Page 14
University Daily Kansan
Friday, March 27, 1964
Many Youths Found to Lose Hope, Desire for Job
(Editor's Note: This is the fifth and last series on the plight of American youth.)
By Harry Ferguson
WASHINGTON —(UPI)— The discouraging thing about the teenage unemployment crisis is that the people who are trying to solve it are becoming discouraged.
Not all of them will admit it publicly, but in private they talk about nothing but gloom and despair. They think that events relentlessly are pushing millions of teen-agers into a blind alley of idleness from which there is no exit. The worst factor is that a sizeable number of the kids already have lost hope and don't care whether they find jobs.
The U.S. children's bureau sets forth the following facts:
- Twenty-nine per cent of the children who dropped out before finishing high school in 1962 could not find jobs.
- In 1960, two out of every three youths were living in cities and by 1970 it is estimated the rate will be three out of four. The under-educated ones who can't find jobs, spend their time mostly on the streets and provide an enormous
recruiting pool for juvenile gangs
recruiting pool for juvenile gangs.
- The American economy will have to provide between 19 and 21 million jobs in the coming decade to soak up the teen-agers coming into the labor market. Some estimates—probably a bit high—are that automation is eliminating 40,000 jobs a week.
President Johnson has declared an unconditional war on poverty and is committed to solving the youth unemployment problem. But the question the experts are asking is—how and when? Most of them think only a crash program is the answer and they talk about spending 10 billion dollars quickly.
THEY ARE IGNORING the political facts of life. The Johnson administration, in this election year, is committed to economy even to cutting down the White House electric bill.
Persons who expect Lyndon Johnson to come out now in favor of a billion dollars-plus appropriation for youth or anything else are either naive or think the President is, which he isn't.
There has been considerable experimentation in a program to retrain under-educated teen-agers to give them marketable skills. Here and there they seem to be working fairly well. But the other day the Wall Street Journal disclosed this report:
"Consider what recently happened with the Youth Career Development Center in Newark, N.J., a government sponsored pilot project aimed at finding new ways to combat teen-aged joblessness.
"SOCIAL WORKERS . . . arranged a short training course for would-be waiters and waitresses. The instruction ranged from personal hygiene to how to figure out the sales tax on a customer's check.
"It seemed like a good idea, for the Newark papers were full of want-ads for waiters. Several local restaurant owners even called the center promising to hire any of its graduates.
"But the course never got under way. Joseph Viviani, an official of the center, glumly tells why: 'We simply couldn't get enough youngsters who wanted to be waiters.' I'm afraid that sort of work isn't
Just as soon, and they would just as soon employed 'Viviani said only II 14,000 youths who sought jobs through the center have been
placed. But he thinks the rate would have been 25 per cent except for the fact he couldn't find any kids interested in certain types of work.
glamorous enough, and they would just as soon remain unemployed."
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