One in an occasional series

Staring at the Rocky Mountains in the summer heat, Mike Deaven, 24 and jobless, was trying to make sense of his fast-fraying life.

He'd been The Latest Thing - a young, fresh engineer at a Warminster firm. And that's precisely why, he says, he was laid off in April from his $61,000-a-year job.

"It's good for a company to have new blood," Deaven said by phone as he drove across America to clear his head. "But it's strange that's the first thing they give away in a bad economy."

Initially exhilarating, the Rockies were, by Wyoming, closing in on Deaven, looking more like a fence than freedom - and reminding him of his Pennsylvania troubles.

"The mountains . . . ," he writes in a cyber-diary, feel like "the crushingly narrow state of unemployment. And this is where I am now, on Route 80 and in life."

At the moment they should be blasting off, many in their 20s are finding their trajectories altered, or their launches stalled, by the dream-killing economy.

While national unemployment is at 9.4 percent, people ages 20 to 29 face jobless rates of 12.7 percent nationally and 14 percent in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, including South Jersey, according to figures compiled by Mark Price of the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg.

Aside from teenagers, people in their 20s endure the highest rate of unemployment of any age group, U.S. Department of Labor statistics show.

And while the overall rate of U.S. unemployment increased 3.9 percentage points between June 2008 and June 2009, the rate for people in their 20s went up about 5 points, said economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

"Younger workers are hit the hardest in this downturn," she said. "Lower levels of experience are the last hired, first fired."

Currently, Shierholz said, there are six unemployed workers for every available job in the nation. And, while some economists say the recession is coming to an end, they also expect job losses to continue.

Even when there are openings, Shierholz said, "people don't pick the young. For the same wage, they can get someone with more experience." Some experts disagree, citing anecdotal evidence that older unemployed workers are most often denied jobs.

Nevertheless, with dreams deflated or deferred, many workers in their 20s whose promise had been nurtured in universities find the real world harrowing. In interviews, more than a dozen young people talked about the challenge of being taken out of the game just as they were learning how to play.

"I worked hard in college," said the bearded and burly Deaven, who graduated from Pennsylvania State University and, after just two years on the job, now worries about making the $965 rent payments on his Center City apartment.

"I'm used to seeing hard work rewarded. Now I'm dropped because I'm the new guy? How will I get experience? This is a bleak feeling."

Teaching rowing

The Schuylkill looked brown and placid in Bridgeport, Montgomery County, on a miasmic morning, and lush riverbank vegetation gave the scene an Amazonian feel.

Jason Bohot, 27, who should be designing buildings as an architect, was here instead, teaching rowing to Upper Merion High School kids.

He's been volunteering his time during the summer, having made the rough equivalent of $4 an hour teaching part-time during the spring rowing season.

With a preprofessional degree in architecture from Temple University, Bohot, fit and contemplative, lives in nearby King of Prussia. He had been laying the foundation for his career by helping to design Quiznos restaurants for a Lansdale architectural firm.