associate degree, you may find more opportunities with a bachelor's degree. But if time is a major factor, then an associate degree may be the best choice for your immediate needs. Ultimately, it's important to review your situation—your financial resources, your schedule, your objectives—to determine which is the best degree for you.

If you're interested in earning an academic degree to gain entry to a new career path or advance your career in a chosen field, it can help to look at job postings and see the minimum education required. Understanding the standards your industry expects may help determine which degree you eventually earn.

Associate degree alternatives

If your goals don’t require an academic degree, there are other options that may offer some flexibility.

Professional certificates

Professional certificates are qualifications you can earn by completing courses or exams to demonstrate your ability in a field. They often require no previous experience in a subject, and can take anywhere from several months to a few years to finish. You can get a professional certificate in a variety of fields, including IT support, data analysis, computer programming, and marketing.

Certificate programs can be part-time or full-time, and may be offered online and in person. Because they tend to take less time and financial resources than degrees, professional certificates can be a solid option for those who know what specific skills they want to develop, and prioritize flexibility. If you’re ready to explore, browse some online certificate options .

Trade or vocational school

Trade schools, also known as vocational or technical schools, train students to enter professions that require a certain set of skills. They’re characterized by their emphasis on hands-on training. 

Graduates go on to work as electricians, dental hygienists, chefs, construction managers, and car mechanics, among many other professions. Trade schools typically take two years or less to complete, though some professions may require additional apprenticeships after the program. They can be a good option if you have a specific job in mind and don’t need or want to pursue an academic degree to secure employment in that profession. Some characteristics to consider when researching trade schools include: whether the program is accredited, has a track record of job placement, and makes sense for you financially.

Bootcamps—intensive programs that are designed to quickly equip you with a new skill set—can be a fast way to enter a new field or advance in your current one. Bootcamps typically take a few months to complete. Though computer coding bootcamps are popular, you can enroll in digital marketing, cybersecurity, or UX/UI design bootcamps , too. Bootcamps can be online or in person, full-time or part-time.

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

How many of my associate degree credits will transfer to a bachelor’s degree program ‎.

This depends on the courses you took and the bachelor’s program you’re transferring into. Universities will generally evaluate your courses and decide if they’re transferable or not. Thanks to accreditation , some community colleges may have agreements with universities that will guarantee that some of your credits will transfer (if the requirements are met).

To make sure you maximize your transferable credits, talk to your academic advisor at your community college, and reach out to an admissions officer at the university you want to transfer to. ‎

What are other types of degrees I can get? ‎

Other academic degrees include bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, doctoral degrees, and professional degrees. A bachelor’s degree typically takes four years (as little as two if you have an associate degree). You may go on to enroll in a master’s degree program after completing a bachelor’s. A doctoral degree , or PhD, is the generally the highest academic degree you can receive in most fields. Other professional degrees —such as JDs for aspiring lawyers, or MDs for doctors—are usually pursued after finishing a bachelor’s degree. ‎

Can I become a registered nurse (RN) with an associate degree? ‎

Yes. Though hospitals might prefer nurses with at least a bachelor’s degree, the minimum academic requirement to become an RN in the US is generally an associate degree or a diploma in nursing, according to the College Board [ 5 ].

Students must also pass the National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX-RN) and any state licensure requirements. Many community colleges offer degrees specifically for those who want to enter the nursing field. An associate degree can also be transferred to a bachelor’s nursing program.

Read more: Your Guide to Nursing Degrees and Certifications ‎

Related articles

What Is a Bachelor’s Degree?

10 High-Paying Jobs You Can Get with an Associate Degree

How Long Does It Take to Get an Associate Degree?

Can You Get a Bachelor's Degree at Community College?

Article sources

1. College Board. " Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2021 , https://research.collegeboard.org/pdf/trends-college-pricing-student-aid-2021.pdf." Accessed August 8, 2022.

2. American Association of Community Colleges. " AACC Fast Facts 2022 , https://www.aacc.nche.edu/2022/02/28/42888/." Accessed August 8, 2022.

3. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. " Education Pays , The median salaries in the US are at least $40,000." Accessed August 8, 2022.

4. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. " Occupation Finder , https://www.bls.gov/ooh/occupation-finder." Accessed August 8, 2022.

5. College Board. " Career: Registered Nurses , https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/careers/health-diagnosis-treatment-registered-nurses." Accessed November August 8, 2022.

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Coursera staff.

Editorial Team

Coursera’s editorial team is comprised of highly experienced professional editors, writers, and fact...

This content has been made available for informational purposes only. Learners are advised to conduct additional research to ensure that courses and other credentials pursued meet their personal, professional, and financial goals.

Employment and disconnection among teens and young adults: The role of place, race, and education

Subscribe to how we rise, martha ross and martha ross senior fellow - brookings metro @marthahross nicole prchal svajlenka nps nicole prchal svajlenka former research analyst - metropolitan policy program.

May 24, 2016

• 19 min read

Young people in their late teens and early 20s stand at a pivotal point as they transition into adulthood. Although they typically have higher unemployment rates than older workers, the Great Recession and slow recovery have focused attention on the challenges young people face when progressing from adolescence and school into full-time employment enabling self-sufficiency.

The following analysis and related interactive examine employment trends among teens aged 16–19 and young adults aged 20–24, and compares these groups with adults aged 25–54—those typically considered to be in their prime working years. School is likely to be teens’ primary activity until high school graduation, but early work experiences (part-time and in the summer) can provide valuable opportunities for teens to learn new skills, gain experience, expand their networks, and develop positive relationships with adults. Young adults are typically in a different phase and engage in a broader mix of activities. Some continue in school full time, some combine work and school, and others work full time, or would like to do so.

Specifically, the analysis examines the employment and unemployment rates of teens, young adults, and prime-age workers, using microdata data from the American Community Survey for the years 2008–2014. The analysis also examines a key subpopulation among teens and young adult population: “disconnected youth” who are neither working nor in school. These young people are missing key educational and employment experiences and are at increased risk for a host of negative outcomes: long spells of unemployment, poverty, criminal behavior, substance abuse, and incarceration. [1]   Data on disconnected youth also comes from American Community Survey microdata, but to compensate for small sample sizes, the analysis uses a three-year estimate encompassing the years 2012–2014.

The research examines these three measures —at the national level and in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas. It updates previous work on labor market indicators among teens aged 16–19 and young adults aged 20–24.

Findings include:

• Whites typically have the highest employment rates and lowest unemployment rates among all ages. However, among prime-age workers, Asians have the lowest unemployment rates.
• Blacks consistently have lower employment rates and higher unemployment rates than other groups. Unlike Asians, their low employment and high unemployment rates do not improve with age. Asians’ low employment rates as young people are driven by high rates of school enrollment, and their subsequent high levels of educational attainment serve them well in the labor market as adults.
• Disparities by educational attainment are larger than disparities by race. People without post-secondary credentials do much worse in the labor market than those with higher levels of education.
• Employment and unemployment rates vary substantially by place; many of the best-performing metro areas are in the Midwest, West, or regions with highly educated residents, including state capitals and university towns.
• Nationally, an estimated 3 million young people aged 16–24 (7.6 percent) are disconnected. The majority of these young people are between 20 and 24 years old, suggesting that the problem becomes more acute after young people are of an age to have graduated high school. They are disproportionately people of color. Rates of disconnection vary widely by metropolitan area, and in some places, young blacks and Latinos are up to 3-to-6 times more likely to be disconnected than young whites.

Employment rates fell most dramatically among teens, and large disparities between whites and blacks persist, particularly among teens and young adults.

Employment rates are typically lowest among teens and steadily increase with age as people seek to find full-time work, usually after completing their education (whether or not they earned a credential). Employment rates among all age groups fell between 2008–2014, typically bottoming out in 2010 or 2011 and then increasing, although not back to pre-recession levels.

The decline was most dramatic among teens aged 16–19: Employment rates fell from 35 percent in 2008 to 29 percent in 2014. While most teens do not need to work to support themselves or their families, the decline raises concern in some quarters that teens are missing out on opportunities to learn new skills and gain experience and contacts that will improve their job prospects later in life. [2] Both young adults aged 20–24 and prime-age workers aged 25–54 registered employment rate declines of three percentage points, landing in 2014 at 65 percent and 77 percent, respectively.

Among all three age groups, whites consistently had the highest employment rates, followed by Asians among prime-age adults and Latinos among teens and young adults. Among teens and young adults, blacks and Asians had similar rates at the low end, although more blacks started working post-recession than Asians did. The white teen employment rate in 2014 was 34 percent, compared to 26 percent among Latinos, 21 percent among blacks, and 19 percent among Asians. White young adults had an employment rate of 69 percent in 2014, compared to 66 percent among Latinos, 57 percent among blacks, and 51 percent among Asians. The gap by race/ethnicity narrows when adults are in their prime working years of 25–54, although the black-white gap remains a still-sizable seven to nine percentage points over the 2008–2014 time period. In 2014, the employment rate of white prime age workers was 79 percent, compared to 77 percent among Asians, 75 percent among Latinos, and 72 percent among blacks. The low employment rates among Asian teens and young adults is related to their high levels of school enrollment. While those enrolled in school can and do work, they do so at a lower rate than those who are not in school (with the exception of those with the lowest levels of education—less than a high school diploma). 92 percent of Asian teens and 63 percent of Asian young adults are enrolled in school, compared to 81 percent of all teens and 38 percent among all young adults. Among adults 25 and over , 54 percent of Asians have a bachelor’s degree, compared to 33 percent among all adults. As shown in the next section, those with bachelor’s degrees fare much better in the labor market than other groups.

Employment rates differ more by education than they do by race.

The spread in employment rates by education among young adults and prime-age workers is wider than the spread by race/ethnicity. In 2014, the employment rate among young adults with a bachelor’s degree was 87 percent, a full 35 percentage points higher than the rate among those less than a high school diploma (52 percent) and 21 percentage points higher than among those with a high school diploma and no further education (66 percent). The gaps are a bit smaller among prime-age workers, which may reflect that the experience of older workers compensates for lower levels of education, and/or that young people entering the labor market today with lower levels of education have a harder time finding a job than similarly educated young people did in the past. Among prime age workers in 2014, the employment rate of those with a bachelor’s degree was 87 percent, compared to 60 percent among those with less than a high school diploma and 72 percent among those with a high school diploma and no further education.

Employment rates by metropolitan area show substantial variation, especially among teens.

Employment rates among teens by region vary considerably from the national average of 29 percent. At the high end, the metro areas of Madison, Wisc.; Des Moines, Iowa; and Ogden, Utah, have employment rates of  about 50 percent, compared to a low of 16-17 percent in McAllen, Tex., and the California regions of Bakersfield and Riverside. Among young adults, employment rates range from 79 percent in Madison, Wisc., and Omaha, Neb., to about 50 percent in Bakersfield, CA and Deltona, FL. Some of the metro areas with the highest employment rates among prime-age adults did not have particularly high rates among teens and young adults, including Washington, D.C.; Hartford, Conn.; Raleigh, N.C.; Albany, N.Y.; and Austin, Tex. These places all have relatively highly educated populations, and the disproportionately high employment rate among adults aged 25–54 relative to younger workers probably reflects that these metros import workers from other places.

In the largest metropolitan areas, employment by race echoes and sometimes amplifies national patterns.

Among the 10 largest metro areas (those with populations large enough to support detailed demographic analysis of relatively small subgroups), whites typically have employment rates above the regional average across age groups, while blacks generally have lower than average employment rates across the age groups. Asians have lower-than-average employment rates among teens and young adults, but as prime-age workers, their rates equal or exceed regional averages in most of the ten largest metros. Latinos show a more varied pattern. Latino teens have employment rates that are sometimes higher and sometimes lower than the regional average, while in most of the ten largest places (excepting Boston) their rates as young adults exceed the regional average. Among prime-age workers, Latino employment rates meet or exceed regional averages in Miami, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C.; elsewhere their rates are below average.

The extent to which black employment rates lag regional averages or other groups varies. Among the 10 largest metro areas black employment rates across all ages are the lowest in Chicago, where the teen rate is 12 percent, the young adult rate is 47 percent, and the prime-age worker rate is 66 percent. By comparison, the employment rate is 25 percent for all teens in the Chicago region, 65 percent for all young adults, and 78 percent for all prime-age adults. Philadelphia and Los Angeles also have employment rates for blacks that are considerably below regional averages across age groups.

Whites have the lowest unemployment rates among teens and young adults, while Asians have the lowest rates among prime-age adults.

Like employment rates, unemployment rates vary considerably by age. Rates are highest among teens and decline as people become more competitive job candidates with increased education, skills, and experience. Unemployment among teens is consistently about twice that of young adults and three to four times that of prime-age workers.

Unemployment rates increased among all age groups between 2008 and 2014, with dramatic spikes starting in 2009 and then falling after the recession, but still remaining above pre-recession levels. In 2014, unemployment was 22.5 percent for teens, 12.7 percent for young adults, and 6.2 percent for prime-age workers.

As with employment rates, unemployment rates vary by race/ethnicity and education. Blacks have the highest rates in each age group by considerable margins. Whites have the lowest rates among teens and young adults, and Asians have the lowest rates among prime-age workers—about one percentage point or less below whites. The racial gap narrows with age, as the spread between the highest and lowest rates falls to about seven percentage points among prime-age workers, down from 12 percentage points among young adults and 20 percentage points among teens.

Unemployment rates are very high among those with low levels of education. Young adults with only a high school diploma had an unemployment rate of 17 percent in 2014, about two-and-one-half times higher than the rates of those with an associate degree (6.9 percent) and a bachelor’s degree (6.4 percent). Among prime-age workers, the unemployment rate of those with a high school diploma was 8.4 percent in 2014, almost three times higher than the rate for those with a bachelor’s degree (3.0 percent) and almost twice as high as the rate for those with an associate degree (4.9 percent).

Metropolitan areas show wide variation in their unemployment rates. Teen unemployment shows the greatest variability, reaching a high of nearly 40 percent in Jackson, Miss. and Riverside, CA compared to 4.2 percent in Madison, Wisc. and the next lowest, 12.8 percent in Ogden, Utah. The range is a bit more compressed among young adults, with a low of 5-6 percent in Boise City, Idaho; Grand Rapids, MI; and Madison, Wisc., compared to highs above 20 percent in Memphis, TN; Bakersfield, CA; and Winston-Salem, NC.

An estimated 3 million young people are disconnected; they are disproportionately people of color, and the majority are aged 20–24.

Nationally, an estimated 3 young people aged 16–24 are disconnected, or 7.6 percent of all young people. We define disconnected youth as young people who are not working or in school, with less than an associate degree, living below 200 percent of the poverty line, and not living in group quarters such as dorms or correctional facilities. Most of these young people (74 percent) are between the ages of 20–24, with another 26 percent aged 16–19.

Disconnected teens aged 16–19 number 784,000 and are evenly split among males (51 percent) and females (49 percent). They are racially and ethnically diverse, although people of color form the majority: 24 percent are black, 31 percent are Latino, and 37 percent are white. Those who are foreign born make up a small share of the total (11.2 percent). Half (51 percent) have earned a high school diploma; 7 percent have earned a high school diploma and taken some college courses, and the remaining 42 percent have less than a high school diploma .

Another perspective is to examine which groups of teens are more or less likely to be disconnected. Overall, 4.6 percent of all teens aged 16–19 are disconnected. Several groups have higher-than-average shares of disconnection: 7.6 percent of all black teens are disconnected, as are 6.7 percent of all Latino teens and 6.9 percent of all foreign-born teens. Male and female teens have virtually equal rates of disconnection, at 4.5 percent and 4.6 percent respectively—very close to the total teen average.

Among young adults aged 20–24, a total of 2,243,000 are disconnected, of whom 55 percent are female – higher than the share among teens. The race/ethnicity distribution among young adults is similar to that of teens, although not identical: 25 percent are black, 28 percent are Latino, and 40 percent are white. A slightly higher share than among teens is foreign-born (12.4 percent). Given their age and the longer time period in which they could be enrolled in school, young adults have higher educational attainment than teens: Twenty percent have earned a high school diploma and taken some college courses, 50 percent have a high school diploma, and 30 percent have less than a high school diploma.

Young adults are more likely to be disconnected than teens: 9.9 percent of all those aged 20–24 fall into the disconnected category. As with teens, some groups have higher rates of disconnection than others. Young black adults aged 20–24 have the highest rate at 17 percent. 13.4 percent of Latino young adults are disconnected, as are 11.2 percent of all females, and 11.5 percent of the foreign-born.

Turning to geographical differences, rates of disconnection vary widely by metropolitan area. Among teens, the disconnected youth rate ranges from a low of about two percent (Boston, MA; Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN; Provo, UT; and San Jos, CA), to about eight percent and up (McAllen, TX; Jackson, MS; and Memphis, TN). (In one metropolitan area—Madison, WI—the sample size is too small to report on with confidence.) The twenty metros with the highest rates of teen disconnection (all at or above 6 percent ) are generally among the least populous of the top 100 largest metropolitan areas and concentrate in the South, the Southwest, and California, with the exception of Springfield, MA. Metros with the lowest teen disconnection rates, however, come in all sizes, encompassing large, medium, and small places. They tend to be on the coasts and in the Midwest, with the exception of Provo, UT.

Among young adults, the metros with the highest disconnection rates are also concentrated in the South, the Southwest, and California, with the exception of Detroit. These metros also are on the smaller side, again with the exception of Detroit. Metros with the lowest disconnection rates among young adults tend to be on the coasts, in the Midwest, and in Utah, with the exception of Austin, TX. As with teens, metros with low rates of young adult disconnection are of all sizes.

Not surprisingly, however, it is the largest metropolitan areas that have the highest numbers of disconnected teens and young adults, even if their rates of disconnection are lower. For example, the New York City region has the most disconnected teens (nearly 38,000) and young adults (113,000), even though its share of young people who are disconnected is below the national average. By comparison, in McAllen, TX, which has the highest rates, there are about 12,000 disconnected young adults and about 5,000 disconnected teens, a fraction of the number in the New York City area.

Among the 10 nation’s largest metropolitan areas (areas with large enough populations to support a detailed demographic analysis), the disparity in the disconnection rates among whites, blacks, and Latinos is striking. Houston has the smallest black-white gap: the share of young adult blacks who are disconnected (13.3 percent) is 1.75 times larger than the share of white young adults (7.7 percent). Chicago and Philadelphia have the largest black-white gaps. In Chicago, the share of black young adults who are disconnected is 23.1 percent, nearly 7 times the share of young white adults (3.3 percent). In Philadelphia, the share of black young adults who are disconnected (19.8 percent) is 6.5 times the share of young white adults (3.1 percent). Turning to Latinos, the differences with whites are not quite as large but still notable. Houston again has the smallest gap; 12.6 percent of Latino young adults are disconnected, more than one and half times the rate for white young adults (7.7 percent). Philadelphia and Boston have the largest gaps: 19.5 percent of Latino young adults in Philadelphia are disconnected, nearly 6.5 times larger than the share for young white adults (3.1 percent). In Boston, 11.6 percent of Latino young adults are disconnected, 5.5 times higher than the share of white young adults (2.1 percent).

Teen and young adult employment patterns do not exist in a vacuum. These findings show in stark terms the extent to which young people’s success in the labor market is shaped by place, race, and education. The low employment rates among black teens and young adults are particularly concerning, since their rates continue to lag behind other groups as adults. The weaker employment outcomes of blacks at all ages is probably related to multiple factors: relatively low levels of educational attainment , discrimination , and the neighborhood effects of living in concentrated poverty . (While not all black people live in concentrated poverty, they form a disproportionate share of those living in neighborhoods with poverty levels above 40 percent).

Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to address youth disconnection or to better connect young people to employment. To succeed in today’s economy and earn middle-class wages, a young person needs to graduate from high school or earn an alternate credential, enroll in and complete some post-secondary education or job training, and then enter the labor market with skills that match employer demand. There are many points along that pathway at which a young person can get off-track, and many factors that can interfere with reaching those milestones. Schools, families, and neighborhoods all play a role in a young person’s trajectory—both positive and negative. Research suggests that youth employment programs with the following characteristics are most effective: They develop strong links between education, training, and the job market; focus on promoting healthy youth development; provide support services to address challenges such as childcare and transportation; offer opportunities for paid work closely aligned with or integrated into the program, and provide continuous support after job placement and program exit.

Methodology

Data on employment and unemployment rates come from Brookings’ analysis of American Community Survey (ACS) 1-year microdata, 2008 through 2014. Employment and unemployment rates are calculated for the civilian non-institutional population.

The years 2008–2014 are used due to data limitations. While the ACS allows small geographic analysis, it does not have a long time series. The American Community Survey was launched in the mid-2000s, and although this analysis could have included data from the 2000 Decennial Census and ACS data from 2006 and 2007, the Census Bureau made changes in the wording of labor market questions starting in 2008, making direct comparisons with earlier years less accurate.

Data on disconnected youth comes from the American Community Survey microdata as well. Using guidance from the Census Bureau, Brookings staff constructed a 3-year ACS file, combining and weighting three individual years of ACS data – 2012, 2013, and 2014. (The Census Bureau eliminated the 3-year ACS estimate from its data products starting in 2014.) We used a three-year estimate to bolster sample sizes in order to create more reliable estimates, particularly for small geographies.

While there is broad agreement that the terms “disconnected youth” or “opportunity youth” refer to young people not working and not in school, there is not a standard methodology or data source to create estimates of the number of such youth or their characteristics. Thus, different reports are likely to produce different figures, based on the use of different data sources and definitions.

In this analysis, people are considered disconnected if they meet the following criteria: they are between the ages of 16–24, not working (including both those who are unemployed and not in the labor force), not enrolled in school, living below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, with an educational attainment of less than an associate degree, not in the Armed Forces, and not living in group quarters.

We included the poverty and educational variables to limit the population to those who may be considered at-risk. Young people with a two- or four-year college degree are more likely to find and keep a non-low-wage job, and those whose families have higher earnings are more likely to have a family safety net. We removed those in the military, since that is a form of employment and to remain consistent with how the government typically reports statistics on employment and unemployment. We removed those in group quarters for several reasons. Group quarters refers to non-household based living arrangements, and includes “institutional group quarters,” such as such as correctional facilities or supervised medical facilities, and “non-institutional group quarters,” such as college dormitories, military bases, or group homes. Income is not reported for people living in “institutional group quarters,” making it impossible to calculate poverty levels for this subgroup. While there is income data for residents in some types of non-institutional group quarters, these individuals are students who may have low incomes from their own earnings but are often supported by their families, so the reported data on earnings does not always paint an accurate picture of their economic status.

1. Clive R. Belfield, Henry M. Levin, and Rachel Rosen, “The Economic Value of Opportunity Youth” (Washington: Civic Enterprises, 2012); Michael Wald and Tia Martinez, “Connected by 25: Improving the Life Chances of the Country’s Most Vulnerable 14-24 Year Olds” Working Paper (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2003); Adrienne L. Fernandes and Thomas Gabe, “Disconnected Youth: A Look at 16- to 24-Year Olds Who are Not Working or in School” (Washington: Congressional Research Service, 2009); Douglas A. Besharov, ed., America’s Disconnected Youth: Toward a Preventive Strategy (Washington: Child Welfare League of America and American Enterprise Institute, 1999).

2. Paul Harrington and Ishwar Khatiwada, “U.S. Teens Want to Work” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston: Communities and Banking (27) (2) (2016): 9-11; Robert Halpern, Youth, Education, and the Role of Society (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2013); Harvard Graduate School of Education, “Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21 st Century,” 2011; Andrew Sum et al, “Vanishing Work Among U.S. Teens, 2000-10: What a Difference a Decade Makes!” (Boston: Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University, 2010); Jeylan Mortimer, “The Benefits and Risks of Adolescent Employment,” Prevention Researcher 17 (2) (2010: p 8-11).

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Is College Worth It?

2. public views on the value of a college degree, table of contents.

• Labor force trends and economic outcomes for young adults
• Economic outcomes for young men
• Economic outcomes for young women
• Wealth trends for households headed by a young adult
• The importance of a four-year college degree
• Getting a high-paying job without a college degree
• Do Americans think their education prepared them for the workplace?
• Is college worth the cost?
• Acknowledgments
• The American Trends Panel survey methodology
• Current Population Survey methodology
• Survey of Consumer Finances methodology

We asked Americans what they think about the value of a four-year college degree from a few different angles:

• Is a degree important in order for someone to get a well-paying job in today’s economy?
• Has the value of a degree changed in recent decades?
• Can someone without a degree get a well-paying job?
• How useful do people think their own education was in preparing them for a well-paying job?
• Is the cost of college worth it today?

Four-in-ten Americans say it is not too or not at all important to have a four-year college degree in order to get a well-paying job in today’s economy.

Only 25% say it’s extremely or very important to have a college degree, and 35% say it’s somewhat important.

We also asked the public about the importance of a college degree now versus 20 years ago.

About half of Americans (49%) say it’s less important today than it was in the past for someone to have a four-year degree in order to get a well-paying job. About a third (32%) say having a degree is more important now, and 17% say its importance hasn’t really changed.

Differences by party

Half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents – compared with 30% of Democrats and Democratic leaners – say it’s not too or not at all important to have a four-year college degree to get a well-paying job.

And a majority of Republicans (57%) say having a degree is less important today than it was 20 years ago; 43% of Democrats say the same.

These partisan gaps hold even after controlling for differences in the educational attainment of Republicans and Democrats.

Differences by education

College graduates are more likely than those with less education to say that having a college degree is extremely or very important (30% vs. 22%).

But views on whether having a college degree is more or less important today than it was 20 years ago don’t differ significantly by education. Roughly half of four-year college graduates (51%) and those with less education (48%) say it’s less important today for someone to have a college degree than it was in the past.

Adults with a postgraduate degree, however, have somewhat different views than those with a bachelor’s degree on both of these measures. Some 35% of postgraduates say it’s extremely or very important to have a four-year college degree in order to get a well-paying job, compared with 27% of those whose highest attainment is a bachelor’s degree.

And 39% of postgraduates – compared with 30% of those with a bachelor’s degree – say it’s more important to have a college degree today than it was 20 years ago.

Differences by age

Young adults stand out in their views on the importance of a college degree today versus in the past.

Among those ages 18 to 29, 44% say having a degree is more important today in order to get a well-paying job than it was 20 years ago. By comparison, 29% of those 30 to 49 and 30% of those 50 and older say the same.

Americans also have mixed views when it comes to whether someone without a four-year college degree could get a well-paying job in today’s economy.

Only about a third (34%) say it’s extremely or very likely that someone withouta four-year degree could get this kind of job.

Nearly half say it’s somewhat likely that someone without a college degree could get a well-paying job, and 20% say it’s not too or not at all likely.

These views differ by:

• Partisanship: 42% of Republicans and 26% of Democrats say it’s extremely or very likely someone without a four-year degree could get a well-paying job. Among Democrats, 25% say it’s not too or not at all likely; just 15% of Republicans say the same.
• Education: 28% of adults with at least a bachelor’s degree say it’s extremely or very likely that someone without a college degree could get a well-paying job today. This compares with 37% of those with some college and 36% of those with a high school diploma or less education.

When thinking about how useful their own education was in giving them the skills and knowledge needed to get a well-paying job, a majority of those with a four-year college degree or more education (58%) say it was extremely or very useful. (This finding excludes the 9% of respondents who said this question did not apply to them.)

Adults with a postgraduate degree are especially likely to say their education was extremely or very useful: 72% say this, compared with 47% of those whose highest attainment is a bachelor’s.

By comparison, adults with less education have more mixed views. Among those who have not completed a bachelor’s degree, 38% say their education was not too or not at all useful in giving them the skills and knowledge needed to get a well-paying job; 35% say it was somewhat useful, and 26% say it was extremely or very useful.

These views don’t differ as substantially by age or by party.

When asked about the cost of college these days, many Americans question whether it’s worth it if a student has to take on debt. Nearly half of adults (47%) say a four-year college degree is worth the cost, but only if someone doesn’t have to take out loans in order to attend.

Only 22% say college is worth the cost even if someone has to take out loans. And 29% say college isn’t worth the cost.

Meanwhile, data from the Federal Reserve shows that more than four-in-ten adults who attended college say they took out student loans for their education .

Views on the value of college differ by partisanship, education and age. But notably, in all groups except for Republicans, pluralities say the cost of college is worth it only if someone doesn’t have to take out loans.

A narrow majority of Democrats (54%) say the cost of getting a four-year college degree is worth it, but only if someone doesn’t have to take out loans. A smaller share of Republicans (41%) say the same.

About one-in-four Democrats (26%), compared with 19% of Republicans, say the cost is worth it even with loans.

Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to say college is not worth the cost (38% vs. 19%).

Americans with at least a four-year college degree are much more likely than those with less education to say that college is worth the cost even if someone has to take out loans (32% vs. 17%).

Those with a postgraduate degree are among the most likely to express this view: 37% say college is worth the cost even after taking out loans. This compares with 29% among those with a bachelor’s but no postgraduate degree.

Even so, across all education levels, more say a four-year degree is worth the cost only if someone doesn’t take on debt than say it’s worth the cost with debt.

Those with some college or less education are about twice as likely as those with at least a bachelor’s degree to say the cost of getting a degree isn’t worth it at all (35% vs. 18%).

Young adults are more likely than their older counterparts to say the cost of a degree is worth it only if someone doesn’t take out loans: 55% of those ages 18 to 29 say this, compared with 48% of those 30 to 49 and 44% of those 50 and older.

And 18- to 29-year-olds are less likely to say the cost isn’t worth it at all (22% vs. roughly three-in-ten among older age groups).

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