Interventions designed to alleviate youth unemployment can only be assessed against criteria based upon beliefs about its causes and consequences. In the following pages, five criteria are set out and then applied to three interventions from three different nations. Schooling and voluntary service are considered as alternatives to interventions focused on preparing youth for work.

Criteria for Assessing Interventions

Interventions cannot be limited to the improvement of human capital; that is, to increasing the supply of qualified workers. Policy makers in the United States are especially apt to assume that youth unemployment can be reduced by improving the education and training of young people. However, unless the demand for skilled workers increases simultaneously, education and training serve only as waiting rooms, not launching pads. Both the demand for skilled labor and the supply of skilled labor must be part of the intervention equation.

Rutter's treatment of causality (in this volume) makes this point by associating the human capital strategy with the presumption that individual differences cause unemployment. He usefully points out that although different levels of education and training can explain differences in the individual propensity to be unemployed, they cannot explain overall levels of unemployment. Using his terms, differences in the average levels of human capital among subgroups can explain at least some of the distribution of unemployment. One reason young people suffer higher levels of unemployment than adults is because, as a group, they have less human capital—in the form of educational credentials, job skills, and personal qualities—than adults.