How You Can Help People Get Good Jobs

This newsletter is part of Times Opinion’s Giving Guide 2024. Read more in a note from Times Opinion’s editor, Kathleen Kingsbury.

For this year’s Giving Guide, I’m suggesting three organizations that help people make the treacherous leap from school, unemployment or underemployment to rewarding work.

Last spring, I wrote a pair of newsletters and recorded a podcast about college students and grad students who were trying without success to land jobs after graduation. One said, “It feels like I am screaming into the void with each application I am filling out.”

You might ask why philanthropy is needed here. Shouldn’t the free market sort this out? Employers and job applicants need each other, after all. There’s a powerful financial motive on both sides to match available people with available jobs.

Clearly, though, market forces aren’t enough. When I wrote about the issue last spring, the unemployment rate was under 4 percent. That’s what Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, who is a labor economist by training, once called a “high-pressure economy” — one with “robust aggregate demand and a tight labor market.” Yet the college students I talked to weren’t even getting nibbles on their job applications.

In economic terms, one obstacle is what the Nobel laureate George Akerlof — Yellen’s husband, by the way — called a “lemons” problem. Hiring someone is a big commitment, and employers are reluctant to make that commitment for fear that the person hired may turn out to be a lemon, like a used car with a broken transmission. Nonprofits can help by arranging internships and other connections that give employers the confidence they need to make the bet.