The OYF Common Measures are how we track youth outcomes across OYF communities, for our whole network and for partnerships individually. Using the Common Measures, we were able to track success prior to Covid-19, and we are using them now to track current progress and set future goals.

A Uniform Way to Track Opportunity Youth

Opportunity Youth have historically been difficult to count, as they are defined as a group which does not appear in either of two data sets – those in an educational program and those not working.

The data source most often used to determine youth disconnection is the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which is 1) the source of the most accurate estimates available; 2) consistent across communities and time; and 3) reliably available annually.

In 2019, Equal Measure worked with six OYF collaboratives to develop more detailed measures that move beyond identifying the rate of disconnection from school or work. These measures, collectively referred to as the OYF Common Measures, also utilize the American Community Survey, and allow us to capture the traditional disconnection rate, as well as the nature of that disconnection. The metrics provide greater clarity on how communities can prevent and support youth disconnection while tracking community-wide progress on closing the gaps of disconnection from high school, postsecondary education, and the workforce.

The four measures are:

• Overall community disconnection rate: The rate of young people disconnected from work and school (i.e., opportunity youth).
• High school disconnection rate: The rate of young people without a high school diploma/GED and not working who are disconnected from high school.
• Postsecondary disconnection rate: The rate of young people with a high school diploma/GED but without a postsecondary credential, who are disconnected from postsecondary education and not working.
• Workforce disconnection rate: The rate of young people with a postsecondary credential, but not enrolled in postsecondary, who are disconnected from the workforce.

[More information on the process used to pick the ACS as the data source, and other details of the process can be found in this publication. If you are interested in the specific technical methods used to derive the Common Measures from ACS data, you can find that in this publication.]

This two page infographic summarizes the state of the Opportunity Youth Forum Common Measures for 2021 based on the latest available data. Key trends include the following:

• Most young people across the OYF are disconnected from postsecondary education – nearly 650,000.
• The high school disconnection rate for American Indian and Alaskan Native youth decreased by 4.8 percentage points between 2019 and 2021. However, they were still most likely to be disconnected from high school (20.7%).
• While postsecondary disconnection for most gender and racial/ethnic groups increased between 2017 and 2021, American Indian and Alaskan Native postsecondary disconnection decreased by 7.3 percentage points. However, their postsecondary disconnection rate remained the highest of any racial or ethnic group (46.8%).
• Workforce disconnection rates increased for all gender and racial/ethnic groups from 2017 to 2021, with Black or African American youth experiencing the greatest increase in workforce disconnection and the highest overall (22.1%).

Tracking Local Progress

In addition to capturing trends across the OYF, the OYF Common Measures are used by collaboratives to track population-level outcomes over time. Examples include:

• Seattle/South King County, WA
• Boston, MA
• Phoenix, AZ
• Philadelphia, PA
• Bedford–Stuyvesant, NYC, NY
• Denver, CO
• Los Angeles, CA

OYF Partnership Successes

OYF collaboratives are improving youth outcomes and increasing opportunities and connecting young people to pathways toward economic mobility. Many are defying national trends and seeing disconnection rates that are below pre-pandemic levels per the OYF Common Measures.

Disaggregation

One important attribute of the Common Measures data is that it can be disaggregated by various demographic variables, such as race, gender, and income. Disaggregation allows collaboratives to monitor equity gaps and apply targeted supports to priority populations.

OY Outcomes Target Setting

To realize the full potential of the OYF Common Measures, each urban area-focused OYF community is encouraged to set targets to foster transparency and accountability that drives improvement of OY outcomes at the community and network levels. Given the uniqueness of each OYF community, translating each community’s goals into targets makes it easier to manage how we track progress and to communicate success and lessons learned with the field. Further, having targets helps collaboratives and their partners identify where to focus their efforts and to measure their progress in improving opportunity youth outcomes.

Additionally, targets help to:

• Provide a clear sense of what each community is aiming for.
• Drive improvement by prioritizing the areas that determine success and great impact for the Opportunity Youth.
• Help understand where you are now, what you are trying to achieve and areas that need improvement to achieve the target(s).
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement.
• Examine the levers of changes to proactively improve engagement with OY.
• Encourage the partners in a collaborative to align their activities and to work more intentionally towards known targets.

Communities may also choose to set additional targets against other, more local data sets. Read more about target setting approaches and practices, which are a strategy of our Data for Impact Initiative.

We continue to work with our rural and tribal OYF collaborative members, to establish an alternative to the ACS-derived Common Measures. Due to the size of the geographic unit of analysis used by the ACS, it is not an appropriate source of information – for the purpose of setting improvement targets for OY outcomes – for smaller population communities to use. Read more about our work with tribes on data sovereignty, and on our continued work with our rural and tribal communities on data issues here.

2021 Common Measures for OYF Collaboratives

Additionally, we’re pleased to share the detailed 2021 data for each of our urban-focused OYF collaboratives below. As noted above, we’re currently working with our tribal and rural members to establish alternative approaches to the Common Measures.

Note that the impacts of COVID were still being felt at the time that this data was collected in 2021.

Source: ACS 2021 1Y PUMS

*** denotes that the estimate is not reliable enough to report this data.

NOTES:

• Denominators of the number of youth included in these rates differ for each disconnection rate. For more information, please see “Equity Counts: Development of Common Measures: A Brief Technical Guide.”
• Jasper and San Augustine are contained in the same defined geographic area. Thus, their results are presented together.
• NYC’s Transfer 2 Career collaborative serves all NYC, and includes the geographies of the other three NYC collaboratives.
• The Network total includes Roaring Fork, CO.