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Disconnected Youth
About This Indicator
What Is Disconnected Youth?
The share of Americans ages 16 to 24 who are neither enrolled in school nor working, from the Current Population Survey, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics runs every month. Each year averages its school-year months, since students on summer break would otherwise count as out of school. Since 1994.
Why Does It Matter?
The years from 16 to 24 are when most people gain the schooling and first jobs that shape the rest of their working lives. Long stretches out of both are linked to lower pay and more joblessness years later, costs that reach families, towns, and taxpayers as well as the young people themselves.
Can Politics Influence It?
Through the job market, which recessions squeeze hardest for the young, and through school funding, job training, apprenticeships, and college aid. Most schooling decisions are made by states and school districts.
Key Idea
It counts young parents at home with children and people too ill or disabled to work alongside those simply adrift, so a rise does not always mean idleness. But it also catches young people who have stopped looking for work, whom the unemployment rate, which counts only those still looking, leaves out.
Scored: A Fall Ranks Better
Source: BLS. Current Population Survey: LNU00023016, LNU02023016, and LNU00022967.
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