Equity Counts: Tracking Opportunity Youth Outcomes

Opportunity youth (OY) are among the hardest-to-reach youth in our communities. Unlike youth who are connected to school systems, postsecondary institutions, or employers, opportunity youth—defined as "young people between the ages 16 to 24 who are neither enrolled in school nor participating in the labor force"—do not interact with these systems. There is no system or single point of contact through which opportunity youth are engaged, and through which progress and outcomes are measured. Rather, opportunity youth, if connected at all, float among service providers, in and out of school, and between jobs.In this report, we:discuss the importance of creating common measures for tracking opportunity youth outcomes;describe the greatest challenges associated with these efforts; andintroduce a set of measures—The OYF Common Measures—that utilize publicly available data to capture community-wide progress in connecting 16 to 24 year-olds to high school, postsecondary education, and the workforce