Wherever that place was, it’s clear that it wasn’t through the doors of a classroom: “Mostly we ran the halls, talked to boys, bothered the principal,” says Tiffany. Like all good celebrities, they mastered the art of the dramatic entrance (“usually around lunch time”), and they always left their public wanting more – by the time she was a junior, says Caniyah, “I was going to school maybe once or twice a month, if I knew I had something cute to wear.”
It wasn’t until what should have been their senior year, after logging thousands of hours in front of the TV and several F’s on their transcripts – far from any hope of graduation – that it occurred to Caniyah and Tiffany that what was cute at 17 might not be so charming ten years down the road. “We both looked in the mirror and we didn’t like what we saw,” Tiffany recalled recently. “What can you do with your life if you don’t have a high school diploma?”
It’s a good question – one faced by a cohort of young people fast growing across the country, and even faster in New York. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but the city estimates that somewhere close to 160,000 – or nearly one in six – New Yorkers between the ages of 16 and 21 are neither in school nor employed in a legal job. Most of them started out poor, and their future economic prospects are grim: According to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, 54 percent of young adults without diplomas were jobless during an average month in 2008, and 40 percent were jobless for an entire year.
Kids drop or fall out of the mainstream education system for a long list of reasons – most commonly because they need to work, have a baby, or are caring for another family member, according to the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD). Whatever the back story, it’s in everyone’s best interest to help out-of-school youth get educated and employed. When researchers at the Community Service Society did the math, they found that each New Yorker who doesn’t finish high school costs the city treasury nearly $135,000 more than he pays in taxes, for expenses such as incarceration or shelter. Those with just a high school degree pay an average of $190,000 more into city coffers than is expended on their behalf – making each high school diploma or GED worth a grand total of $325,000 to the city.
That’s why a portion of money from the federal Workforce Investment Act (WIA) – the country’s main funding stream for job training services – is designated for programs aimed at getting so-called “disconnected youth” back into school or the labor market. This year, New York City is in line to receive nearly $14 million in WIA funding for out-of-school youth programs.
