Vice - According to [a University of California] report, about one in five people between the ages of 17 and 21 lived in poverty during the past decade, the highest proportion of any age group. This was true even without counting homeless youth or people who didn’t work a significant amount of hours (that latter group including otherwise well-off college students who subsist on Top Ramen for four years). James Hawkins, the associate director of the Berkeley Institute for the Future of Young Americans and author of the study, said that excluding those obvious outliers means that the figures he presents are actually an undercounting of young people's poverty levels, which have been increasing pretty steadily since the 1970s, even as poverty in other age groups has fallen.
Hawkins said that the evolution of the U.S. labor market significantly disadvantages low-skill workers, and that disproportionately affects young people who have less job experience. As low-skill jobs have disappeared, it’s more difficult to find an entry-level gig as someone just joining the workforce. This dynamic, Hawkins says, calls into question longstanding notions that young people don’t need help in our society because they’ll always be able to earn a living.
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