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While the week before Christmas is a time when most Americans begin to pay less attention to the outside world in order to focus on friends and family, 1.3 million people will find that nearly impossible. That’s the number of the long-term unemployed—individuals who’ve been jobless for more than six and a half months—-whose unemployment benefits will expire just days after Christmas. The long-term unemployed are disproportionately people of color.
According to a recent Associated Press analysis of government data, 53.6 of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 are unemployed or underemployed. News flash: The job market is tough for everyone. It has been since before we entered college. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate in 2000 was at a 30-year low at 4 percent. We are now hovering around 8 percent, and that’s pretty positive.
William F. Baskerville knows that losing the opportunity to cultivate the “minds of California’s brightest students from every background” is like losing “a precious national resource.” That’s why despite the Inland Empire’s posted unemployment rate of 12.6 percent in March, the education consultant is not giving up on finding a job. “I refuse to be relegated to the government’s ‘uncounted’ roles,” he said, referring to the millions of unemployed Americans who have simply dropped out of the labor market.