Unemployment Crisis: Full-time jobs down 25% for adults under 25

As bad as the headline unemployment numbers make the young adult jobs crisis seem, the reality is even worse.

May’s jobless rate for those aged 16-24 was 16.1%. That’s bleak, but a big improvement from 19.6% in early 2010 and not much worse than the 15% touched in 1992.

Yet when one focuses on the roughly 16 million young adults no longer in school, there has been almost no recovery in full-time employment since the generational low hit in early 2010 .

As the nation’s job-creating machine was downshifting to first gear, just 47.3% of these young adults held full-time jobs in May — down 12 percentage points from May 2007 and 16.5 percentage points from 2000, when the slide really began.

Even after adjusting for more people staying in school longer, the under-25 group has seen 1.9 million full-time jobs disappear since 2007 and 2.6 million since 2000.