The Forgotten 42

IN NOVEMBER 1988, the William T. Grant Foundation Commission on Work, Family and Citizenship published The Forgotten Half: Pathways to Success for America's Youth and Young Families. Its first page is still informative and dramatic: Who are the Forgotten Half? In non-statistical terms, they are the young people who build our homes, drive our buses, repair our automobiles, fix our televisions, maintain and serve our offices, schools, and hospitals, and keep the production lines of our mills and factories moving. To a great extent they determine how well the American family, economy, and democracy function. They are also the thousands of young men and women who aspire to work productively but never quite "make it" to that kind of employment. For these members of the Forgotten Half, their lives as adults start in the economic limbo of unemployment, part-time jobs and poverty wages. Many of them never break free. In November 1998, a group of foundations sponsored The Forgotten Half Revisited. Have conditions improved for this group? Not a great deal, it would seem. As a society, we still invest less in these young people than in the college-bound. Today, they are the "Forgotten 42%" because more and more high school graduates are going on to postsecondary schooling. Several chapters refer to them as the "Forgotten Third," but this changes the definition of who they are. The "one-third" refers simply to the one- third of high school graduates who do not go to college. But there is another group of non-college attendees, the dropouts, and this brings the proportion of all young people who do not attend college to about 42%. Those in the forgotten half today are still more likely to be employed at low wages or unemployed. The outcomes for specific groups are stark. For blacks, dropping out is an economic disaster: only 30% of blacks between the ages of 16 and 24 who dropped out of school are employed. For whites, the figure is 53% employed. Getting a high school diploma doubles the employment rate for blacks to 59% and sends the rate for whites to 77%. Blacks who obtain a college degree are employed at almost the same rate as whites: 88% versus 90%. Data on poverty are direr than those on employment, and the situation has gotten worse over the decade for everyone but college grads. Only 2.5% of college graduates lived below the poverty line in 1989 and in 1996. For all others, the propor-tion who fall below the poverty line has increased: for those with some college, from 11% to 16%; for high school graduates, from 19% to 24%; for high school dropouts, from 45% to 50%. Recently, some observers have been touting the decline in the rate of teen pregnancies. The data in The Forgotten Half Revisited, though, indicate that, while the total number of births to young women (ages 15 to 24) declined, the proportion of births to single mothers as a proportion of all births rose from 1989 to 1995. The proportion for whites went from 34% to 47%, for blacks from 80% to 86%, and for "other" groups from 43% to 49%. No figure was available for Hispanics for 1989; in 1995 the proportion was 53%. As I recall, the egalitarianism and the willingness to redistribute wealth of the 1960s and 1970s were predicated on the thesis that the "scarcity assumption" was false. That is, we had been told that there was only so much to go around, and we had come to believe that this was not true. We believed that there was plenty for everyone. That belief appears to have faded, perhaps because we are now the most economically stratified nation in the Western world the grabbers have been extremely good at grabbing. In a chapter on educational attainments in The Forgotten Half Revisited, Jack Jennings and Diane Stark Rentner of the Center on Education Policy present data indicating that, over a 12-year period from 1982 to 1994, students of all ethnicities increased the number of "core courses" they were taking in high school. …