Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The late teens and early twenties are a critical time in an individual’s life, as educational, employment and life decisions made during this period have a long-term impact on one’s future career and life trajectory. For this reason, practitioners and policymakers have recently become more focused on opportunity youth—individuals between the ages of 16 and 24 who are neither employed nor enrolled in school—because these youth are understood to be at higher risk than their more connected peers. Furthermore, a high presence of opportunity youth can also contribute to broader social problems, as opportunity youth are more likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors such as criminal activities. Practitioners and policymakers view improved circumstances for opportunity youth to reconnect as a means to improve life outcomes for at-risk youth, and to help build a healthier community and save taxpayer money over the long-term.

However, due to lack of data, previous studies have not been successful in identifying the neighborhoods in which opportunity youth live, --which is a critical prerequisite to designing and implementing place-based policy. We develop a simple, yet powerful, method to locate opportunity youth at the census tract level. As census tract level data do not provide separate labor force participation rates for those who are enrolled in school and those who are not, we obtain these numbers at the PUMA (Public Use Microdata Area) or City level for each race and ethnic groups using IPUMs (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series). We then calculate the population weighted average of the labor force participation rate for those who are not in school by each census tract. Together with the census tract unemployment rate, we use this information to estimate the number of opportunity youth for each census tract. To check the robustness of our estimation we aggregate the number of opportunity youth at the census tract level and assess whether it matches the total number of opportunity youth at larger geographies.

Using the opportunity youth estimates, we further examine how the availability of jobs for opportunity youth differs across geographies. We conduct a case study comparison of the City of Los Angeles and the Coachella Valley of California, which is a relatively rural desert geography located approximately two hours southeast of Los Angeles. Positioned within similar regional and policymaking contexts, these two geographies offer a means to investigate whether conditions faced by opportunity youth differ between urban and rural settings, including potential jobs for opportunity youth, resource deficits, and barriers to accessing those jobs. Our findings will not only provide baseline information to track opportunity youth in smaller geographies, but also help practitioners and policymakers to develop effective strategies to help youth who need support. Furthermore, this analysis will contribute to a deeper understanding of how opportunity varies across geographic contexts.