Education and jobs for young black men
A high priority for colleges and universities these days is to improve affordability of, and access to, higher education. We care because we want to have students who reflect the diversity of society, and we want to keep our classrooms and laboratories filled. We also care because we know that we can’t have a good society in the future unless most of today’s young people grow up to hold productive, decently-paid jobs, which increasingly requires some college education.
What we may not fully realize is the dire consequences, both to young people and to society, if the young people do not get a decent education or have decent job prospects. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, in his March 15, 2007 column, paints a dismal picture of the prospects and consequences for young black men. He writes,
Black American males inhabit a universe in which joblessness is frequently the norm, where the idea of getting up each morning and going off to work can seem stranger to a lot of men than the dream of hitting the lottery, where the dignity that comes from supporting oneself and one’s family has too often been replaced by a numbing sense of hopelessness. ...
[M]ost black men do not go to college. In big cities, more than half do not even finish high school. Their employment histories are gruesome. Over the past few years, the percentage of black male high school graduates in their 20s who were jobless (including those who abandoned all efforts to find a job) has ranged from well over a third to roughly 50 percent. … For black males who left high school without a diploma, the real jobless rate at various times over the past few years has ranged from 59 percent to a breathtaking 72 percent. ...
Jobless rates at such sky-high levels don’t just destroy lives, they destroy entire communities. They breed all manner of antisocial behavior, including violent crime. One of the main reasons there are so few black marriages is that there are so many black men who are financially incapable of supporting a family.
Herbert points out that some of the most useful job-training programs to move poor young people into productive jobs have been gutted, rather than expanded, and that our educational programs are faltering and largely ineffective.
Many colleges and universities are trying to ameliorate this situation, if only in small ways, through programs with schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods, service-learning, literacy tutorials, clinics and nutrition programs, and so forth. But these efforts have small chance of success if they are not bolstered by other societal investments, and particularly by the prospect of decent jobs.