ONE IN SIX YOUNG PEOPLE IN NYC IS "DISCONNECTED" --
THEY ARE NEITHER ATTENDING SCHOOL NOR WORKING
CSS' Latest Report Defines The Challenge Facing Mayor Bloomberg's New Vocational And Job Initiatives

Full Report

New York, NY - January 19, 2005 - A new report released today by the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), a nonpartisan, not-for-profit, antipoverty organization, reveals that 16 percent of New York City's 16 through 24-year-olds are neither enrolled in school nor participating in the labor market. These nearly 170,000 young people are "disconnected."

In Out of School, Out of Work...Out of Luck? New York City's Disconnected Youth, CSS tracks school enrollment and labor force participation trends since the late 1980s. It also explores disparities between gender, race, and ethnic groups. The city's African-American and Hispanic youth, it finds, are twice as likely as Whites and Asians to be out of school and out of work. Prior CSS research has documented a "crisis of Black male employment" in New York City, finding that just over half of Black men
(16 through 64 years of age) were employed in 2003. There is a connection between the low rates of jobholding among the city's Black men and the high rates of disconnection afflicting New York's Black youth.

Mark Levitan, CSS Senior Labor Market Policy Analyst and the author of both reports, states, "To be disconnected is to be in danger. Young people with large blank spaces in their resumes are likely to experience long bouts of joblessness and earn lower wages throughout their lives. We need to do more to keep kids in school and we have to make greater efforts to connect out of school youth to jobs."

The study's key findings are:

The disconnected rate of 16.2 percent for young men in New York City is twice that of males nationally (7.7 percent).

Trends over time for the city's male and female youth are markedly divergent. Young women have made substantial gains, mostly as a result of higher school enrollment. The proportion of disconnected female youth has plunged by nearly 10 percentage points since the mid-1990s. By contrast, the disconnected rate for young men is as high as it has been since the end of the 1980s.

The disconnected rate for New York City's youth is higher than the nation's because of the low labor market participation rate among our out of school youth. The labor force participation rate for New York's males is 68.3 percent, compared to 85.2 percent for male youth nationally. The difference in labor force participation is not as large for young women, 65.8 percent in New York against 73.3 percent nationally.
Among both males and females, African American and Latino youth have much higher disconnected rates than do Non-Hispanic Whites and Asians. The differences are greatest among males, where, in 2000, Black (16.6 percent) and Hispanic (16.0 percent) disconnection rates were twice those of Whites (7.6 percent) and Asians (7.3 percent). But the very highest disconnection rate was for Hispanic females (20.5 percent).

Implications for Public Policy:

Education matters. According to the report, high school dropouts account for about half of the city's disconnected youth.

"CSS has been working vigorously to get vocational education and job creation on the public agenda," said CSS President David R. Jones. "The mayor's new vocational education initiative and his proposal to create a construction industry opportunity commission are welcome, positive steps. Given the magnitude of the problems as the current report documents, it will be important that the scale and scope of these initiatives is large enough to make a real difference," stated Jones.

Although strategic thinking about disconnected youth must start with the schools, educational initiatives cannot do the job alone. The three CSS proposals outlined below focus on employment opportunities.

Open Apprenticeship Opportunities in the Construction Industry: The mayor's new Construction Opportunity Council should establish a "pre-apprenticeship" program that can serve as a pipeline into the industry for young people who lack the academic or other qualifications to gain admission into traditional apprenticeship programs.

Expand the Apprenticeship Model to New Industries: Policy makers should look beyond the construction trades to create apprenticeship programs in other industries.

Establish a New York City Job Corps: Public service or transitional jobs offer a time-limited, wage-paying job to people who do not yet have the capacity to secure employment in the unsubsidized labor market.

Data for this report was derived from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey and the U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 Census.

For over 150 years, CSS, an independent, nonprofit organization, has tackled the complex issues of poverty by applying our experience through three mutually supportive approaches. We advocate for the poor and underserved; research and shape public policy affecting them; and provide direct services that improve their quality of life.

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