WASHINGTON


THIS may be little consolation to recent graduates who have sent out dozens of résumés with nary a response; who have been turned down for unpaid internships; who have vast amounts of student debt to repay as they continue in jobs as baby sitters and waiters. 


But employers say they will hire 10.2 percent more college graduates from the class of 2012 than they did from the class of 2011, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.


Nuggets of news like this are welcome as the economy fitfully recovers. Even so, joblessness among the young remains at crisis levels, economists say. In April, the unemployment rate for workers under age 25 was 16.4 percent, compared with 8.1 percent over all.


Those with only some college, or with high school degrees or less, are the worst off. But “every way you cut it — by race or gender, with or without a college degree — young people are just not getting the job opportunities they need, and it will have a lasting impact on their careers,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist who studies the labor market at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.


No one wants to see millions of young people sitting idle. So what can be done? Can policies and programs be created to channel them into full-time jobs?


Those questions are entangled in certain truths about the political process. Teachers have the American Federation of Teachers. Gun owners have the N.R.A. The older population has AARP. But where are the advocacy groups for jobless youth?


They are coming. Two movements have sprouted to fight for this generation’s right to move out of the parental basement (or avoid it altogether): the Campaign for Young America and Fix Young America.


In a way, they are the younger siblings of Occupy Wall Street, but with a nonpartisan agenda, more centralized leadership and one specific mission: to help young people find jobs.


“Occupy represented this bottled-up energy and frustration — it was the manifestation that our generation will not be able to reach the American dream,” said Aaron Smith, 30, co-founder of Young Invincibles, a nonprofit group based in Washington that is the force behind the Campaign for Young America. “Now we are trying to harness that energy into something tangible.”


The Campaign for Young America is in the midst of a 21-state bus tour that is set to conduct 100 round tables with young people, Occupy Wall Street protesters, community leaders and entrepreneurs. “One thing we are really focused on is trying to better connect colleges and universities to local employers,” Mr. Smith said. Later this year, the group will endorse specific policy recommendations based on input during the round tables, and host candidate forums, he said.


Fix Young America is supported by members of the nonprofit Young Entrepreneur Council, based in New York. (Officially the new group has a hashtag in front of its name, to reflect its presence on Twitter.)


The group assembled more than two-dozen people — including Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, Representative Patrick McHenry, Republican of North Carolina, university leaders and entrepreneurs — to offer prescriptions for solving youth unemployment.


The ideas were required to have a track record. “Anyone and their mother could come up with ideas, but what we wanted to do with Fix Young America was to get the strongest voices in the room, the ones who showed there was proof in the pudding,” said Scott Gerber, 28, founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council and Fix Young America.


The solutions will be published Wednesday in a book. Mr. Smith, for one, wrote a chapter advocating student loan forgiveness for entrepreneurs who start businesses that create jobs.


Another solution was proposed by Zach Sims, whose chapter focuses on teaching young people JavaScript, the computer programming language. “There are a limited number of things you can do with an English degree,” said Mr. Sims, 21, co-founder of Codecademy, a free Web site that teaches programming and coding. “Coding skills are such a clear path to employment, regardless of your background.”


Mr. Sims suggests teaching coding nationally via sites like Codecademy and creating partnerships with high schools, colleges and local government. He wants to start a “national programming movement” and recently formed a partnership with the White House for a summer program to teach coding to underprivileged youth.


OTHER Fix Young America solutions have already been road-tested on a state level. Senator Wyden’s idea is to expand the Self-Employment Assistance Program, an obscure government program that allows laid-off people to collect unemployment benefits while they start a business. (Regular unemployment insurance requires that a recipient actively search for work.)


Senator Wyden says the program, which is optional and used only by a handful of states, is one way to unstack the deck against young people.