Passage Five 

For this generation of young people, the future looks bleak. Only one in six isworking full time. Three out of five live with their parents or other relatives. A largemajority-73 percent-think they need more education to find a successful career, butonly half of those say they will definitely enroll in the next few years. No, they arenot the idle youth of Greece or Spain or Egypt. They are the youth of America, theworld’s richest country, who do not have college degrees and aren ’t getting themanytime soon. Whatever the sob stories about recent college graduates spinningtheir wheels as baristas or clerks, the situation for their less-educated peers is farworse. For this group, finding work that pays a living wage and offers some sense ofsecurity has been elusive. 

Despite the continuing national conversation about whether college is worth itgiven the debt burden it entails, most high school graduates without college degreessaid they believe they would be unable to get good jobs without more education. 

Getting it is challenging, though, and not only because of formidable debt levels.Ms. McClour and her husband, Andy, have two daughters under 3 and another duenext month. She said she tried enrolling in college classes, but the workload becametoo stressful with such young children. Mr. McClour works at a gas station. He hateshis work and wants to study phlebotomy, but the nearest school is an hour and halfaway. 

Many of these young people had been expecting to go to college since theystarted high school, perhaps anticipating that employers would demand skills highschools do not teach. Just one in ten high school graduates without college degreessaid they were “extremely well prepared by their high school to succeed in their jobafter graduation. ” These young people worried about getting left behind and werepessimistic about reaching some of the milestones that make up the American dream.More than half-56 percent-of high school graduates without college diplomas saidthat their generation would have less financial success than their parents. About thesame share believed they would find work that offered health insurance within thattime frame. Slightly less than half of respondents said the next few years wouldbring work with good job security or a job with earnings that were high “enough tolead a comfortable life ”. They were similarly pessimistic about being able to start afamily or buy a home. 

The online survey was conducted between March 21 and April 2, and covered anationally representative survey of 544 high school graduates from the classes of2006-11 who did not have bachelor ’s degrees. The margin of sampling error wasplus or minus 5 percentage points. 

 What does the underlined phrase “spinning their wheels ” mean in Paragraph 1?