Surprising Stats

I was reading an article on the web about a program working with homeless youth, and the agency cited an interesting statistic. They said that a homeless youth is 2.5 times less likely to receive a high school diploma than teens who aren’t homeless.

Yes, you read that correctly: 2.5 times less likely to receive a high school diploma. You may be as surprised as I was to read that statistic. Personally, I was completely shocked … shocked, that is, that homeless youth weren’t at least 100 times less likely to get their diplomas!

Think about it. We’re talking about young people who are homeless. They are surviving on the streets, outside of social support structures and even the law, existing in a world of drugs, crime, and prostitution. When they’re not being ignored or discriminated against by adults, they’re being exploited by them. This is the life of a homeless youth; endless hours of excruciating boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. And they are only 2.5 times less likely to receive a high school diploma?

The reason for this, of course, is that contrary to what many people think, the vast majority of homeless youth are capable and intelligent. This is one of my theories about why some youth become homeless and others don’t. It’s popular to point to sexual abuse or drugs in the home as causal factors, but the fact is that there are hundreds of thousands of young people being sexually abused and exposed to drugs all over this nation who don’t leave home. What’s the difference between those who do and those who don’t? My theory is that the more capable and intelligent a young person is, the less likely they are to remain in a bad situation where they have little or no control. Certainly the situation they leave to is not much better; survival on the streets can be, in many ways, worse. But at least on the streets they have a measure of control over their life. Maybe they are still being abused and exploited, but they have some power over how they are abused, who exploits them, and when and where it happens.

In any case, whether or not my theory is valid, those of us who work with homeless youth can confirm that this is not a ‘hopeless’ population, and we are often impressed by just how capable they can be. Was I really shocked at the above quoted statistic? Not so much. I remember one young woman I worked with who attended high school every day and graduated with honors – and, up until the last few months when she moved into the transitional living program I operated, she had been attending while homeless for almost two years.

The truly revealing thing about statistics related to homeless youth is not how bad the stats are, it’s the fact that they aren’t so much worse.