Bam's Bogus Youth Agenda
By Ron Meyer
NYPost.com
President Obama is making a big push to recover his lost popularity with youth — but his promises don’t address the real needs of the under-30 crowd.
Since Inauguration Day, the president’s approval rating with the 18-to-29 crowd set a record for the most precipitous drop in Gallup Poll history, from 77 percent approval to 48 percent.
The Youth Misery Index (which combines youth unemployment, average graduating college debt and the national debt) is at an all-time high, and Millennials are taking an economic shellacking.
America’s youth want careers — not more college debt and internships. But that’s all Obama’s new programs offer.
No recent promise is more disingenuous than Summer Jobs+. The labor Department of Labor purports to have “180,000 job commitments” from private-sector companies, but only 38 percent (70,000) of these “jobs” pay money. The rest are unpaid internships — a category that Nancy Leppink, an Obama appointee at Labor, declared not “in compliance with the law” as recently as 2010.
The abrupt reversal doesn’t make these positions “jobs.” The 70,000 paid positions offered by the private sector won’t be nearly enough to employ the 1.7 million students who will graduate from college this year.
Youth employment (which the Labor Department measures for the age-16-to-24 cohort) is already in the high teens, and more than 4 million young people are looking for jobs. These 70,000 or even 180,000 new positions promised by the Obama administration wouldn’t even employ 5 percent of the young people now seeking work.
Then there’s the Obama call to expand the student-aid program — mostly through a massive increase ($1 billion to $8 billion) in the Perkins student-loan program.
To anyone who hasn’t graduated from college recently, this might sound great. To those of us who have, it’s terrifying.
Making it easier to get a student loan now is as devious as making it easier to get a mortgage a decade ago — the government is encouraging people to take on more debt than they can handle.
Many recent graduates face the same situation as the people who took out subprime loans from 1998 to 2007; the government encouraged them to take out massive loans that they now can’t afford. Student-loan defaults hit a record-breaking 8.8 percent last year.
Growing the student-loan program means dooming more graduates to this same fate. Tuition costs continue to rise at twice the rate of inflation, and average graduating-student loan debt has grown 12.5 percent since 2008 (in real terms) to $26,300.
In his State of the Union Address, our president said he’ll fight skyrocketing tuition by reducing funding to colleges that raise it. Sorry. The vast majority of federal funding comes to colleges through student loans — which Obama wants to expand.
So, even if Obama makes good on his threat to cut other funds to the schools, colleges that hike tuition will still receive more overall funding — giving these institutions little reason to reform.
The White House recently commissioned a front group called the National Campus Leadership Council to promote the administration’s youth policies to students. However young people vote this year, they ought to let the administration know that these policies don’t pass the sniff test.
No matter how the administration packages them, lofty promises based on faulty policies won’t fool Generation Y — which is learning from experience why gimmick-heavy, shortsighted government policies fail.
Millennials want long-term employment, which can only be provided en masse by a vibrant private sector. Instead of focusing on rhetorical ruses, our nation’s leaders need to focus on fundamental economic reform that gives America’s employers the confidence to put our youth labor force to work.
Ron Meyer is a program officer for Young America’s Foundation.