Report Outline
The Problem of Unemployed Youth
Labor Camps in European Countries
Civilian Conservation Corps
Expansion of Work Programs for Youth
The Problem of Unemployed Youth
In the budget sent to Congress on January 4, President Roosevelt asked only $85,000,000 for the National Youth Administration, and $230,000,000 for the Civilian Conservation Corps, as compared with actual appropriations of $99,979,240 and $294,955,000 for these agencies in the current fiscal year. Last year the President's request for a $125,000,000 appropriation for the N. Y. A. was cut to $81,000,000 by the House Appropriations Committee, and then raised to approximately $100,000,000 after a fight on the floor. The President said this year's budget estimate for W. P. A., C. C. C., N. Y. A., and the Farm Security Administration represented “a large—perhaps too large—reduction of current expenditures.” This statement will give encouragement to members of Congress who have already indicated that they will attempt to push the 1941 N. Y. A. and C. C. C. appropriations at least up to the 1940 levels.
The Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Youth Administration both were started as emergency programs, largely because of national concern over the “homeless boys” who wandered about the country during the early years of the depression, creating a problem which was often compared to the plight of the millions of “lost children” of Russia during the 1920's. But surveys and studies made during the last six or seven years indicate that the youth problem is not merely a product of the depression; the transfer of young people from schools to jobs in a modern industrial nation no longer takes place as easily and automatically as it did in the past, even when times are fairly good.
Young people who look for work when they have gone as far as they can with their schooling complain that they cannot get jobs without experience, and that they cannot get experience if they cannot find jobs. A staff study of the President's Advisory Committee on Education puts it this way:
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