Too many
young Americans are failing to make an adequate transition from
school to work. They drift aimlessly through their young
adulthood—often with disastrous consequences. There has been
a growing inequality between the prospects of those who attend
college and those who do not. The latter are finding it
increasingly difficult to obtain a decent job, start a career, and
support a family.
Approximately
one in four American teenagers leaves high school before receiving
a diploma, and dropout rates are higher for minorities. An
estimated 40 percent of Hispanic students leave before finishing
high school, and among blacks in some urban areas the dropout rate
is climbing toward 50 percent. Some individuals manage to obtain a
high school equivalency degree later; however, there has been no
progress in reducing the overall dropout rate during the last
decade. High school dropouts are 2½ times more likely than
graduates to be without a job, 3½ times more likely to be
arrested for a crime, and 7½ times more likely to be
dependent on public assistance.
Young males
with less than a college education have had trouble in the labor
market during the past fifteen years. The real value of their
earnings has fallen sharply, their job prospects have become more
marginal, and their ability to support a family above poverty
levels has diminished. The proportion of eighteen- to
twenty-four-year-olds counted "inactive" —i.e., not employed,
not enrolled in school, and not in the military—has almost
doubled during the past twenty years to approximately 12 percent
for white males, and more than doubled to almost 30 percent for
nonwhite males.
For girls,
pregnancy is the most important reason for leaving school. By age
twenty, approximately 20 percent of white teenagers and 45 percent
of black teenagers have been pregnant—one of the highest
rates of pregnancy for teenagers in the developed world. Because of
the greater prevalence of abortions and contraception, fewer
teenage girls are having babies today than thirty years ago, but
more and more teenage mothers are unmarried and remaining so. The
proportion of babies born out of wedlock to white girls between the
ages of fifteen and nineteen rose from 6 percent in 1955 to 49
percent in 1986; for black girls, the proportion