Posted on 08/02/2019 8:52:45 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
On June 12, Brandon Webber shot a man five times at point-blank range and stole his car. When U.S. Marshals attempted to arrest him in Memphis, Webber rammed their car and was fatally shot after he fled. This outcome seems to be the downside of the disconnectedness, from school and from paid employment, that he experienced. By all accounts he was a responsible, positive individual while in high school. Typical of those who knew him then was his tenth-grade history teacher, Mary McIntosh, who continued to work with him until he graduated. “He was an excellent student,” she recalled. “For me, he was the kind of student a teacher could count on to be disciplined and focused.” A number of his classmates echoed this positive view of Webber.
The problem was that in the two years after his high-school graduation, Webber’s life seemed to change. After a brief enrollment at the University of Memphis, he did not gain paid employment. Instead, he began to accumulate a police record for a variety of offenses. Without gaining stable paid employment, too many disconnected youth like Webber will gravitate to the street life, where nothing good can happen.
In recent years, there has been an unprecedented employment expansion among young black men. Most striking, the employment rate of those between the ages of 20 and 24 years increased from 46.9 percent in 2010 to 60.1 percent in 2017, halving the racial employment gap for that age group. However, despite these robust gains, 20.1 percent of young black men 16 to 24 years old were disconnected, compared with 12.6 and 10.1 percent of Latino and white young men, respectively.
A 2018 study found that these youths are often disconnected from family as well. Disconnected young people are about two and a half times more likely than their connected peers to be living with family other than their parents, about twice as likely to be living with a roommate, and about eight times more likely to be living alone. Even more disturbing, an alarmingly high proportion of disconnected black males ages 16 to 24 — nearly a fifth — are incarcerated, compared with just 0.3 percent of that age cohort overall.
A study I just completed verifies this finding. I developed a model to explain the variation in state-level violent-crime rates, using data from 2010 through 2016. Variables included the black share of all men not in prison, the poverty rate, the male-employment rate, the high-school-graduation rates, and the share of men between 16 and 24 who are disconnected. Results differed, depending on which variables were included. The statistical significance of the disconnected-youth variable was strong. Once it had been added, neither the poverty nor the employment nor the high-school-completion variable was significant. In particular, for every 10 percent increase in the disconnection rate, my model found a 6.59 percent increase in the state’s violent-crime rate. The statistical significance of the share of men who are black is also strong, indicating that, even after taking into account employment, education, poverty, and disconnectedness, states with a greater share of young black males have higher violent-crime rates.
The disconnectedness of so many young black men is related to the promotion of a four-year-college-for-all educational strategy regardless of a student’s educational skills. Nationwide, in 2017 only 13 percent of black eighth-graders were proficient in mathematics, while more than half did not achieve the basic skill level. In the past, many youth from disadvantaged backgrounds and with weak academic skills found their way into the world of work as teens, in jobs that taught them the necessary “soft skills” of time management and effective interaction with managers and fellow workers.
Unfortunately, teen employment has collapsed, and liberals have no effective strategy to increase the private-sector employment of these at-risk youth. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the proposed increase of the minimum wage to $15 per hour would cost 1.3 million jobs and possibly as many as 3.7 million, weakening the employment prospects of many black men with no more than a high-school degree. Maintaining current levels of low-skilled immigration, which many liberals favor, can only make that problem worse. Rather than promoting direct employment, liberals have emphasized enrollment in academic programs at community colleges, where the dropout rate is high.
For example, in New York City, fewer than one-quarter of community-college entrants gain a two-year degree within three years. Among 25- to 29-year-olds, 46 percent of black men had no more than a high-school diploma, while another 27 percent were college dropouts. Only 7 percent had an associate’s degree, and 20 percent had a bachelor’s. Like Brandon Webber, many weakly prepared black students drop out of college and end up disconnected.
Kenneth Adams, a dean at Bronx Community College, sees a better way. He recommends that, working with industry associations, the City University of New York design new credit-bearing certificate programs that are linked to associate’s degrees. New offerings build short-term credentials, including licensing requirements, into degree-track programs. This would enable many young black men to gain a marketable skill on which to build even if they never completed the associate’s degree.
Liberals fear that black and Latino students will be directed into low-wage occupations that doom them to long-term poverty. What they ignore is the life progression of those who sustain full-time employment. A Princeton study found that, among full-time, year-round workers with the same level of education, inflation-adjusted wages increased by 75 percent as they aged from their mid 20s to their mid 40s. Census data indicate that in 2016, full-time, year-round nonsupervisory workers who were 50 years old had an average wage 50 percent higher than that of comparable 30-year-old workers.
While certificate programs may lead to jobs that have low starting wages, many apprenticeship programs do not. President Trump has authorized a doubling of federal funding for the latter. Studies indicate that the long-term-earnings benefit they provide exceeds that of completing a degree at a community college. Reports from the state of Washington indicate that the earnings gain from apprenticeship programs far surpasses the gain from technical-training programs at either community colleges or private career schools. A study of apprenticeships in ten U.S. states also documents that they conferred a large earnings gain.
Some educators voice concern that, because of their specificity to one industry or occupation, apprenticeship programs are worse than general education at enabling students to adapt to technological change. Yet data from the 2016 National Household Education Survey found that, whether or not they remained in the same occupation, former apprentices were very likely to apply to their current job the skills they learned during their apprenticeship. Among workers ages 40 and over, 67 percent of those who had completed apprenticeships of one year or more reported using the skills they had learned in the program all or most of the time; another 24 percent reported doing so some of the time.
There seems to be a clear public-policy choice concerning students who leave high school with limited academic skills: continue encouraging them to focus on four-year degrees, or increase their enrollment in certificate and apprenticeship programs. The former too often leaves them without marketable skills and puts them at risk of becoming disconnected. The latter in many cases offers a more viable pathway to attaining steady employment and entering the mainstream.
Mike Rowe is a huge supporter of trade/tech schools.
The only thing that scares me about this is that the government has a really crappy track record of predicting what jobs will be in demand 5 to 8 years out.
I’ve worked with some pretty dumb people with masters’ degrees. Meanwhile, some of the most successful and rich people alive didn’t go to college or dropped out.
One of my friends got a C average in community college for two years. The sole reason? His dad died early on and he needed the C average so that SS would pay his tuition. He then became a baggage handler at an airport. He and I met at Boeing’s COBOL tech school. It was a 10 month night school course for $2,300.
He became CIO of a fortune 500 company and cashed out 9 mil in stock options after serving for 11 or 12 years in that role.
My brother in law is a billionaire with no college. He started his own business.
In fact, my son became a multimillionaire with no college. As he hobnobs with other millionaire’s in the Chicago area he discovered something interesting. He told me that the one thing all those people in those disgustingly nice homes have in common is this:
They own their own business.
Sounds like a case for public executions and convict labor.
Liberals never want to talk about the link between cheap immigrant labor and black unemployment.
I’ve known plenty of people in the trades who make as good, if not better, money than college grads. Especially college grads with BS crap degrees.
I was thinking about this the past 2 days and came up with this. Rehab blighted homes in the slums with trainers in everything from flooring, roofing, electrical, HVAC, framing, welding, plumbing, landscaping, sidewalk and street building. Have trainers there guiding residents through the process with certification given when proficient. The houses and streets can then be turned over to those rebuilding the above at low costs and have police & neighborhood protection placed into the rebuilt areas. Continue to expand and rebuild the neighborhoods while giving new and marketable skills to the inhabitants. Something like that amyway.
I went to Empire Tech School in the basement of the Empire State Building after I came out of the service. Was certified in Data Processing back then. Got a job right out of graduation and am enjoying my 39th year in IT. Not a damn thing wrong with Vocational/Tech schools.
“After a brief enrollment at the University of Memphis, he did not gain paid employment.”
What did he expect after a brief enrollment, Executive Vice President? What courses did he attempt? Social Justice 101: Hating Whitey As A Way Of Life? I am a big believer in vocational education, but this article does not address the facts. Why would his behavior change so? Leftist influence and indoctrination into victim culture is my guess. Colleges are infested with commie rats.
“After a brief enrollment at the University of Memphis,”
He may have found out when he got to college that his public school education did not prepare him for what he had gotten in to.
George W. Bush deserves a good amount of the blame here. His disastrous No Child Left Behind Act does not test for trade knowledge. And since schools live and die by their test scores, most high schools dropped their trade programs.
I taught in an urban high school that had an excellent carpentry program. We graduated carpenters who were ready to work the day after they graduated.
But NCLB does not test for carpentry. So the entire program was eliminated. And the carpentry kids were shoved into classes they neither wanted nor needed.
Thanks for nothing, George.
We see the horrendous results of "Everyone should go to college", with illiterate, math-ignorant, non-critical thinkers flooding campuses everywhere. Unable to do the work, they latch onto "causes" and hold up those posters the libtards and commies shove into their hands. Sorry to say, these types don't usually end up as useful citizens, but often life-long welfare recipients.
And then we have the libtards bending over backwards to bring uneducated unskilled illegal criminal invaders into our country. They take the jobs which were traditionally entry level jobs for our teens to learn a work ethic in and to earn college money or money for other worthy purposes. So we have all these teens with no way to get work experience while they're very young.
Is it any wonder they turn to crime? They are unable to do useful work and there are no entry level jobs for them anyway.
$100/hr. plumbers don’t have outstanding student loans.
I don't think we need to put all our faith in the government when it comes to predicting job demand. We can take Department of Labor standards and throw them into the decision-making process, but you can look at online job ads and see where the demand is.
It’s a known thing that a lot of people like this get a free ride to college which they are probably not prepared for, party for a couple years and drop out when it finally is obvious they can’t meet even mediocre standards.
The Lefties pushing college for all are not doing them any favors.
Best anecdotal story I’ve heard in awhile, about the merits of conservative discipline and self respect in young adults, vs self absorption.
I know bad circumstances and poverty in a Godless culture can cause some “self absorption”. These young men are lost in a battle for survival, after all.
Remember when at age 18 men were called by Uncle Sam and even Christian chaplains were near by and mixing in with recruits and career military? It seems good that since al that is gone, now, that it be replaced with a requirement for mandatory vocational training, for all neighborhoods that the college bound are extinct and who fall below the poverty line?
A few Christian chaplains running around wouldn’t hurt, either.
Great story, CL. Thanks.
we're supposed to have a crisis now because young black men are not finishing college and getting into trouble....
its the young white men I worry about....they're the ones who are discriminated against....
but if in this long winded posting the author just wanted to say that college is overrated, its graduates over paid, its worth overstated, then I agree.....
college is not for everyone, and sometimes its for people that really do not know how to actually work....
get us our blue collar solid work opportunities back and it would be a godsend for many young men, or women, who don't have the patience for sociology,political science,communications, et all that fills college curriculum.
Community colleges are wasting to much of the students valuable time. Summers off. Throw in Christmas and Easter vacations allow for too much free, unserious time. I say right out of High School. 12 months.
Allow them to try another related field after 5-7 years. Continuing education.
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