Youth Unemployment Rate Still High in February

The unemployment rate for 18-to-29-year-olds was much higher than the national unemployment rate for February, according to a report released Friday by Generation Opportunity.

The effective unemployment rate, which adjusts for labor force participation by including those who have given up looking for work, is15.8percent. The (U-3) unemployment rate for 18-to-29-year-olds is11.4percent.

According to the report, the declining labor force participation rate has created an additional1.95million young adults that are not counted as unemployedby the U.S. Department of Labor because they are not in the labor force. This is because those young people have "given up looking for work due to the lack of jobs."

The unemployment rate for African-American youths was higher than the overall rate at 19.3 percent. The unemployment rate for women was lower than the overall unemployment rate at 9.7 percent.

Evan Feinberg, president of Generation Opportunity, criticized politicians for ignoring the high unemployment rate of the nation's youth.

Youth unemployment has been way too high for way too long and politicians seem like they don't even care about this mess that they created themselves," he said. "Instead of working to create opportunities for my generation, the administration is busy dreaming up new big-government schemes that rob us of our prosperity and threaten our future well-being.If government insists on waging this War on Youth, we will have no choice but to fight back and hold them accountable."