Measure of America, a project of the Social Science Research Council, aims to breathe life into numbers, using data to foster understanding of our shared challenges and support for people-centered policies. We care about human development—the process of building people’s capabilities, improving their well-being, and expanding their opportunities to live freely chosen lives of value.Young adulthood is when people develop many of the capabilities required to live a good life: knowledge and credentials, social skills and networks, a sense of mastery and agency, an understanding of one’s strengths and preferences, and the ability to handle stressful events and regulate one’s emotions, to name just a few. Measure of America is thus concerned with youth disconnection because it impedes human development, closing off some of life’s most rewarding and joyful paths and leading to a future of limited horizons.Disconnected youth are young people between the ages of 16 and 24 who are not in school and not working. The youth disconnection rate tells us a lot about the opportunities available to teens and young adults from different racial and ethnic groups and in different parts of the country. Understanding who disconnected youth are, the challenges they face, and where they live is the first step to helping them. Doing so is critical for all of us. Youth disconnection’s harms accrue not only to young people themselves, but also to society at large. Society pays a price in terms of reduced competitiveness, lower tax revenues, and higher health, social services, and criminal justice costs, to name just a few. How are young people faring differently based on gender, race and ethnicity, and geography? After reaching an historic low point in 2019 at 10.7 percent, the youth disconnection rate spiked from 2020-2021 but has now nearly returned to the 2019 rate, at 10.9 percent in 2022. The picture below the national level is more complicated, however. Four things stand out: first, stubborn gaps continue to separate racial and ethnic groups at the national, state, and metro area levels; second, though girls and young women have lower disconnection rates than boys and young men at the national level, in many places and among certain demographic groups, the female disconnection rate is higher than the male rate, a fact that gets too little attention; third, considerable variation exists among states and metro areas, with rates ranging from below 7 percent in greater Chattanooga, Boston, and Minneapolis-St. Paul to above 16 percent in Memphis, Bakersfield, and the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission metro area of Texas; and fourth, places differ sharply in terms of the progress made over the last decade. The maps and graphs below allow you to explore the latest youth disconnection data for yourself. What’s happening in your metro area? How are different racial and ethnic groups faring in your state? Which places were most- and least-impacted by the pandemic? Find out!
YOUTH DISCONNECTION
NATIONALLY
Disconnected youth are young people between the ages of 16 and 24 who are not in school and not working. Here in the United States, organizations that work with this population began to use the term ”opportunity youth” in 2012, a term coined by the White House Council for Community Solutions. Internationally, the most commonly used term to describe this population is “NEETs,” an acronym that stands for “not in employment, education, or training.”
The 2022 youth disconnection rate is 10.9 percent, or 4,343,600 young people. The 2022 figure is an improvement on the 2021 rate, 12.1 percent, and has nearly returned to the 2019 rate of 10.7 percent. Over the last decade, we clocked a steady decline in the national youth disconnection rate as the country recovered from the Great Recession, a sharp upward spike in 2020 caused by Covid-19, and a return in 2022 to near-prepandemic levels: from 2012 to 2022, the youth disconnection rate declined by a whopping 22.7 percent.
BREAKDOWN BY RACE & ETHNICITY & BY GENDER
The youth disconnection rate varies by race and ethnicity and by gender; Native Americans have the highest rate, 21.9 percent, Asians the lowest, 6.2 percent.
CONTRASTING PROFILES: CONNECTED VS. DISCONNECTED YOUTH
Who are disconnected youth? Young people both not working and not in school. This definition captures the categorical difference between disconnected and connected young people, but the two groups differ in many ways that go beyond their current employment and educational status. For example, disconnected women are more than four times as likely to be mothers as connected women.Explore more differences between connected youth and disconnected youth.
A DEEPER DIVE ON YOUTH WITH A DISABILITY
Disability is not a monolithic category. The American Community Survey, the source for our disconnected youth calculations, asks six questions about difficulties a person may have with physical or mental activities. If the answer to any one of the six following questions is yes, the person is categorized as having a disability:
Self-care difficulty: Does this person have difficulty dressing or bathing?
Hearing difficulty: Is this person deaf or does he or she have serious difficulty hearing?
Vision difficulty: Is this person blind or does he or she have serious difficulty seeing even when wearing glasses?
Independent-living difficulty: Because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, does this person have difficulty doing errands alone, such as visiting a doctor’s office or shopping?
Ambulatory difficulty: Does this person have serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs?
Cognitive difficulty: Because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, does this person have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions?
Each respondent with a disability could report anywhere between one and six of these types of difficulties. Disconnected youth with disabilities are twice as likely to have three or more types of difficulties, greatly compounding their challenges. A striking finding is that the share of all young people with at least one disability increased sharply between 2019 and 2022. In 2019, 6.7 percent of young adults ages 16–24 had a disability; in 2022, 8.6 percent of young adults did: 3,414,800 young adults.
Disconnected YouthConnected Youth
Three or more difficulties
Two
One
YOUTH DISCONNECTION
BY STATE
Young people are disconnected at rates that range from 4.4 percent in North Dakota to over twice that in others, with Mississippi, Louisiana, and New Mexico facing the greatest challenges. Click a state to see how its youth disconnection rate has changed since 2008.
15.5%
11.9%
10.8%
9.7%
7.9%
4.4%
BREAKDOWN BY RACE & ETHNICITY
The youth disconnection rate for white youth is lower than the rate for Black youth in every state for which data are available.
26.4%
16.5%
13.3%
11.0%
8.6%
4.4%
YOUTH DISCONNECTION
BY CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT
In the country’s congressional districts, youth disconnection ranges from 3.7 percent in Wisconsin District 2, covering Madison and the southwestern part of the state, to 21.1 percent in Kentucky District 5, in the southeastern part of the state.
21.1%
13.5%
11.5%
9.8%
8.2%
3.7%
YOUTH DISCONNECTION
BY METRO AREA
In the country’s 99 most-populous metro areas, youth disconnection ranges from 6.6 percent in greater Chattanooga, Tennessee to 18.5 percent in the McAllen, Edinburg, Mission, Texas metro area.
18.5%
12.5%
10.9%
9.3%
8.4%
6.6%
YOUTH DISCONNECTION
BY NEIGHBORHOOD CLUSTER
Generally speaking, differences in youth disconnection rates within metro areas are much greater than the differences between them; this section explores these differences using a geographical unit called Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs), which we colloquially refer to as "neighborhood clusters." PUMAs are areas defined by the US Census Bureau; there are roughly 2,400 nationwide and they have populations of at least 100,000 people. The Census Bureau divides large counties into many PUMAs; LA County, for instance, has 69 PUMAs. And the Bureau combines sparsely populated counties, creating new geographies with sufficiently large populations to allow for calculation of the youth disconnection rate. For instance, Arizona’s Navajo and Apache Counties are joined together in a single PUMA, as are Wyoming’s Sheridan, Park, Teton, Lincoln, and Big Horn Counties. Measure of America's PUMA calculations provided first-ever published rates for communities across the country, starting with our 2019 report on youth disconnection, Making the Connection. The data featured here are from 2017-2021.
YOUTH DISCONNECTION
BY COUNTY
Measure of America has not yet obtained a custom data tabulation from the US Census Bureau required to update this section, which currently displays 2016–2020 data.The highest county rate is found in East Carroll Parish, Louisiana, 80.1 percent, followed by 74.8 percent in Hancock County, Georgia, and 69.6 percent in Stewart County, Georgia. As you can see from the gray parts of the map, many counties have populations that are too small for reliable youth disconnection estimates. In such cases, refer to the PUMA map above, which shows values for groups of small counties.
80.1%
21.1%
15.8%
12.6%
9.7%
1.4%
BREAKDOWN BY RURAL / URBAN AREA
Rural counties have a youth disconnection rate of 17.3 percent, on average, compared to 11.2 percent in urban centers and 9.9 percent in suburbs. These data were last updated in 2021 as part of Measure of America's update report A Decade Undone, which uses 2019 data.
YOUTH DISCONNECTION
METHODOLOGICAL NOTE
The youth disconnection rates above are Measure of America calculations of data from the US Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey. State, congressional district, and metro area data are from 2022. Time series data are one-year estimates from the relevant year. County data are from 2016–2020 and Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA) data are from 2017-2021. Read the full methodological note here.The metro areas featured above, officially called Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), are designated by the White House Office of Management and Budget. The full names of MSAs as well as maps of their boundaries are available here.If you want to understand more about youth disconnection, read our latest report, Broad Recovery, Persistent Inequity: Youth Disconnection in America. This report features the latest opportunity youth data.
TAKE THE YOUTH DISCONNECTION
QUIZ
CREDITS
Site designed by Laura Laderman, in partnership with Humantific, who provided key visual language and design elements.
connected youth and 
disconnected youth.