Citation URL: http://www.urban.org/PaulOffner

By several recent counts, the United States is home to 2 to 3 million youth age 16 through 24 who are out of school and out of work Much has been written on disadvantaged youth, and government policy has gone through many incarnations, yet questions remain unanswered. Why are so many young people “disconnected,” and what can public policy do about it? And why has disconnection become more common for young men—particularly African-American men and low-income men—than for young women? In Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men, Edelman, Holzer, and Offner offer analysis and policy prescriptions to solve this growing crisis. They carefully examine field programs and research studies and recommend specific strategies to enhance education, training, and employment opportunities for disadvantaged youth; to improve the incentives of less-skilled young workers to accept employment; and to address the severe barriers and disincentives faced by some youth, such as ex-offenders and noncustodial fathers. The result is a clear guidebook for policymakers, and an important distillation for anyone interested in the plight of today’s disconnected youth. With a foreword by Hugh Price, former President and CEO, National Urban League

In this paper, we document the continuing decline in employment and labor force participation of black men between the ages of 16 and 34 who have a high school education or less. We explore the extent to which these trends can be accounted for in recent years by two fairly new developments: (1) The dramatic growth in the number of young black men who have been incarcerated; and (2) strengthened enforcement of child support policies. We use micro-level data from the Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Groups (CPS-ORG), along with state-level data over time on incarceration rates and child support enforcement, to test these hypotheses. Our results indicate that post-incarceration effects and child support policies both contribute to the decline in employment activity among young black less-educated men in the past two decades, especially among those age 25-34.

The problems of teenage parents were high among the concerns of the drafters of the 1996 welfare reform law, as a result of which several provisions targeted to this group were added to the legislation. Surprisingly, however, there has been little effort to determine how welfare reform has affected teenagers. This paper attempts to address that need. In particular, it seeks to answer three questions: first, how did implementation of the 1996 reforms affect school attendance among teenage parents/teenagers; second, how did it affect living arrangements; and third, how did it affect out-of-wedlock fertility.

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