A national survey from the Heldrich Center of recent high school graduates from 2006 to 2011 who are not enrolled in college full time reveal the difficulty this group has with finding work that pays a living wage and offers financial security. Young adults who graduated from high school just before layoffs started to swell in the Great Recession— in this report, defined as 2006-8 — were having trouble making ends meet. Just 37 percent employed were full time and another 23 percent were working part time, usually because they could not find full-time work. But among those who graduated after the financial crisis, the numbers are far worse: only 16 percent of the classes of 2009-11 had full-time jobs. Many of these young people had been expecting to go to college since they started high school, anticipating that employers would demand skills high schools do not teach. Just one in ten high school graduates without college degrees said they were “extremely well prepared by their high school to succeed in their job after graduation.”