Press

KNPR: Why is Youth Unemployment So High?

07.11.2014

This week, Diana Carew, director of PPI’s Young American Prosperity Project, was interviewed on Nevada’s Public Radio on the topic of millennial unemployment.  You can find the full recording here; a few summarizing quotes are below.

You need an education and training system that’s set up to be dynamic and to meet the needs of current employers, but you also need employers to be investing and creating jobs.  So you  need both things to be happening and actually there are issues at both ends of the spectrum that need to be addressed.

A lot of what I’ve been advocating is that we need more alternative pathways into the workforce.  I think everybody needs post-secondary education, that’s clear.  It’s not clear that everybody needs a four year degree and in fact that’s very expensive to funnel everybody into a four year school because not all jobs need a four year degree.  A lot of jobs could use vocational training or a certification, especially in the tech space.  So I think that there’s a stigma around the fact that everyone needs a bachelors degree and that’s just not true.  But what is also true is that there aren’t enough socially accepted pathways outside of the four year degree.

Public Private partnerships in education is a must.