The College Fix

In a column this week, Ron Meyer of the Young America’s Foundation revealed the truth about Obama’s bogus jobs claims, and explained why the president is losing support among college-age voters:

President Obama is making a big push to recover his lost popularity with youth — but his promises don’t address the real needs of the under-30 crowd.

Since Inauguration Day, the president’s approval rating with the 18-to-29 crowd set a record for the most precipitous drop in Gallup Poll history, from 77 percent approval to 48 percent.

The Youth Misery Index (which combines youth unemployment, average graduating college debt and the national debt) is at an all-time high, and Millennials are taking an economic shellacking.

America’s youth want careers — not more college debt and internships. But that’s all Obama’s new programs offer.

No recent promise is more disingenuous than Summer Jobs+. The labor Department of Labor purports to have “180,000 job commitments” from private-sector companies, but only 38 percent (70,000) of these “jobs” pay money. The rest are unpaid internships — a category that Nancy Leppink, an Obama appointee at Labor, declared not “in compliance with the law” as recently as 2010.

The abrupt reversal doesn’t make these positions “jobs.” The 70,000 paid positions offered by the private sector won’t be nearly enough to employ the 1.7 million students who will graduate from college this year.

Youth employment (which the Labor Department measures for the age-16-to-24 cohort) is already in the high teens, and more than 4 million young people are looking for jobs. These 70,000 or even 180,000 new positions promised by the Obama administration wouldn’t even employ 5 percent of the young people now seeking work.

Then there’s the Obama call to expand the student-aid program — mostly through a massive increase ($1 billion to $8 billion) in the Perkins student-loan program.

To anyone who hasn’t graduated from college recently, this might sound great. To those of us who have, it’s terrifying.

Making it easier to get a student loan now is as devious as making it easier to get a mortgage a decade ago — the government is encouraging people to take on more debt than they can handle.

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter