Many of the city’s young people aren’t in school or working

16th March 2015   ·   0 Comments

New Orleans, which has often been called the City That Care Forgot, has one of the nation’s highest percentages of young people who are neither in school nor working, according to a new report.

FOX 8 News reported last week that the study, done by the Cowen Institute at Tulane University shows the city has the third-highest percentage of young adults between the ages of 16 and 24 who are neither employed nor enrolled in school. The report also found that Louisiana has the country’s third-highest percentage of these opportunity youth of any state in the nation.

The study found that two out of every 10 New Orleans youth are not enrolled in school or currently employed.

Only Memphis, Tenn., and Las Vegas, Nevada outpaced New Orleans with higher percentages of young people who were neither in school nor working.

The Cowen Institute study described these young adults who aren’t working or in school as opportunity youth because of their potential value to their communities if they are able to reconnect to education, employment and civic opportunities.

“This report provides a baseline for understanding of who opportunity youth are both in New Orleans and nationally,” Vincent Rossmeier, director of policy for the Cowen Institute, told FOX 8. “Opportunity youth can truly be assets for their communities when they are reconnected to quality employment, educational and training opportunities. Recon­nection of this kind is the first step in ensuring opportunity youth persist on pathways to living-wage careers.”

The report also found:

• Of 16-to 24-year-olds in the New Orleans metropolitan area, an estimated 18.2 percent are opportunity youth. This is significantly higher than the national rate of 13.8 percent.

• More than 26,000 16-to 24-year-olds in the New Orleans area are estimated to be opportunity youth. Nationally, there are 5.5 million opportunity youth.

• Additionally, Southern states, when compared to states on the West Coast, East Coast, and in the Midwest, have higher overall percentages of opportunity youth.

Sociologists, criminologists and public policy experts have often talked about the connection between chronic unemployment and undereducated residents and high rates of poverty and crime.

The study comes on the heel of another study by the New Orleans-based Data Center that said poverty is significantly impacting the lives of many of the city’s children, causing learning difficulties and trauma.

“You often hear people who live in New Orleans talk about the ills that afflict our community, whether it’s crime, whether it’s poor infrastructure, whether it’s the lack of a tax base,” Rossmeier told WWL. “What I think about when I think about opportunity youth is, it’s an easy way to fix a lot of these things.”

Greater New Orleans Inc. President and CEO Michael Hecht told WWL that the business community is starting to work with potential employers to establish programs in local schools to prepare young people for the jobs of the future.

“We’re having some good success early on, but now the challenge is scale,” Hecht. said “How do we do this at scale so we have real systemic change and we’re not there yet. We have the right idea, but now we have to scale it.”

Hecht added that communities need to do more than just supply the labor and expect business to accept it.

“You have to make sure the training in hard skills and soft skills is what businesses need and if you do that, you’re going to have great social results and great economic results,” Hecht told WWL.

The report said that failing to create better economic and educational opportunities for young people and to motivate them to take advantage of these opportunities can have dire consequences for residents, the city’s tax base and long-term economic growth in New Orleans.

“These jobs are going to be there by all accounts, so we just have to find a way to train and educate all our young people to make sure they can take that opportunity,” Rossmeier told WWL. “It’s a struggle. But, it also working both with employers and everyone else to make sure that training fits the jobs that are actually going to be available.”

“We know what the problems are — we live with them every day,” the Rev. Raymond Brown, a community activist and president of National Action Now, told The Louisiana Weekly Thursday. “What we need are better schools and better economic opportunities for New Orleans families.

“It would be foolish to expect conditions to get better without improving the way schools treat young Black people and expanding employment and business opportunities for Black people.”

“We need to end the systemic racism that is literally choking the lift out of Back New Orleans,” Ramessu Merriamen Aha, a New Orleans businessman and former congressional candidate, told The Louisiana Weekly. “The public school system is being used to impose a glass ceiling on most of the city’s young people and limit their opportunities to pursue higher education and better-paying jobs.

“We need to demand that the city leaders and the business community do more than pay lip service to making things better for everyone who lives in New Orleans. We need them to understand that they have a vested interest in a better-educated and financially stable constituency, even if that means sharing decision-making power,” Aha continued.

“City Hall and the business community need to decide if maintaining control of the City of New Orleans and its resources is worth it when these patterns of discrimination and political chicanery continue to take such a major toll on the majority of this city’s residents and the future well-being of New Orleans.”

Additionally reporting by Louisiana Weekly editor Edmund W. Lewis.

This article originally published in the March 16, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.