Broad Recovery, Persistent Inequity: Youth Disconnection in America
LAUNCHED OCTOBER 31, 2024
FULL REPORT | INTERACTIVE TOOL
For a dozen years, we have charted the highs and lows of youth disconnection in America. 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. The 2022 national youth disconnection rate is 10.9 percent, or 4,343,600 disconnected youth—this rate represents a near-return to the pre-Covid rate of 10.7 percent in 2019. Despite the sharp-but-temporary pandemic-driven uptick in 2020 and 2021, the rate fell 22.7 percent between 2012 and 2022.
Broad Recovery, Persistent Inequity: Youth Disconnection in America is the latest in Measure of America’s series of annual reports on teens and young adults ages 16–24 years who are neither working nor in school, a group referred to as disconnected youth or opportunity youth. The youth disconnection rate is a vital metric of access to opportunity and societal well-being. People acquire skills, credentials, habits, and experiences fundamental to a rewarding, productive, and joyous life during their teens and early twenties. The youth disconnection rate thus tells us which young people in our society have the chance to lay the groundwork for freely chosen, flourishing lives and which groups face serious challenges in the transition to adulthood. Research shows that being disconnected as a young person has long-term consequences; it’s associated with lower earnings, less education, worse health, and even less happiness in later adulthood. Determining who remains disconnected, and why, is vital to identifying strategies and interventions, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This year, 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.
Broad Recovery, Persistent Inequity presents 2022 youth disconnection rates for the United States as a whole as well as by gender, race and ethnicity, region, state, metro area, and congressional district. The report also offers recommendations on how to better serve out-of-school and out-of-work young people.
KEY FINDINGS
- National rate: The 2022 youth disconnection rate is 10.9 percent, or 4,343,600 young people.
- Changes in Enrollment and Employment: During the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise in the disconnection rate between 2019 and 2021 was accompanied by a decrease in both educational enrollment and employment. In 2022, as the youth disconnection rate returned to nearly pre-pandemic levels, enrollment and employment are on different trajectories: the increase in employment is the mirror image of the decline in disconnection, even as school enrollment continues to decline at a similar rate to the years during the peak of the pandemic.
- Gender: As in past years, girls and young women at the national level are less likely to be disconnected than boys and young men, 10.6 percent versus 11.2 percent. The size and direction of the gender gap varies by race and ethnicity and by place, however.
- Race and ethnicity: More than one in five Native American teens and young adults are neither working nor in school. The Native American youth disconnection rate is 21.9 percent, the highest of the United States’ six major racial and ethnic groups. Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander (NHOPI) teens and young adults have the second-highest disconnection rate, 19.4 percent, or 15,000 young people. NHOPI young people have the largest gender gap in the youth disconnection rate of any racial or ethnic group—16.3 percent for NHOPI boys and young men, compared to 22.7 percent for their female counterparts. The disconnection rate for Black young people is 16.8 percent, or 871,300 young people. About one in five opportunity youth are Black. The Latino youth disconnection rate stands at 12.8 percent, or 1,224,800 young people. As in past years, Latina girls and young women were slightly more likely than their male counterparts to be disconnected, 13.44 percent versus 12.2 percent. The disconnection rate for white teens and young adults is 8.9 percent, the second-lowest rate. White teens and young adults make up the largest absolute number of opportunity youth, 1,797,700 people. Asian teens and young adults have the lowest disconnection rate, 6.2 percent, or 133,200 young people. Rates vary widely by Asian subgroup, however, from a low of 4.8 percent for Korean young people to a high of 17.6 percent for Cambodian young people.
- Regions: The West South Central region, which comprises Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas, has the highest disconnection rate of any region in the United States, 13.1 percent. The New England region has the lowest disconnection rate of all US regions, 8.4 percent; it is home to 6 states: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
- States: North Dakota has the lowest youth disconnection rate (4.4 percent), followed by Nebraska (6.4 percent) and Washington, DC (6.9 percent). Louisiana has the highest rate (15.5 percent), followed by Mississippi (15.4 percent) and New Mexico (15.3 percent).
- Metro areas: Chattanooga, TN-GA (6.6 percent), boasts the lowest youth disconnection rate of the 100 most populous metro areas in the country, followed closely by Minneapolis–St. Paul–Bloomington, MN-WI and Boston-Cambridge-Newton MA-NH (both 6.7 percent). The highest youth disconnection rate can be found in McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, TX (18.5 percent), followed by Bakersfield-Delano, CA (17.2 percent), and Memphis, TN-MS-AR (16.5 percent).
- Congressional districts: Wisconsin’s 2nd Congressional District, which includes which includes state capital Madison and its surrounding suburbs and towns as well as the University of Wisconsin, has the lowest youth disconnection rate, 3.7 percent. Kentucky’s 5th Congressional District, which which encompasses rural Appalachia’s Southeastern Kentucky, is home to the highest youth disconnection rate, 21.1 percent.
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