Understanding Disconnection Among American Youth

In today’s economy, a successful transition from adolescence to adulthood typically requires education, training, and entry into the labor force. The U.S. labor market has transformed substantially over the past five decades, influenced by advances in technology, globalization, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and other factors. Yet this fundamental work-based pathway to achieving middle-class status and economic prosperity remains unchanged (see, e.g., Becker, 1980; Carnevale, Smith, and Strohl, 2020; Coleman, 1972; Murnane and Levy, 1996).

About one in seven young people aged 18 to 24 report not being engaged in school, training, or work.^[1] This group of nearly 4.2 million disconnected youth is unlikely to be on a path toward economic prosperity.^[2] Experiencing disconnection has enormous costs for the individual and for broader society; disconnected young people forego more than $12,000 per year in earnings in the short term and are expected to earn less throughout their working lives than those who have not experienced disconnection. The total costs to society from a young person’s disconnection throughout their youth can be as high as $1 million (in 2025 dollars), including lost earnings, lost tax revenues, and other costs (Belfield, Levin, and Rosen, 2012).

Previous research shows that young people in rural areas, African American young people, and young men are more likely than others to be disconnected, as are young people who do not complete high school (Burd-Sharps and Lewis, 2018; Lewis, 2021; Lewis et al., 2024). Rates of disconnection are also higher in some regions in the South and Midwest. Reeves (2022) demonstrates a variety of ways in which young men lag behind their female peers in educational settings; he notes that these differences are largest for African American and Hispanic boys.

Most research describes rates of disconnection at a single point in time and contrasts the rates among different groups (e.g., men versus women, African American versus Hispanic youth). In contrast, MaCurdy et al. (2024) used panel data to track the duration of disconnection and control for multiple characteristics at once; they found that more than half of spells last longer than one year, and about 10 percent last at least four years. However, their analysis measured disconnection in the period prior to the Great Recession; most of these data were collected more than two decades ago.

In this paper, we focus on disconnected youth aged 18 to 24; we use the American Community Survey (ACS) to learn more about this population and to examine key subgroups.^[3] Given the current conversation on the particular disadvantages faced by boys and young men, we examine disconnection rates of young men and young women separately. This paper will be of interest to researchers and policymakers developing or working on programs designed to improve the transition out of high school, as well as programs that focus on reconnecting youth with education, training, or employment.

We make several contributions. First, we reconsider the traditional definition of disconnection; we exclude young mothers from our analyses, as many appear to be caring for young children. Second, we use recent data to understand disconnection rates in the period that includes the COVID-19 pandemic and the post-pandemic recovery. Third, we consider young men and young women separately, and we examine multiple subgroups within each of these groups (e.g., by race/ethnicity, citizenship, and education status).

We begin with a discussion of who should be considered disconnected.

Disconnected Youth: Who Is Included?

Disconnected youth are young people who are not working for pay and are not in school. This definition, which is used broadly—including by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the U.S. Census Bureau, and other organizations—is appealing, as it simplifies questions of how to measure rates of disconnection. But applying such a bright-line standard means that individuals working even a handful of hours per week for very low wages or taking a single college class are not considered disconnected, whereas those caring for their own children or other family members on a full-time basis but doing no paid work are considered disconnected. Thus, disconnected youth include groups with very different experiences but exclude young people who may be only marginally attached to school or work. We argue that assuming that all disconnected young people will respond to the same policy interventions—while excluding others who work or attend school sporadically—could lead to ineffective policies. Therefore, we focus on several distinct groups of disconnected youth, and we include a short discussion of those who are marginally connected to school or employment.

Disconnected groups vary in size and experiences. About 7 percent of young women, or 1.25 million women nationwide, are mothers. Of these, more than 40 percent are classified as disconnected. The largest group of these young mothers consists of unmarried mothers; unmarried mothers are far more likely to report living with their parents or other relatives or roommates than to report living with a partner.^[4] These young women appear to be engaged in caring for children rather than in searching for work or completing their education; they meet the definition of disconnected because the work they do is unpaid. All of this suggests that “disconnected” young women with children have very different experiences from disconnected young people who are not engaged in any activities. At a minimum, it is likely that these women will benefit from policies and programs that are different from those that will benefit other disconnected young people. For this reason, we exclude young mothers from the rest of our analysis; a future paper will describe their experiences in more detail.

In addition to 4.2 million disconnected youth, about 3.1 million young people report being employed, not taking part in school or training, and earning below the federal poverty level ($15,060 in 2024); this equates to these individuals earning less than $300 per week and less than $7.25 per hour if they are working full-time.^[5] About 50 percent of individuals in this group earn less than half the federal poverty limit. Although they do not meet the technical definition of disconnection, individuals in this group are likely not earning enough to put them on the path to prosperity. They, too, may benefit from programs or policies designed for disconnected youth, as long as they are not excluded because of employment status. Examining this group in more detail, and comparing and contrasting their experiences with those of disconnected youth, is an important avenue for future research.

Patterns of Disconnection Vary Between Young Women and Young Men

In Figure 1, we present overall rates of disconnection by age, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, and other key demographic characteristics. For each group, we present these rates separately for men and women, excluding young mothers. The light blue bars represent the rate of disconnection among young women; the magenta bars represent the rate among young men. As shown by the first two bars, young men have somewhat higher rates of disconnection than young women overall.^[6] To make comparisons straightforward, the dotted lines indicate the average rates for young men and young women. Figure 1 shows that disconnection varies by race/ethnicity, citizenship, education levels, disability status, marital and family status, veteran status, and the overall rate of disconnection found in the community. Many of these differences are larger than the overall difference between men and women.

Some of these findings accord with previous studies (such as Belfield, Levin, and Rosen, 2012; Burd-Sharps and Lewis, 2018; Lewis, 2021; and Lewis et al., 2024) that reported rates by sex, race/ethnicity, and, in some cases, region. We, too, find that African American, Hispanic, and Native American/Alaska Native youth have higher rates of disconnection than do Asian or non-Hispanic White youth. African American men have especially high rates of disconnection, as do men and women who indicate that they are Native American or Alaska Native. Previous research also shows that young people who lack a high school diploma experience high rates of disconnection (Belfield, Levin, and Rosen, 2012).

Previous research has not typically focused on citizenship status, disability status, veteran status, or the relationship between community factors and youth disconnection. We find that each of these factors helps explain disconnection. Young noncitizens, especially women, have a higher rate of disconnection than other young people, which could reflect differences in immigration rates, labor market opportunities, or other factors. It is not surprising that young people who report a disability are much more likely than other young people to be disconnected; within this population, the rate of disconnection is higher among men than among women.^[7] We discuss the relationships between youth disconnection and educational status, veteran status, and community rates of disconnection in more detail below.

• All, aged 18–24
  • Young women: 12%
  • Young men: 14%
• African American
  • Young women: 17%
  • Young men: 24%
• White
  • Young women: 10%
  • Young men: 12%
• Hispanic
  • Young women: 15%
  • Young men: 15%
• Native American/Alaska Native
  • Young women: 19%
  • Young men: 22%
• Asian
  • Young women: 7%
  • Young men: 8%
• U.S. citizen
  • Young women: 12%
  • Young men: 14%
• Noncitizen
  • Young women: 18%
  • Young men: 13%
• No high school credential
  • Young women: 22%
  • Young men: 23%
• GED
  • Young women: 33%
  • Young men: 35%
• High school diploma
  • Young women: 20%
  • Young men: 20%
• Some college plus
  • Young women: 6%
  • Young men: 7%
• Disability
  • Young women: 27%
  • Young men: 36%
• Married
  • Young women: 23%
  • Young men: 10%
• Veteran
  • Young women: 19%
  • Young men: 17%
• Low community disconnection
  • Young women: 11%
  • Young men: 11%
• High community disconnection
  • Young women: 14%
  • Young men: 18%

NOTE: GED = general equivalency diploma. For ease of comparison, the dotted lines indicate the average rates of disconnection among young men and young women. We exclude young mothers (see discussion in the text). The community disconnection rate is calculated as the proportion of working-aged males (males aged 25–54) without a college degree who are not at work or enrolled in education or training. This rate is calculated at the Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA) level based on the same five-year ACS sample used to measure youth disconnection. “Low” and “high” rates indicate that the PUMA falls into the lowest or highest quartile on this measure. PUMAs are defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as a way of dividing the entire population of the United States into areas with at least 100,000 people in each.

Although Education Protects from Disconnection, Most Disconnected Young People Have at Least a High School Degree

Completing high school has many positive effects, but educational efforts alone are unlikely to offer a solution to youth disconnection. Although only half as many young people leave high school without a diploma today as did in 2000, the overall rate of disconnection has not fallen over this period (Harris et al., 2020; Lewis et al., 2024).

Figure 1 shows disconnection rates by level of educational attainment. GED holders have the highest rates of disconnection—even higher than for young people who left high school without any credential—and the rates are similar among men and women.^[8] Figure 2 shows that young GED holders are a very small group. This could partly reflect successful efforts by schools and districts to retain students who would otherwise have earned a GED and instead provide them with a high school diploma through alternative programs. If this is the case, this would help explain the relatively high rate of disconnection among high school graduates, which includes a population of students who were redirected from GED tracks into high school completion but still encounter substantial barriers to success. It is less surprising that those with at least some college experience report much lower disconnection rates. Of course, Figure 1 shows simple descriptive statistics; young people with different levels of education also differ in other ways.

These findings suggest that education provides only partial protection from disconnection. Figure 2 shows educational attainment among the 18- to 24-year-old population and among those who report being disconnected. Those without a high school degree represent 12 percent of the population; GED holders are a much smaller group. As shown in Figure 2 (and consistent with Figure 1), these two groups are overrepresented among disconnected youth, but they do not constitute the majority. High school graduates report high rates of disconnection (20 percent), making up about half of disconnected youth even though they represent only about one-third of all youth. Youth with college experience have relatively low rates of disconnection but are a very large group; about one-quarter of disconnected young people have some college experience. In total, about three-quarters of disconnected young people have a high school diploma or some college experience. According to these numbers, if young people with no high school diploma or a GED reported the same rate of disconnection as those with a high school diploma, the number of disconnected youth would fall, but only by about 5 percent. This suggests that increasing the high school graduation rate does not provide a singular solution to the issues faced by disconnected youth.

While young women in the ACS are more likely than young men to report attending college, young men are more likely to report leaving college without a credential. This suggests that although college experience serves to protect young people from disconnection, pausing or dropping out of college may be especially harmful to young men.^[9]

• All young people, aged 18–24:
  • No high school degree: 12%
  • GED: 2%
  • High school graduate: 32%
  • Some college plus: 54%
• Disconnected youth:
  • No high school degree: 20%
  • GED: 5%
  • High school graduate: 50%
  • Some college plus: 26%

SOURCE: Features information from the five-year sample (2019–2023) of the ACS (U.S. Census Bureau, 2025). We use individual (person) weights to create statistics that are representative of the U.S. population.
NOTE: In this figure, as in our main analyses, we exclude young mothers. This group has more education than other disconnected young people but less than the overall population.

Young Veterans, Especially Female Veterans, Report Substantial Rates of Disconnection

Figure 1 also shows the rates of disconnection among young veterans. Both women and men who are veterans report higher rates of disconnection than the general population; the disconnection rate among male veterans is about 25 percent higher than that of the general population, while the rate among female veterans is about 50 percent higher than that of the general population. This is likely to be partly mechanical; leaving the military, by definition, necessitates a job change, and young veterans may be engaged in job searches or waiting for classes to begin for some period. The vast majority of young veterans have a high school diploma at a minimum; most should have access to the Post-9/11 GI Bill (Kofoed, 2020; Wenger and Ward, 2022). This high rate of disconnection, especially among women, could reflect differences in the rate of attrition (leaving the military prior to completing one’s term of service); women have higher attrition rates than men, and enlistees who leave early in their terms are not eligible for the Post-9/11 GI Bill (Marrone, 2020; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 2025).^[10] But family circumstances also surely help explain this difference. Young veterans (men and women) are married at a higher rate than the rest of the population; ACS data indicate that more than 20 percent of young male veterans and more than 25 percent of young female veterans are married (compared with about 6 percent of the youth population). Married female veterans also have children at a higher rate than nonveterans but at about the same rate as married women who are not veterans. Therefore, the rates of disconnection among female veterans may reflect family circumstances as much as military experience. This analysis suggests that examining subgroups separately (for example, female veterans and married women) might not reveal the full story of disconnection.

Community Factors Help Explain Disconnection

Finally, Figure 1 reports the rates of youth disconnection in communities with overall high levels of disconnection among all working-aged males (males aged 25–54) without a college degree (high community disconnection).^[11] We define “low” and “high” levels of community disconnection by the lowest and highest quartiles on this measure among all communities; in communities with low levels of disconnection, about 12.5 percent of working-aged men are disconnected, while in the highest quartile, about 37 percent are disconnected. To better illustrate the variation in rates of disconnection across communities, Figure 3 plots the disconnection rate among young people against the disconnection rate among working-aged men.

This figure is a scatter plot showing the relationship between the percentage of youth (x-axis, labeled "Youth," ranging from 0% to 30%) and the percentage of working-aged men (y-axis, labeled "Working-aged men," ranging from 0% to 60%).

Each blue dot represents a data point for a different observation or population group. The data points are scattered, but there is an upward trend.

A black line labeled "Fitted values" is drawn through the plot, showing a positive linear relationship between the percentage of youth and the percentage of working-aged men. As the percentage of youth increases, the percentage of working-aged men tends to also increase.

SOURCE: Features information from the five-year sample (2019–2023) of the ACS (U.S. Census Bureau, 2025).
NOTE: In this figure, we calculate the rate of disconnection for these two groups at the community (PUMA) level. PUMAs are defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as a way of dividing the entire population of the United States into areas with at least 100,000 people in each. PUMAs are contained within states; there are about 2,500 PUMAs in the United States. Working-aged is defined as 25 to 54 years of age, as is typical in the literature.

Figure 3 demonstrates the large variation in rates of disconnection (both among young people and among men of working age) across communities in the United States. This figure suggests that communities with high rates of disconnection among adult men also have high rates of disconnection among youth (confirming this, the correlation between these rates is positive, and the fitted values line has an upward slope).^[12] Although Figure 3 does not include location information, we find that the communities with the highest rates of disconnection are located all across the country, with at least one such community in each of the nine census divisions. However, as noted by others, these communities are not distributed equally; the communities with the highest rates of disconnection are most often concentrated in the Middle Atlantic, East North Central, and South Atlantic divisions. Finally, Figure 3 demonstrates the very high rates of disconnection among adult men in some communities; in ten different communities located in five states and the District of Columbia, fewer than half of adult men are working. Six of these communities have quite high levels of youth disconnection; the rest do not. All of this suggests that adult disconnection is related to—but is not the entire explanation for—youth disconnection. Additional community-level analyses could yield valuable insights.

The Path Forward

We use the ACS to compare and contrast the characteristics of young men and young women who experience disconnection. Young men as a group have somewhat higher rates of disconnection than young women, but other characteristics (such as family status, race/ethnicity, disability status, and educational attainment) can be more important than sex in explaining disconnection rates in some cases. Disconnection rates are especially high among African American men, Native American/Alaska Native men, people with a disability, and people who hold a GED rather than a traditional high school diploma.

However, because the population lacking a high school diploma is quite small, we find that the vast majority of disconnected youth have a high school diploma or some college experience. Therefore, education provides only partial protection from disconnection. Community characteristics appear to matter as well; young people in communities with high disconnection rates among working-aged men also experience higher-than-average levels of disconnection. Finally, young female veterans experience high levels of disconnection, a finding that may be explained by family circumstances. Our findings have several implications.

First, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for disconnected youth; rather, the wide variety of experiences and needs among disconnected young people call for a variety of solutions. The experiences of women who live with family members and care for young children likely have little in common with the experiences of young men who drop out of college and search unsuccessfully for employment or young people who live in communities with very high levels of disconnection among working-aged men. However, young people working in low-wage jobs on a temporary basis would likely benefit from programs designed for disconnected youth, assuming that their employment does not preclude their participation. Our findings suggest that no single policy is likely to assist all disconnected young people; making progress on this issue that affects about one in seven young people may require multiple carefully designed policies and programs.

Second, we know little about the experiences in early adolescence that predict disconnection or the factors that shorten spells of disconnection. We lack rigorous measures of how long a typical young person spends in this state. We also have little understanding of the specific programs and policies that shorten disconnection and put young people on a path to economic prosperity. These programs and policies should be a focus of future research.

Third, we find much higher rates of disconnection among some groups, but we also find evidence that understanding how individuals’ experiences, family status, and community characteristics interact can provide value. Much of the existing analysis examines subgroups individually; our results suggest that future research should focus on understanding how a variety of factors simultaneously affect disconnection. For example, we found that female veterans’ disconnection rates could stem from the military experience of these women but are more likely to be related to their family status. Modeling disconnection in a multivariate regression framework could allow us to untangle these interactions and thus provide valuable insights.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the contributions and support of our colleagues Andrew Hoehn, Heather Schwartz, and Jennifer Kondo. We thank Ben Master and Christine Mulhern for their careful reviews. Finally, we are grateful to Monette Velasco, Emily Ward, and Mirka Vuollo for their assistance with editing and the publication process.

Notes

1. All figures are calculated from the five-year sample (2019–2023) of the American Community Survey (ACS), a nationally representative household survey that encompasses about 5 percent of the U.S. population. The ACS includes populations living in group quarters, both institutionalized and noninstitutionalized (e.g., those in college dorms, military quarters, correctional facilities, nursing homes); we include these groups in our estimates, although excluding them would not alter our overall findings. See U.S. Census Bureau (2025) for more information about the ACS. The largest publicly available datasets to study such topics as disconnection are the ACS and the Current Population Survey (CPS). Both are household-level surveys, but they include slightly different populations. We have found in exploratory analyses that the estimated proportion (and number) of disconnected youth is higher based on analyses of the CPS than based on the ACS; Belfield, Levin, and Rosen (2012) also document this difference with earlier data. The difference appears to be driven by who is included (CPS does not include institutionalized populations) and perhaps by response rates and weighting. Because young people are more likely than others to live in group quarters (most often college dorms), the treatment of group quarters can influence measures of disconnection, youth unemployment, and so on. The ACS includes those in group quarters; about 9 percent of young people aged 18 to 24 (around 3.4 million) live in (all types of) group quarters. The majority (about 3.1 million) live in noninstitutionalized group quarters; this number includes those in college dorms, military barracks, group homes, or other shelters. A small group (about 215,000) live in institutionalized group quarters. These include juvenile and adult correctional facilities, as well as skilled nursing facilities and psychiatric hospitals. The 18- to 24-year-old institutionalized population in the ACS is about twice the size suggested by the adult incarceration rates of 18- to 24-year-olds (see Zeng, 2025, especially Display 7), which suggests that about half of the young incarcerated population is in juvenile facilities or medical facilities. Return to content ⤴
2. Disconnected youth, sometimes referred to as opportunity youth, are often defined among 16- to 24-year-olds; this definition yields a slightly larger group (around 4.4 million). In this paper, we focus on 18- to 24-year-olds because more than 95 percent of 16- and 17-year-olds in our data (the ACS) report being enrolled in school. In other, forthcoming work, we explore the factors during the early teen years that are associated with later periods of disconnection. Return to content ⤴
3. Although we find the precise definition of disconnection to be a useful starting point for our analyses, we recognize that disconnected youth are at times referred to as opportunity youth. Return to content ⤴
4. Young married women also report high rates of disconnection, but we find that the presence of children, rather than marriage, is the driver of these trends. Rates of disconnection among married and unmarried mothers are similar (46 percent versus 40 percent); rates among married women without children are just over 20 percent. About 20 percent of young, disconnected mothers indicate that they are searching for work; the rest report being out of the labor force. Return to content ⤴
5. The ACS five-year data include a factor to inflate all dollar figures to 2023 dollars. We further inflate them to 2025 dollars using June figures from each year obtained from the Chained Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers. Return to content ⤴
6. Differences discussed in the text are statistically significant at the 5-percent level, indicating that they are unlikely to have occurred by chance. Return to content ⤴
7. The overall disability rate is about 8 percent for both young men and young women. For this statistic, excluding those in group quarters makes a small difference, resulting in a slightly smaller population reporting a disability. Return to content ⤴
8. Figure 1 suggests that GED holders have very different experiences from those of high school graduates; this is consistent with Cameron and Heckman (1993), as well as substantial later research. Return to content ⤴
9. Consistent with this suggestion, Giani, Attewell, and Walling (2020) documented that some college experience (but no degree) is less valuable for male students than for female students. We note that there is a large, multidisciplinary body of literature exploring the relationships between education, earnings, and economic factors, such as industrialization and trade. Return to content ⤴
10. The ACS question about military service states, “Has this person ever served on active duty in the U.S. Armed Forces, Reserves, or National Guard?” The person completing the survey is directed to choose one of the following options: “Never served in the military,” “Only on active duty for training in the Reserves or National Guard,” “Now on active duty,” or “On active duty in the past, but not now.” Members of the last group are considered veterans, but ACS technical material notes that some people may erroneously report active-duty service, including those who served in the National Guard or reserves and were not called to active duty and some civilian employees, such as those who worked in the U.S. Department of Defense and other service-related organizations. See U.S. Census Bureau, undated. (Executive Order 14347, signed September 5, 2025, authorized the use of Department of War as a secondary name for the Department of Defense. This publication was written before that order was released and thus refers to the secretary and department by their current statutory names under Public Law 81-216, National Security Act Amendments of 1949.) Return to content ⤴
11. We define community based on the PUMA level provided in the ACS data. The PUMA is the most precise geographic identifier available in the ACS. PUMAs in major cities include small geographic areas, while those in rural areas include larger spaces. We focus on working-aged males without college degrees as our reference group because this group’s rate of disconnection has increased sharply over recent decades in some areas; potential reasons for the increase include overuse of opioids and loss of manufacturing jobs (Krueger, 2017). Return to content ⤴
12. The pairwise correlation between disconnection rates for these two groups at the PUMA level is 0.35. This correlation is significant (p < 0.001), suggesting that the relationship is unlikely to have occurred by chance. Return to content ⤴

References

• Becker, Gary S., Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education, University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Belfield, Clive R., Henry M. Levin, and Rachel Rosen, The Economic Value of Opportunity Youth, Corporation for National and Community Service, January 2012.
• Burd-Sharps, Sarah, and Kristen Lewis, More Than a Million Reasons for Hope: Youth Disconnection in America Today, Social Science Research Council, March 2018.
• Cameron, Stephen V., and James J. Heckman, “The Nonequivalence of High School Equivalents,” Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 1993.
• Carnevale, Anthony P., Nicole Smith, and Jeff Strohl, The Future of Work: The Evolving Nature of Work and the Skills Needed for Success, Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, 2020.
• Coleman, James S., The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and Its Impact on Education, Free Press, 1972.
• Giani, Matt S., Paul Attewell, and David Walling, “The Value of an Incomplete Degree: Heterogeneity in the Labor Market Benefits of College Non-Completion,” Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 91, No. 4, August 2020.
• Harris, Douglas N., Lihan Liu, Nathan Barrett, and Ruoxi Li, “Is the Rise of High School Graduation Rates Real? High-Stakes School Accountability and Strategic Behavior,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University, EdWorkingPaper No. 20-210, March 2020.
• Kofoed, Michael S., Where Have All the GI Bill Dollars Gone? Veteran Usage and Expenditure of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, Brookings Institution, October 2020.
• Krueger, Alan B., “Where Have All the Workers Gone? An Inquiry into the Decline of the U.S. Labor Force Participation Rate,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Fall 2017.
• Lewis, Kristen, A Decade Undone: 2021 Update, Social Science Research Council, July 2021.
• Lewis, Kristen, Alex Powers, Cara Wohnsigl, Kate Harvey, and Tara Shawa, Broad Recovery, Persistent Inequity: Youth Disconnection in America, Social Science Research Council, October 2024.
• MaCurdy, Thomas, David Glick, Sonam Sherpa, and Sriniketh Nagavarapu, “Reprint of: Profiling the Plight of Disconnected Youth in America,” Journal of Econometrics, Vol. 243, Nos. 1–2, July 2024.
• Marrone, James V., Predicting 36-Month Attrition in the U.S. Military: A Comparison Across Service Branches, RAND Corporation, RR-4258-OSD, 2020. As of August 21, 2025: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR4258.html
• Murnane, Richard J., and Frank Levy, Teaching the New Basic Skills: Principles for Educating Children to Thrive in a Changing Economy, Free Press, 1996.
• Reeves, Richard V., Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.
• U.S. Census Bureau, “American Community Survey (ACS) Topic Information: Veterans,” undated. As of August 30, 2025: https://www2.census.gov/topics/population/veterans/guidance/acs-topic-information-veterans.pdf
• U.S. Census Bureau, “American Community Survey 5-Year Data (2009–2023),” webpage, last updated January 10, 2025. As of September 4, 2025: https://www.census.gov/data/developers/data-sets/acs-5year.html
• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, “Post-9/11 GI Bill (Chapter 33),” webpage, last updated June 17, 2025. As of September 4, 2025: https://www.va.gov/education/about-gi-bill-benefits/post-9-11/
• Wenger, Jennie W., and Jason M. Ward, The Role of Education Benefits in Supporting Veterans as They Transition to Civilian Life: Veterans’ Issues in Focus, RAND Corporation, PE-A1363-4, January 2022. As of September 4, 2025: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA1363-4.html
• Zeng, Zhen, Jail Inmates in 2023 – Statistical Tables: Full Report, Bureau of Justice Statistics, April 2025.

Related Content

• 

  Expert Insights

  What Predicts Disconnection Among American Youth?

  Oct 29, 2025

Topics

• Community Health and Well-Being
• Employment and Unemployment
• Life Skills
• School-to-Work Transitions
• United States
• Young Adults