Disconnected youth are teenagers and young adults between the ages of 16 and 24 who are neither working nor in school. There are 5,527,000 disconnected youth in America today, or one in seven teens and young adults (13.8 percent).

Momentum is growing across the nation to tackle the issue of youth disconnection. From the presidential initiative My Brother’s Keeper to the analyses of pundits and scholars on the causes of civic unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore, evidence abounds that society is finally waking up to the costs of consigning five and a half million American youth to lives at the margins of society. And this national crisis seems tame compared to the situation in some locales: in three major metro areas, one in five youth are out of school and work.

• Our analysis of a very small subset of the direct costs of youth disconnection reveals an astonishingly high cost to taxpayers: $26.8 billion in 2013 alone. This figure comes from summing four direct costs recorded for disconnected youth: incarceration costs, Medicaid, public assistance payments, and Supplemental Security Income payments.

To read more, please visit; http://www.measureofamerica.org/disconnected-youth/