Early this month, Venture for America (VFA), a new philanthropic program that recruits talented college seniors to add capacity to business start ups in some of the most difficult American cities, opened its application process. With a mission similar to its near-namesake Teach for America, VFA seeks to improve existing businesses in ailing cities by injecting them with new talent and helping them attract college grads that might otherwise overlook opportunities at small, local startups. The program’s goal is to create a new class of entrepreneurs that will help grow the companies they work for or launch their own after learning the ropes, all in the hopes of creating 100,000 new jobs by 2025.
VFA’s launch comes less than a month after the White House announced its own urban capacity bolstering strategy for struggling cities. The Strong Cities, Strong Communities program—which will bring talent to Cleveland, Detroit, New Orleans, Memphis, Fresno, and Chester, PA—aims to strengthen neighborhoods, towns, cities and regions around the country by increasing the capacity of local governments through technical assistance and access to federal agency expertise.
Despite the reality that metropolitan areas account for 86 percent of employment, 90 percent of wage income, and, over the next 20 years, 94 percent of the nation’s economic growth, many cities are experiencing human capital deficits adding to already diminished competitive capacities. Despite the ample opportunity that such dilapidated landscapes present for regrowth and redevelopment, too many are losing the race for human capital to their shinier, more established brethren.
Meanwhile, college graduates are having difficulty findings jobs to channel their skills through. In 2010, only 24 percent of college graduates who had applied to jobs had a job waiting for them upon graduation. In the United States, the official unemployment rate for college graduates is 11.2 percent, but for college graduates 25 and over it is only 4.5 percent. Clearly the level of unemployment for recent college graduates is significantly higher. In April 2010, 8 percent of college graduates under 25 were unemployed, lower than the national unemployment rate at the time of 9.9 percent, but up from the 6.8 percent of unemployed college grads under 25 in April 2009 and 3.7 percent in April 2007, before the recession began.
Anecdotally, in the months since colleges released their latest brood of grads in May, I have met many whose job application counts top 100, who hold unpaid internships and high rent payments simultaneously as they search for a more permanent spot, for whom the promise of education as a path to a brighter future seems fallacious unless they want to go further into debt to pursue a higher degree—now a pre-requisite in many fields.
Something is amiss. Already ailing cities are being crushed by the limits of their capacity and the lack of young blood coming in to both the public and private sectors. Meanwhile, young graduates are desperately seeking employment options that will be valuable both financially and professionally, with an emphasis on the latter. It only seems right then that programs like VFA and Strong Cities, Strong Communities do what they can to engage this group of youth and harness their talent to help rebuild areas in need of people of the streets and ideas in city hall. Like the Public Works Administration in the Great Depression, the Great Recession calls for an investment in our infrastructure, both the physical structures and the ideological purveyors that support great places. This means more than Americorps level funding to non-profits, which provides a barely livable wage and signals the degree to which we value putting young minds to work. This means true investment that builds public private partnerships and creates a competitive mutual selection process in which cities and young professionals clamor to find their best fit to increase their potential for progress.
Richard Florida has long written about how cities can reshape themselves to attract young professionals, the “creative class.” I believe we need to think more about how bright young minds can shape cities, and then equip both cities and young graduates to do so. Our cities are suffering from a human capital debt crisis, creating and supporting programs like VFA that seek to do something about this is an excellent first step to rewriting their futures.
