PHILADELPHIA — Ryan Fontana beat Stanley Joseph into this world by two weeks. Both are 26, both live in Philadelphia, and both graduated from college in 2007, just as the economy slid into the Great Recession.

Both are also in the world of technology, but Fontana has an apartment in Society Hill and a job at a hip company with headquarters in a converted church in a trendy neighborhood.

Joseph, an unemployed network administrator and tech-support person, who lives with his parents, spends his time looking for work and building a server to keep his skills sharp.

It would be nice to think that technology and the myriad categories of jobs that go with it would be enough to save people in their 20s from the huge toll unemployment is taking on their generation.

But for Fontana’s ability to straddle marketing and the digital world, he might be in Joseph’s place.

Young workers in the region lost their jobs at about three times the rate of all workers from the recession’s start in 2007 until 2010, the most recent data available. Meanwhile, workers 55 and older gained jobs.

“Across the board, kids have lost more than their share,” said Paul Harrington, director of Drexel University’s Center for Labor Markets and Policy.

Philadelphia’s story

When the U.S. Labor Department released its March jobs report, and the news remained grim. The unemployment rate for the nation’s youngest workers, aged 16 to 24, was 16.4 percent in March, double the nation’s rate of 8.2 percent, with 3.5 million unemployed. Of the 3.5 million, two million were aged 20 to 24 — an unemployment rate of 13.2 percent.

While Philadelphia’s tech sector is expanding — with jobs in cybersecurity, search-engine optimization, and product development, it is far from replacing the factory jobs that once allowed the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce to proudly describe the city as “The World’s Greatest Workshop.”

“When I write about runaway successes, those are companies with 150 employees,” said Christopher Wink, 26, who follows technology as editor of the online news site Technically Philly. “But you need a lot of them to get to the 300,000 (manufacturing) jobs” that once employed so many in the city.

“It’s the big missing piece of the … puzzle,” Wink said. “We have a lot of small shops, but where are the runaway successes with 3,000 employees?”

Indeed, where are the jobs for young people such as Stanley Joseph, graduate of Pennsylvania State University, where he majored in communication and minored in information technology?

Or for Kimberly Larned, 23, a Rowan University graduate with great grades and good internships in human resources, who is changing price tags at her local supermarket?

A grim outlook

In some ways, the problems affecting young people are the problems affecting all. The recession is officially over, but the recovery remains nearly jobless, leaving a deficit of more than 10 million jobs lost or not created since the recession began in 2007.

Not only has the country failed to recover those jobs, but entry-level positions have especially taken a hit.

Areas that typically welcome young workers — teaching, office work, manufacturing, and construction — have seen first-rung jobs evaporate.

Here’s a window into the trend: Job postings for entry-level positions fell 49 percent between the fourth quarter of 2007, when the recession began, and the fourth quarter of 2011, as employers filled the few openings they had with experienced workers, according to Beyond.com, a company that runs online job boards.

Beginning jobs in many fields also tend to be the ones most readily shipped abroad or overtaken by automation. (Think online banking, factory robots, or self-service checkout at the supermarket.)

‘Caught in the middle’

“When a job is repetitious or rule-based, some smart engineer can devise some kind of algorithm to handle the work, sharply reducing the need for people with high school diplomas or less,” said Drexel’s Harrington.

“This 10- to 15-year period is a wrenching transition to a new economy, and young people are caught in the middle,” said Carl Van Horn, director of the John Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

The situation has “gotten worse for people without a high school degree,” Van Horn said.

The youngest members of the workforce — including high school graduates and dropouts — aged 16 to 19, are in a particularly rough spot. One in four are jobless, the U.S. Labor Department reported.

To be sure, many young people are getting hired. It’s just that there aren’t enough jobs for all of them.

The March monthly jobs report showed increased hiring, but job growth isn’t keeping pace with previous losses.