Opportunity Youth Data Guide: 2022

January 2022

 For the past decade, many research and programmatic efforts at the Cowen Institute have focused on supporting opportunity youth, a term for young people aged 16-24 who are neither working nor enrolled in an educational institution. Our research has shown that New Orleans has a higher proportion of opportunity youth than the U.S. as a whole — in 2018, 15.5% of youth were disconnected in Orleans Parish, compared to 11.2% nationally. Louisiana also has one of the highest rates of opportunity youth of any state in the nation — 16.4% of youth in Louisiana are opportunity youth. Research has found that many opportunity youth come from low-income households, and experience unpredictable housing, lack of health insurance, and unreliable transportation and that can impede their efforts to find stable employment. This brief uses American Community Survey (ACS) census data from 2019.