A bit ironic that the cut off is 24 and the rough age of full brain maturity is 25 (and loss of parental insurance is 26). So the young adults that had poor/no guidance or made poor decisions in youth don’t get this opportunity once they get their head on straight and realize they need to acquire some skills (pretty common character arc for young men, at least in my circles).
Source: used this to get my PhD coming from factory work. Regret nothing.
This means, that until 24, any aid you get is calculated based in your parents’ income + your income. Even if you’ve been fully independent since 18. Combined with the laughable EFC calculations, this often means less aid available.
One is if you are an emancipated adult. The other being if you're married.
But at least at community college there were many options. Table tennis once a week for one semester wasn't a huge burden.
1. Born before Jan 1, 2000; 2. Married; 3. Will be attending grad school [2]; 4. Active-duty U.S. military; 5. U.S. military veteran; 6. Have dependent children; 7. Have live-in dependents other than children; 8. Both parents deceased and/or were a foster child or a ward of the court after age 13; 9. Current or former emancipated minor; 10. Legal guardian is someone other than parent or stepparent; 11,12,13. Homeless or at-risk-of-homelessness within the past year (three different routes of determination).
[1] https://studentaid.gov/2324/help/need-parent-info
[2] Graduate students in the U.S. generally don't get the kind of need-based financial aid that undergrads do, though, so this one is often not very helpful.
Because that’s essentially what you were. Hopefully no longer.
I understand why the system is the way that it is — it covers probably 95% of cases correctly — but for those of us who were essentially on our own after 18, it’s terribly unjust.
There is a legal contract, that is important to people you have never met and will never meet, and, if things are going right, is never at all relevant to your actual marriage in any way except for how it lets you navigate government policy.
There is a social contract, that is important to everyone who acknowledges you as a couple (and also people who have never business seeing you this way).
And there is your actual relationship, which may be enhanced or degraded by the previous two elements, but is somewhat oblique to both.
In my time, factors like age mattered as much as other factors that separated you from "the usual". Nowadays that may not be the case.
That said the idea that you do most of your growing up before 25, but still do some of it 18-24 should not be controversial. I wouldn’t use that observation to deny education/apprenticeship benefits from anyone though.
Since you're making this political I'd like to point out that it is conservatives that have started a movement to repeal the 26th amendment and raise the voting age.
Substitute “progressive” for “ever increasing” to retain mostly the same meaning intended.
There isn’t some magic age where we suddenly stop screwing up all the time.
In reality, it's just fluctuating. The US's age of majority was 21 until the need for soldiers in WWII drove it to be lowered.
Other cultures have gone even higher.
About the most one could say about 25 is that it's when people's paths start to radically diverge, even amongst the group of people that were previously lumped together as "high achievers." So perhaps the subset of that group who are relatively low-performing — and yet, somehow, high in self-awareness — will wake up and start making changes at 25.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/brain-development-25-ye...
> When we spoke, I told Steinberg his work had been referenced in this way. “Oh no,” he said, laughing. I then asked whether he had insights about where the figure 25 came from, and he said roughly the same thing as Cohen: There’s consensus among neuroscientists that brain development continues into the 20s, but there’s far from any consensus about any specific age that defines the boundary between adolescence and adulthood. “I honestly don’t know why people picked 25,” he said. “It’s a nice-sounding number? It’s divisible by five?”
> Kate Mills, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Oregon, was equally puzzled. “This is funny to me—I don’t know why 25,” Mills said. “We’re still not there with research to really say the brain is mature at 25, because we still don’t have a good indication of what maturity even looks like.”
> You may NOT be eligible for Job Corps if you:
> - Use drugs illegally under federal law
> - Exhibit behavioral problems that could prevent you or others from success in Job Corps
> - Have certain criminal convictions or require court supervision
If you have done any of these before 24, chances are really high that you were otherwise disadvantaged in life. And it's not going to get much easier.
I made the comment in the context of:
If you need a program like this between 16-24 AND you are doing drugs, it's much more likely than not that disadvantages have been heaped upon your life.
https://www.caron.org/addiction-101/teens-young-adults/stati...
I agree there is a difference between those 2 statements. But you never made the quoted statement.
There is a difference between having used drugs "at least once" and "use drugs illegaly" (note the present tense).
How so? If you tried drugs once years ago you meet this requirement for this program. If you are an addict taking drugs daily, you will probably fail the drug tests that I assume they use for this qualification and won't qualify. Of course there is a whole spectrum between thos, but saying half the population has taken drugs at least once is very much not the same thing as saying half the population is regularly using drug.
And the qualification is worse for people who are heavily dependent on drugs, and thus can't easily give it up while going through the program.
> which you are quickly and callously dismissing as less than you
When did I ever suggest they are less than me? I was simply pointing out that saying that half of teens have tried drugs does not imply that half of them would be ineligible for this program due to drug use. In fact the same cited article states 1 in 8 have used drugs in the last year, which is probably closer to an upper bound on who would be disqualified for Job Corps due to drug use.
To be clear, I am opposed to this requirement, because it is a barrier to people who need it most.
https://www.iflscience.com/does-the-brain-really-mature-at-t...
Also, the idea that girls mature faster than boys is a much more a myth; girls mature _physically_ faster than boys but not psychologically.
> There isn't great evidence linking that to anything behavioral though.
Ish. There are behavioral patterns which run parallel to it, most obvious with young male aggression which plateaus in the late 20s before trending down.
NEET
This is a term used in the field of education, the acronym stands for; Not in Education, Employment or Training but young people have started to use it as a term for bums/layabouts with no future.
That’s all that really matters for many people.
In the UK, the classification is applied to people aged 16-24 (thus excluding the retired) and sometimes phrased as "respondents who were out of work or looking for a job, looking after children or family members, on unpaid holiday or traveling, sick or disabled, doing voluntary work or engaged in another unspecified activity"
On the other hand in Japan the NEET classification covers ages 15 and 34; and people who are engaged in housework or who are actively seeking work aren't considered NEETs.
By the time I was 22, it had been 4 years.
Just sayin'...
But I suspect it's nothing, compared to army life.
Some say that's what started the end of the Great Depression, but the government lacked the confidence to fully invest until they got a violent war for justification.
[1] Well, okay, at this precise moment, unemployment is at historic lows, but that hasn't always been the case, and won't always be the case.
Many of our "intractable" issues are policy issues and are completely fixable within 1 or 2 generations and honestly have always been fixable.
“My value system would create a utopia and everyone is evil because the world doesn’t subscribe to my nebulous beliefs”
Real unique idea!
“this is the only time of the day you actually feel like your existence means anything”
You are gripped by ideology. Don’t train yourself to think everyone is evil and you know best. It isn’t true.
I’m not even sure what you’re advocating for, but blind anger at the world is senseless. You want to replace our current society with a new one? That could mean bloody, violent revolution.
What do you even want? What does the world owe you?
I really hope we don't get back to any of that in 1, 2 or 100 generations
The idea of america is how this country can keep going. Yes the reality is that we often fall short. But defeatist naysayers who decry any attempt at making things better are worse than turncoats.
I suspect that very few folks hereabouts, would find that prospect attractive.
It’s mostly because I’m retired, enjoy working, and care about the folks that use the software I write.
It's not much different than China stopping the reporting on their current youth unemployment issue.
"It's not a problem, because we're no longer studying it, therefore it is not a problem."
I suspect the real, actual unemployment number in America is far higher than the official reports.
We have many different ways of measuring unemployment, which count different things. For example, employment to population ratio of prima age (25-54) is at 80.8%, just shy of the all time high of 81.9%.
It is very different than China, and there's no information being hidden.
"NOTE: Students who are aged 21 or older may drink alcohol when off center and not under center supervision; however, they cannot bring alcohol onto the center. In addition, if students of any age return to the center intoxicated, it is categorized as a Level II “intoxication” infraction described below."
Where:
"we consider an individual intoxicated when they exhibit a state in which their capacity to act or reason normally has been inhibited by the ingestion of a substance with the intent to cause such a state [including alcohol]" [2]
[1] https://prh.jobcorps.gov/Exhibits/Exhibit%202-1%20Infraction... [2] https://supportservices.jobcorps.gov/Information%20Notices/i...
If someone values getting fucked up all the time more than their career, fine, but don't subsidize that behavior with my tax dollars.
These people are not just getting free training, but free room and board, clothing, tech, and even a stipend on top.
That cost has to be subsidized by someone. None of us truly gets to choose who will pay, just like none of us chose to be born in the first place.
If they want subsidized housing, they have to play by the rules.
It's not about banning "mind states". Once you have shared dorm-style housing you have to be more careful about the rules. If you have minors getting and/or being obviously drunk on your shared dorm-style housing and you do nothing, you're going to be in for a huge scandal as soon as one of those drunk minors does something harmful to someone else.
But let's think about this from a practical standpoint: If someone is quietly and safely getting drunk and then returning to their dorm unnoticed, nobody is going to know or care. This is a tool for them to exercise when people get out of line.
The entire existence of programs like this depends on the opposite notion.
Puritanical authoritarianism has an outsized effect on people who are less financially independent.
But I'd imagine the rule was designed from a "How do we prevent everyone else from being inconvenienced (or threatened) by an irresponsible person?" perspective.
If you're serving low income populations, higher incidences of substance abuse come hand in hand.
And 1 person with a serious substance abuse problem in a group of 10 is still a big problem for everyone else.
Nobody's saying they can't avail themselves of vices... they just can't do it in a communal environment where people are trying to better themselves.
My point was: Why not ban the actual behavior that inconveniences or threatens others? Being too loud, causing property damage, etc.
(Though frankly, I don't feel very strongly about this. Presumably there's a reason for the rules -- I don't have much experience interacting with unemployed young adults.)
Government program means apathetic mid-level management, lawsuits for civil rights violations, and all sorts of red tape.
In most scenarios I'd envision, the person being thrown out is incentivized to try everything they can to avoid getting tossed. Which includes lying and concealing behavior.
Or, they could just have a clearer rule that allowed them to remove people with unaddressed substance abuse problems. Much easier.
> "we consider an individual intoxicated when they exhibit a state in which their capacity to act or reason normally has been inhibited by the ingestion of a substance with the intent to cause such a state [including alcohol]"
If you're acting and reasoning normally, that's evidence that you have the capacity to do so. So act normal and you won't attract discipline for being intoxicated and acting up.
These people need rigid structure and strict rules so they can get passed the hurdles that are easy for the rest of us but hard for them.
We need more of these kinds of programs, especially for convicts and othere societal degenerates. We either help them or let them rot far away from the rest of us, and I vote we at least try help them.
If you're an alcoholic, it's going to be extremely difficult to stay on the wagon if there's a guy who offers you a drink every day... while you're trying to do something difficult, with all the intermittent failures and tough days that entails.
What's the worst way to combat poverty? Put all impoverished people together. What's the best way to combat poverty? Teach different behaviors and put some impoverished people in better environments, with non-impoverished people.
If someone is working to change their life, they deserve at least a neutral-to-positive environment in which to do that.
The entire rule is about discipline. The Job Corp is designed to instill such discipline in people who need it. No one said you can't drink at all. They said you can't drink on our property. God forbid they look out for the safety of people!
I truly don't understand why people get their panties in a twist over rules and regulations. They exist for a reason. Drunks cause problems. Drunks grope people, drunks get in fights, drunks vomit all over the place, drunks make your organization look sloppy, drunks miss work, etc. There are plenty of reasons to ban drunks on YOUR campus. None of them have to be, what you call, "puritanical" in origin.
Many of America's alcohol-related regulations are, literally, Puritan in origin and exist largely due to historical precedent. [1] [2]
Thus, when encountering a surprisingly harsh anti-alcohol regulation, it's reasonable to question its origin and validity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_laws_in_the_United_States [2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/blue%20laws
Freedom doesn’t mean being a nuisance or disruptive. Some of us like to live in NICE living conditions.
What’s wrong with not being drunk when they’re in a program designed to help them?
Do you think it’s bad when you can’t drink alcohol or be drunk in a public library? Or at work? Two person startup aside are you going to show up to work drunk or smoke a J at your desk in an open office? Gonna join zoom zoinked with red eyes? Come on bro.
I personally do not see why job training should have anything like an age requirement. If you're old enough to be on your own, and you need assistance, then assistance should be made available to you.
This makes a lot of sense to me. Just create another program that's tailored towards a diff lot.
The age requirements are because of the insipid, endemic "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" bullshit in US society.
Can't have any form of "welfare" like the entire rest of the developed world...that's "communism."
The loud part is that we'd be "rewarding the lazy" and the quiet part is "we think people who are out of their 20's and unemployed are failures and we don't give a damn about failures, that's capitalism and they're on their own." And then we wonder why property crime and drugs are a problem...
I think we're probably the only wealthy, developed country in the world where you can be in your 40's and if you're male, penniless and unemployed you are likely looking at living barely above poverty for the rest of your life. If you're a woman? Just get married, you can always divorce in a few years and walk away with half your partner's assets.
Male? You're fucked. 100%.
* no programs to help you re-train and college has become completely unaffordable
* not nearly enough time to build up any sort of retirement savings sufficient to not be eating beans for every meal
* not eligible for any assistance programs (only disabled, parents, and those over 65)
* completely undesirable to many employers, especially tech
* ineligible for public service jobs (fire/ems/police) and military (even non-combat roles. We'll put a morbidly obese 20 year old out there before we'll put a fit, loaded-with-life-experience 45 year old)
The real reason: all the companies that underpay their workers and treat them like shit need a steady supply of desperate but experienced workers. And that's how you have 55 year olds working at walmart...
Even in a community property state (a small minority operate under this rule, while an even smaller number allow voluntarily designating particular property as community property), without a prenup, its half the marital property, which includes only what is acquired during marriage, and of that excludes property one party receives during marriage through inheritance and similar processes. And, of course, even if your description was accurate, a penniless woman isn’t just going to automatically be able to find and marry a man with assets or likely to acquire them in any significant quantity. (And, conversely, while it is likewise not automatic, men can and do "marry up" financially, its not something that is only possible for women, and where marital assets are a thing, are just as entitled to a division of them.)
> * no programs to help you re-train and college has become completely unaffordable
Job retraining programs, including public community colleges, do, in fact, exist.
> * not nearly enough time to build up any sort of retirement savings suficient to not be eating beans for every meal
This is actually one area where public sector employment is a good deal; the base pay at the low end often isn’t any worse than the private sector, upward mobility (at least in wages) in the low end is also not bad, and defined benefit pensions exists. Even in the 40s, getting in 20 years is doable, and a plan with a 2% per year of service benefit multiplier (which isn’t very high, if you are retiring in your 60s) gives you 40% of your base (usually something like average of highest 3) years pay as your annual pension benefit.
Public sector employers are often also. for jobs where age discrimination is common if illegal in the private sector, much less prone to it.
> * not eligible for any assistance programs (only disabled, parents, and those over 65)
In many jurisdictions, general assistance/general relief is a thing, though the cash benefit levels tend to be low (though they often come bundled with non-cash aid, including food aid, job training, etc.), and there may be time limits with cooling off periods for able-bodied adults (e.g., something like a limit of 9 months in any 12 month period.)
> * ineligible for public service jobs (fire/ems/police) and military (even non-combat roles. We’ll put a morbidly obese 20 year old out there before we’ll put a fit, loaded-with-life-experience 45 year old)
Very few civilian public service jobs have age limits; the military has enlistment age limits (though for the Navy and Coast Guard, you aren’t necessarily past it if you are in your 40s, since it is 41 and 42, respectively), fire/police/EMS very often do not (though this varies by service and jurisdiction), and instead only have required fitness qualifications.
We definitely can use more programs, but there are tons of programs, government and private. Community college is cheap (or free with grants). You can do this.
Devil's advocate, assuming limited resources for the program, it makes more sense to invest them in younger cohorts in terms of total ROI to society.
However, surely doesn't satisfy the principle of equality under the law. Alas
Whether you like it or agree with it or not, the math has to be done at some point since we are not (yet?) a post-scarcity species.
How do you think things like life insurance policies and wrongful death awards are calculated?
Consider questions like: Why did we spend so much money trying on a Covid vaccine but not to cure gall bladder cancer? Why does eminent domain exist? Why do young men have to register for selective service?
But they were clearly talking about ROI of the job training.
Well, based on my reading, the age here starts at 16 and includes high school potentially. It seems eminently reasonable to me to have an age requirement for a program where there are minors. Otherwise, it seems ripe for abuse. But sure, another program for adults may be a good idea.
Sounds like all the young people in the military.
This is the small fraction of people who were even willing to volunteer for the military, and then completed a significantly more strenuous recruiting process than nearly any private sector job. Having a sucky life in return for learning job skills isn't worth it to most Americans of any age!
Also note all branches are having trouble recruiting the last several years, to the tune of 25-30,000 recruits short this year. Again, most people do not want to do this!
1. https://download.militaryonesource.mil/12038/MOS/Reports/202... pg 50 shows active duty separations by type, I refer to Military Requirement/Behavior/Performance and Legal Issues/Standards of Conduct.
2. https://download.militaryonesource.mil/12038/MOS/Reports/202... Similar to above, pg 46
Most are in to get away from their native location or to get money for school/GI Bill, not because the idea of military is more appealing than being a civilian.
plus we got drunk as hell all the time, even with clearances. even in iraq a couple of times.
showing up to formation hammered and doing some sloppy PT was like a right of passage.
In a less rigorous setting like one implied by jobcorps, this would be much more voluntary. The peer culture in the military, combined with isolation and authoritarianism really does keep people in line, even if they screw up all the time along the way. Source: 5 military family members.
Although most do, because of the supervision. The "party problem" doesn't really start until sophomore year. Unless you're in a frat or sorority. Those count as "dorms" for the requirement, and are notorious.
> because there is almost 0 supervision (I would call what dorm RAs do as more "emergency oversight") and freshman absolutely party the same as upperclassmen & women.
I know that there are schools where this is true. But I also know there is at least one school where this is certainly not true.
I've never heard of a University where the freshman were magically diligent and contained, though I've never been to a private school (if that's the type of school you're talking about). I don't mean to imply anything, but is it possible that your child may have not explained all the intricacies of their experience, perhaps to save you the trouble of worrying and them the trouble of you worrying? I certainly did not tell my parents anywhere near what actually happened, and i still have never. As far as my mom knew, i was a model child in university and in the dorm.
It was in the comment you replied to, you only explicitly addressed the first part, but implicitly agreed with the latter as well:
> how many 19-year-olds do you know who want to live in a dorm setting and show up on time?
The vast, VAST majority of freshmen drink themselves stupid at least once per week, even in the dorms.
But if your kids convinced you otherwise, props to them. You have actors or lawyers to look forward to!
Probably different at a state school, where kids are marking time until the job market. This was a private school in a small town upstate. Kids had a sense of purpose.
Most college kids? Even the no-drinking part these days comprises many college students, the number of young people who don't drink is rising.
... asking for a friend
"Computer Technician Network+, average salary $68,90x - $108,xxx" LOL. Please show me the employer willing to hire an 18-24 year old graduate of this Job Corps program for $69k to $108k.
Some of the salary estimates are so hilariously off the mark.
But it's not a silver bullet, and it requires a certain amount of diligence and self-awareness to be able to finish the program. It's not a party atmosphere like college or entry-level employment can be: how many 19-year-olds do you know who want to live in a dorm setting and show up on time? How many 22-year-olds want to go months without drinking?
That said, it's a clear and coherent step forward for people who might otherwise feel lost, and that's a very good thing.
Now, if only they had something for NEETs over job corps's age limit....