A New Deal for Young Workers

New Deal President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Library of Congress)

Countless hours of cable news commentary and endless gallons of ink have been devoted to the economic plight of auto workers and Wall Streeters. But there’s another group really struggling right now: us. Young people have been simply devastated by the economic crisis. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, in 2008, 16-to-24-year-old workers experienced a higher rise in unemployment than any other age bracket, an increase 50 percent larger than that suffered by the workforce as a whole. It’s still early, but things aren’t looking much better in 2009: during the first quarter of this year, the unemployment rate for 16-to-24-year-olds remained higher than for any other age bracket. This is no small problem. Young people make up between 14 and 15 percent of the workforce, but about one-third of all the unemployed.

As with so many economic facts and figures now, these statistics are eerily reminiscent of what we saw during one of the darkest periods in our nation’s economic history. In the midst of the Great Depression, young workers also made up about a third of the unemployed.

In 1935, via Executive Order, President Roosevelt created the National Youth Administration to boost their economic prospects. Today, President Obama would be wise to dust off this oft-overlooked item in the New Deal toolbox, and restart the NYA. Under the auspices of the NYA in the 1930s, young people built ballparks and buildings; today, they should build wind turbines and solar panels.

Obviously, much has changed in 70 years, and a reconstituted NYA would have to differ dramatically from Roosevelt’s in order to be successful. But if it incorporated the lessons of the original NYA, and adapted to the contours of the twenty-first century economy, a new NYA could bring youth out of the doldrums and give the whole economy a shot in the arm. Moreover, a new NYA could be the incubator for a life-long productive relationship between government and the youngest generation of workers—who, as part of the “Millennial Generation,” are the largest age cohort in American history.

Despite being all but forgotten, the NYA was successful by almost any measure. Part jobs program, part student aid program, 2.7 million young people were employed under the NYA’s auspices, while 2.14 million were given money to help them stay in school, according to Carol A. Weisenberger’s Dollars and Dreams: The National Youth Administration in Texas. This led to a drop in youth unemployment, and made for a wildly popular program. A 1940 Gallup poll revealed that among Americans who were aware of the NYA, 82 percent wanted the government to make it permanent.

How would the NYA function today? Again, the lessons of the past are instructive. Roosevelt’s NYA operated on a state-by-state basis, with local directors deciding on what projects to spend their money. Under the leadership of a young Lyndon Johnson, for example, the Texas NYA constructed roadside parks and even a popular chapel. The new NYA, on the other hand, could match young workers to the places where they are needed most. Mobility is a key advantage of young workers; indeed, recent scholarship has demonstrated that young workers are more likely than others to move around and look for work. A new NYA could dispatch unemployed young workers to economic trouble spots around the country. A national office could coordinate job placement and identify economic trouble spots where the skills of young workers would be especially beneficial. For instance, they could help build out the Midwest “wind corridor” that T. Boone Pickens has proposed. In the process, they’d be aiding the local economy while learning essential high-tech skills (and they would of course be doing the environment a huge favor, too).

But the new NYA should not merely be a jobs program. The old one wasn’t. The economic crisis will cause colleges and universities to cut back on scholarship money, as some are already doing. Students without access to financial aid will find their parents’ ability to spend on their education to be constrained. And the value of the degree itself will be diminished; according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, job prospects for recent graduates have already begun to falter. While the stimulus package wisely included an increase in Pell Grants, that increase will not be enough. If the recession does not abate soon, many young people may very well abandon school, and, in the process, bring further pressure to bear on the unskilled job market. What’s needed is dramatic action. A new NYA should administer a program that funds the full cost of public college for the top third of all graduating public high school classes. We estimate, based on the approximate number of high school graduates in a given year and the average cost of in-state college tuition, that such a program could cost as little as $25 billion annually. In the current Bailout Age, such an investment seems more than affordable—it seems necessary.

There’s a political case for a new NYA, too. Since 1980, around the time when the earliest members of the youngest generation were born, the right wing has waged a relentless campaign against the value of government itself. The extraordinary degree to which young people have massed behind President Obama is evidence that, for now, they have rejected this campaign. Yet they have done so on faith–and as first-time voters, their preferences are not yet set in stone. A new NYA would give young people a substantive stake in government, and forge a bond that may very well last a lifetime.

Of course, nothing broad in scope gets done easily in Washington, and a new NYA would be no exception. For one thing, although young voters powered Obama to victory this past cycle and are viewed by electoral analysts as key to the Democrats’ future, there’s yet no youth lobbying infrastructure commensurate to the political power that young voters wield. When social security was endangered after 2004, the American Association of Retired People (AARP) rose to its defense. The AARP is regularly cited as one of the most powerful lobbying associations in America, and it goes to bat exclusively for an older cohort. At this point, young people have no AARP of their own. And to get something of this scale done—especially in light of the objections that would surely come from the deficit hawks in both parties—they’d probably need one.

“I have moments of real terror, when I feel we may be losing this generation of young people,” Eleanor Roosevelt worried in 1934. The original NYA was created after a long and drawn out Washington debate. There’s no reason to replay that waiting game, especially when the numbers for young people this quarter will likely only get worse. Countless politicians have extolled the virtues of children and the importance of the future. Let’s see who really means it.

Ethan Porter is the associate editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and Elon Plotkin is a doctoral student in economics at the University of Virginia.

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