Invest in youth, it will pay off for all of us

Young people in our state have suffered the most from COVID-19 isolation. And if we don’t act swiftly, we’ll all pay a heavy price — up to $43 billion, in fact.

A recent study by the Measure of America found that disengagement rates in New Mexico are higher now than they were during the Great Recession.

The state leads the country with 19.6 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds considered “disengaged youth” — young people who are not working and not in school.

That means there are nearly 48,000 untethered young people in New Mexico. Make no mistake, there are real costs associated with this catastrophe, and those costs are paid by our communities.

In “The Economics of Investing in Opportunity Youth,” a report from 2012, the estimated social costs of disengaged young people over their lifetime was $900,000. Even without accounting for inflation over the past decade, that’s a staggering amount. Crime, social services, and lost wages are making all of us poorer, and we need to do something about it.

The answer is care and concern for our young people. This is the bedrock of the X3 Internship program. These paid internships are an initiative of Future Focused Education, a New Mexico nonprofit.

We work with the students who are most in danger of leaving school and sacrificing their (and our) future. We connect them to meaningful professional work experiences while they are still in high school, and they get paid. However, they get something even more valuable: a safety net of caring adults and mentors who can vouch for their real-life work skills.

If we continue to lose our students to disconnection, at $900,000 per young person, that works out to a $43 billion loss across New Mexico over the next 60 or 70 years. That is twice the current value of the coveted, and often fought over, Land Grant Permanent Fund ($22.8 billion) that is supported by oil and gas revenue and investments on Wall Street.

The X3 program was born out of the need to give young people better work opportunities than dead-end jobs that keep them out until midnight — competing with their best efforts to graduate. Many of these young people are from low-income families and have to work to support their household.

The program has grown to over 85 local employers and 650 intern placements, paying out more than $500,000 in work stipends to students. Only five years ago, the X3 pilot began with six interns and one employer, and people asked us “When will you scale?” Well, here we are.

The pathway to reconnecting these young people to careers is through focused attention on their well-being.

It is not possible to help vulnerable young people move forward without care and concern for their well-being and mental health.

We must invest in more social workers, school psychologists, and teacher training. But we can’t limit our vision to the internal workings of school.

Instead, building a network of support for young people beyond the four walls of the school through programs like X3 and X3 Next paid internships and mentorship is our greatest opportunity for long-lasting success.

As a community, we must invest in the social capital and well-being of young people. All of us should consider investments like paid high school internships with the same attention we give our investments in Wall Street and nonrenewable resources.