"Failure to complete high school is almost equivalent to economic suicide," said Dr. Neeta P. Fogg, a senior economist at Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies and the co-author of a study on education and the youth labor market in Illinois. During a presentation of her findings last week, she noted that the 16-to-24 age range is typically the time when young people "accumulate human capital in the form of formal education attainment or work experience in the labor market."

With the nation at war, the wretched state of millions of young people in America's urban centers is getting even less attention than usual.

While the U.S. is trying to figure out how to pay for its incursion into Iraq, millions of teenagers and young adults, especially in the inner cities, are drifting aimlessly from one day to the next. They're out of school, out of work and, as I've said before in this column, all but out of hope.

The latest data coming out of Chicago, which is roughly representative of conditions in other major urban areas, is depressing. The city's dropout rate is reportedly at an all-time high. And 22 percent of all Chicago residents between the ages of 16 and 24 are both out of school and out of work.

The term being used to describe these youngsters who have nothing very constructive to do with their time is "disconnected youth." Many of them are leading the kinds of haunted lives that recall the Great Depression. They hustle, doing what they can — much of it illegal — to get along. Some are homeless.

Of Chicagoans who are 20 to 24 years old, more than 26 percent are out of work and out of school. When the statistics are refined to focus on young blacks and Hispanics, they only get worse.

An incredible 45 percent of black men in Chicago aged 20 to 24 are out of work and out of school. That is not a condition that should be ignored.…

Youngsters who are left out of that experience entirely — or almost entirely — can face significant barriers to employment success for the rest of their lives. And the difficulties they face become, in one form or another, difficulties to be faced by the society as a whole.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/20/opinion/20HERB.html