With about one in nine young Americans today neither working nor in school, exposing them to greater risk of poverty and violence, the personal-finance website WalletHub Wednesday released its report on 2021’s States with the Most At-Risk Youth and determined that Virginia is the state with the eighth least at-risk youth.
As the website pointed out, many young people also suffer from poor health conditions that hinder their ability to develop physically or socially. Such issues not only affect young people later in life, but they also prove harmful to society as a whole. For instance, more than 70 percent of young adults today are ineligible to join the U.S. military because they fail academic, moral or health qualifications.
Research shows that when youth grow up in environments with economic problems and a lack of role models, they’re more at risk for poverty, early pregnancy, and violence, especially in adulthood. The environment is even more difficult for these young Americans in 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic has hurt the job market, caused schooling to be held online in many cases, and kept people more isolated than usual, though conditions are improving as the country reopens. The pandemic is also a big source of stress, and some youth may not have anyone to turn to for support.
To determine where young Americans are not faring as well as others in their age group, especially in a year made extremely stressful by the COVID-19 pandemic, WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 15 key indicators of youth risk.
Those 15 key indicators were in turn divided into two key metrics: 1) education and employment and 2) health.
The indicators used to make up the education and employment metric were 1) the share of disconnected youth (which refers to the population aged 18 to 24 that is not attending school, is not working, and has no degree beyond a high school diploma) 2) the share of youth with no high school diploma 3) the share of National Assessment of Educational Progress-proficient students (those who have performed at or above eight-grade math and with-grade reading proficiency levels) 4) the labor force participation rate among youth (population aged 16 to 24) 5) the youth poverty rate 6) the rate of teen pregnancy 7) the share of homeless youth 8) the presence of state tuition waiver programs for youth in foster care 9) and the rate of youth detained, incarcerated or placed in residential facilities per 100,000.
The indicators employed to make up the health metric were the share of the population aged 12 and older fully vaccinated 2) the share of overweight and obese youth 3) the share of youth using illicit drugs in the past month 4) the share of youth reporting heavy drinking 5) the share of youth with depression and 6) the share of physically, mentally, and emotionally inhibited youth.
The seven states determined to have young people less at-risk than Virginia were 1) Maryland 2) Utah 3) Minnesota 4) Connecticut 5) New Hampshire 6) New Jersey and 7) Massachusetts.
