Serving UIC's Great Cities Commitment: Solutions for Today's Urban Challenges

On the Ben Joravsky Show, Graciela Guzman speaking on the health benefits for immigrants, based on the report conducted by the UIC’s Great Cities Institute and commissioned by the Healthy Illinois Campaign.

From The Ben Joravsky Show (To go to the actual article, please click on this link.)

A report by the University of Illinois-Chicago Great Cities Institute says that Black teens in Chicago are experiencing much higher jobless rates than other young people in Illinois.

Lead researcher Matt Wilson said Black teens in Chicago have been disconnected from work and school at twice the rate they were in 2021.

“So we have this huge jump where there’s an additional over 16,000 Black 16-to-19-year-olds that are not working and not in school,” Wilson said.

From The Center Square (To go to the actual article, please click on this link.)

Chicago’s youth unemployment rate is higher than the rest of Illinois and the nation at large, according to a new study, demonstrating a sign of the uneven recovery since the COVID-19 pandemic.

From WBEZ Chicago (To go to the actual article, please click on this link.)

Black Chicago teenagers are experiencing higher jobless rates and slower recovery from the pandemic, a new study reports.

Why it matters: The youth employment study paints a bleak picture of Chicago’s inequalities.

• • Not having jobs can turn kids to other pursuits, including gang activities and street violence.

By the numbers: The report, written by University of Illinois Chicago Great Cities Institute and commissioned by the Alternative Schools Network, shows that the city’s jobless rate for Black teens is worse than the national average.

• • In 2022, the jobless rate for Black 16- to 19-year-olds living in Chicago was 86% — more than 16% higher than the national average for that same demographic.
  • To compare, white Chicago teens had a jobless rate of 76%, which is 16% higher than the national average for white teens.
  • The rate in some Black neighborhoods was as high as 92%.

Stunning stat: The jobless rate gap between teens on the city’s South and West sides, which are predominantly Black neighborhoods, and teens in suburbs like Schaumburg was stark, up to a 40% difference.

From AXIOS Chicago (To go to the actual article, please click on this link.)

Young minority Chicagoans were particularly clobbered economically by COVID-19, and their recovery since has been mixed at best, a reality that all of the city is dealing with.

From Crain’s Chicago Business (To go to the actual article, please click on this link.)

The portion of young Chicagoans neither going to school nor working is returning to pre-COVID levels — but it’s an uneven recovery that has left behind Black teens as well as adolescents in the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Overall, about 45,000 16- to 24-year-olds in the city are disconnected from both school and work, accounting for roughly 12% of the city’s residents in that age group — a rate just slightly higher than pre-COVID.

“In the aftermath of the pandemic when things looked really shaky, these overall numbers are very encouraging,” said Matthew Wilson, associate director at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Great Cities Institute and one of the authors of a new study on youth disconnection. That was until researchers zeroed in on Black teens, he added: “When I saw these numbers, I thought, ‘Wait a minute.’”

From Chalkbeat Chicago (To go to the actual article, please click on this link.)

Employment levels in Chicago and beyond have rebounded since the COVID-19 pandemic, but a new report has found teens and young adults across the city, particularly those of color, are still struggling to find consistent work.

The report, published Wednesday by the University of Illinois Chicago’s Great Cities Institute, found that communities are not all recovering from the pandemic at the same pace, as youth joblessness rates in Chicago outpace the rest of Illinois and the country as a whole.

“Black and Latino youth and young adults in Chicago continue to have higher jobless and out-of-school-and-jobless rates compared to White Chicagoans,” the report states, “highlighting the importance of implementing targeted programs to promote more equitable employment opportunities for youth and young adults.”

From WTTW News (To go to the actual article, please click on this link.)

Released Wednesday, the report conducted by the Great Cities Institute is based on U.S. census data from 2022, the most recent data available from the agency, and looks both at the overall youth unemployment rate and those who are both jobless and out of school.

According to the report, young people in Chicago experienced higher rates of unemployment than those in the suburbs and nationally. The highest rates of joblessness for young people ages 16 to 24 were on the city’s South and West sides.

“Chicago has had a ‘longstanding issue with youth employment,” said Matthew Wilson, one of the report’s authors and associate director for economic and workforce development at the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the research arm behind the report. “I think there’s a lot of connections with youth unemployment to some of the social conditions that we see across the city both spatially and racially,” he said.

From Chicago Tribune (To go to the actual article, please click on this link.)