This newsletter is part of Times Opinion’s Giving Guide 2024. Read more in a note from Times Opinion’s editor, Kathleen Kingsbury.
For this year’s Giving Guide, I’m suggesting three organizations that help people make the treacherous leap from school, unemployment or underemployment to rewarding work.
Last spring, I wrote a pair of newsletters and recorded a podcast about college students and grad students who were trying without success to land jobs after graduation. One said, “It feels like I am screaming into the void with each application I am filling out.”
You might ask why philanthropy is needed here. Shouldn’t the free market sort this out? Employers and job applicants need each other, after all. There’s a powerful financial motive on both sides to match available people with available jobs.
Clearly, though, market forces aren’t enough. When I wrote about the issue last spring, the unemployment rate was under 4 percent. That’s what Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, who is a labor economist by training, once called a “high-pressure economy” — one with “robust aggregate demand and a tight labor market.” Yet the college students I talked to weren’t even getting nibbles on their job applications.
In economic terms, one obstacle is what the Nobel laureate George Akerlof — Yellen’s husband, by the way — called a “lemons” problem. Hiring someone is a big commitment, and employers are reluctant to make that commitment for fear that the person hired may turn out to be a lemon, like a used car with a broken transmission. Nonprofits can help by arranging internships and other connections that give employers the confidence they need to make the bet.
Education at Work, one of the organizations I recommend, helps college students get paid internships at big companies. Currently most of the university partners are in the Southwest, and the main employers include Fidelity Investments, First Financial Bank and Intuit. The employers typically help the students with tuition and sometimes offer them jobs after graduation. Last spring I interviewed the organization’s president, Jane Swift, a former acting governor of Massachusetts, who told me that the internships “enhance prospects for a good first job and a career filled with purpose and passion.”
I’d also like to recommend another nonprofit that I mentioned in that article: WorkingNation, which was founded by Art Bilger, a successful investor. Rather than providing a service, WorkingNation is more of a consciousness raiser. It produces videos and digital magazines about unemployment and, in the organization’s words, “scalable solutions that can turn the American worker into an indispensable resource.” It focuses on high school students, veterans, immigrants and other cohorts, not just college students.
My third recommendation is Jobs for the Future, a 41-year-old nonprofit that operates in all 50 states. It helps employers and governments devise pathways to good jobs for people who don’t have college degrees. That includes the formerly incarcerated. It’s in the vanguard of skills-based hiring, which is hiring people based on what they know and what they can do rather than whether they have diplomas. One challenge Jobs for the Future addresses is that there are more than a million non-diploma credentials that people can earn and neither employers nor workers know which ones are worth it, Maria Flynn, its president, told me.
Flynn was a civil servant in the Department of Labor during the presidencies of both Bushes and Bill Clinton. Lucky for her, the organization’s mission has bipartisan support, including from Donald Trump, who made skills-based hiring a priority in his first term as president.
Smoothing the pathways to work benefits employers at least as much as it benefits prospective workers, so it stands to reason that employers should be putting their dollars behind these nonprofits, and they are. But more is needed. Smaller employers, in particular, need help finding good matches. And on the supply side of the labor equation, workers need help finding their way to apprenticeships and other opportunities.
If you’re involved in hiring, recruiting or philanthropy where you work, consider making these and other organizations doing similar work a high priority. If you’re just an individual writing checks at the kitchen table, well, every little bit helps.
This newsletter is part of Times Opinion’s Giving Guide 2024. The author has no direct connection to the organizations mentioned. If you are interested in any organization mentioned in Times Opinion’s Giving Guide 2024, please go directly to its website. Neither the authors nor The Times will be able to address queries about the groups or facilitate donations.
Elsewhere: When Forks Were Scandalous
For your holiday delectation, from “Origins of the Common Fork” by Chad Ward on the Leite’s Culinaria website:
“Imagine the astonishment then when in 1004 Maria Argyropoulina, Greek niece of Byzantine emperor Basil II, showed up in Venice for her marriage to Giovanni, son of the Pietro Orseolo II, the doge of Venice, with a case of golden forks — and then proceeded to use them at the wedding feast. They weren’t exactly a hit. She was roundly condemned by the local clergy for her decadence, with one going so far as to say, “God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks — his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating.”
Quote of the Day
“Instead of gathering up the ‘real smart young men,’ gather up the real smart girls, pull them out of the mire, give them a shove up the ladder of life and be amply repaid both by their success and unforgetfulness of those that held out the helping hand.”
— Nellie Bly, “The Girl Puzzle: Some Suggestions on What to Do With the Daughters of Mother Eve,” The Pittsburg Dispatch (Jan. 25, 1885)
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