COVID-19 Impact on NYC's Youth

The pandemic's greatest health impact has fallen on older New Yorkers, but its economic effects are being deeply felt by the city's young adults. 

New York City faces its worst economy in decades. The fate of the city's disconnected youth, people aged 16 to 24, who are both out of work and out of school is bleak.

The number of young people who are both out of school and jobless in New York City -- so-called "disconnected youth" -- has likely doubled since the coronavirus roiled the city beginning last spring, according to a new report from the city's Disconnected Youth Task Force.

The task force, which was created by City Council legislation in 2017 and appointed by Mayor de Blasio and Council Speaker Corey Johnson, found that while 1 in 8 New Yorkers between the ages of 16 and 24 were “disconnected” in 2018, the number is likely closer to 1 in 4 now. This means that about 25% of New Yorkers between 16 and 24 years old are out of work and out of school.

The Disconnected Youth Task Force was intended to look at the myriad forces driving youth unemployment and academic disengagement and offer recommendations to inform city policy. The report focuses on prevention and reengagement. Meaning, preventing youth from dropping out of school and career pathways, and reengaging those who do.

While this ‘disconnection’ had fallen throughout the previous decade, new problems have emerged and estimates suggest that job losses from the current economic crisis exceed the number of jobs created since the Great Recession in 2008.

Disconnected young-adult New Yorkers are predominantly Black and Latino and are overrepresented in low-income areas with the Bronx accounting for the largest share of the five boroughs, according to the much-delayed report released last week.

The pandemic has exacerbated the problem: "Young adults who held jobs before COVID-19 are disproportionately likely to have fallen out of work in the months since then, as the economic sectors most likely to employ them—food service, hospitality, retail—have been among the hardest hit," wrote First Deputy Mayor J. Phillip Thompson, who chaired the task force, in an op-ed recapping the report, including new city plans to address these challenges.

The upended economy and the shift to remote work and school has created a parallel matriculation and drop-out problem, with thousands of New Yorkers leaving their college degrees unfinished or failing to enroll altogether after being accepted in 2020.

The experience of being out-of-school and out-of-work in adolescence leads to lower earnings, diminished homeownership rates, and worse health outcomes later in life, the report states.

Along with the report released last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a number of programs to engage and connect young people to school and job pathways. Among them is an initiative to support the enrollment of 5,000 recent high school graduates who have accepted offers from CUNY but never matriculated. The mayor also unveiled a number of apprenticeship and training programs through entities and agencies like CUNY, the Department of Youth and Community Development, and the Administration for Children's Services.

"The report of the Disconnected Youth Task Force provides policymakers the clearest picture yet of who our OSOW [out of school, out of work] young adults are, where we are delivering them effective services and where we must do better, and a comprehensive strategy to help every young New Yorker toward career success,” Thompson said in a statement.

The task force calls for the engagement of disconnected youth to be made a central component of the city's COVID-19 response, prioritizing them in contact tracing and other projects fueled by federal stimulus money.

It also recommends career readiness programs, like the mayor's 2019 CareerReady NYC initiative, be integrated and given more emphasis in middle school and high school.

The most overriding recommendation is perhaps the call to create a single office or position in city government responsible for work related to engaging disconnected youth, which would ameliorate current efforts described in the report as "disjointed and unfocused."

The Disconnected Youth Task Force is going to continue monitoring the city's progress toward the goals outlined in its report and the de Blasio administration plans to reconvene its members over the next couple of months.

The administration did not say how much new city or private funding will go to the programs.  

For more info visit the NYC website.   

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Reposted with permission and full article on Gotham Gazette.

Original article written by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette Read more by this writer.