Thinking About the Future Shouldn't Mean Leaving Home: Why Talent Retention and Quality Jobs are Civic Engagement Issues
By Tonanziht Aguas
Forty-three percent of young people said they struggled to meet their basic financial needs. Those same young people, according to CIRCLE analysis after the 2024 election, were also the least likely to vote, volunteer, or believe they can make a difference in their communities.
This is the story of the city I grew up in, and it is the reason I disagree with arguments that civic disengagement comes down to indifference. It has much more to do with place and opportunity: young people train for careers that, too often, don’t exist where they live, and are asked to invest civically in places that have no real path for them to stay and thrive in.
A Place Study: My Hometown
I write this as someone from Passaic, New Jersey, a city with a large immigrant population, as a first-generation American, and as the first in my family to attend college. I am one of many with this background.
My first job, at fifteen, at an outdoor food cart, earning one dollar an hour, taught me persistence and conflict management, but it offered no pathway to stability or relevance to the field I would later pursue.
The summer before college, I worked as a camp counselor through my city's youth employment program. Among fellow counselors, many also college-bound, a recurring thread emerged: nearly all of us planned to leave for good, and none could name more than a handful of local jobs matching what we hoped to study. That perception is telling: leaving your hometown isn't always just ambition; it's often a reasonable response to not seeing a future there.
Today, I see the strength of the community in ways I couldn't at seventeen, but the economic realities underneath have stayed the same. The local labor market doesn't generate enough positions in the fields young people decide to train in, relative to how many the school district sends off to college or trade school each year.
Nearly a decade since my first job, I relearned that positions matching my training exist primarily in much larger metropolitan areas, and even "local" projects are frequently designed and staffed from outside the community. I felt this most after graduate school. I spent months searching for work in my hometown that would let me contribute to the city's professional infrastructure, and found none. I was fortunate to land a remote role, but not everyone can count on that. The result is a strange asymmetry: I am qualified to help build the very systems my city lacks, but there is no pathway for me to do so where I live.
My story isn’t unusual; it's happened to many, and I've since had the chance to examine it from a few different angles.
Two Points of Reflection
Last year, I served as a young ambassador for the Horizons Summit by Jobs for the Future, a role created to bring the perspectives of young adults and early-career workers into a room of employers, investors, policymakers, and workforce providers. It pushed me to ask what "the future of jobs" means in a specific place. I struggled to picture it in Passaic, and I could only see that gap because living in Chicago showed me how different things could look from what I grew up with.
Not everyone wants to move back home, but many can’t afford NOT to as rising costs push young adults back. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, almost half of 25- to 34-year-olds in 1975 had moved out, gotten a job, married, and had kids; nearly 50 years later, less than a quarter had. That’s not a call to replicate 1975, but it shows that young adults today prioritize economic security over starting a family, reflecting the rising burden of housing, food, gas, and other costs.
Local economies don't generate enough good jobs for the people they educate. That shortfall is quietly reshaping civic life.
What May Be Affecting Youth Civic Engagement
Youth disengagement from civic life should not be solely attributed to indifference. It is a downstream consequence of an economic opportunity bind. When the stable, good positions young people train for do not exist locally, choosing to remain in or return to one's hometown becomes a significant personal sacrifice rather than a straightforward expression of civic commitment. Compounding this, small municipal governments often lack the capacity or resources to attract industries capable of closing this gap. Young people either leave and gradually disengage from the communities that shaped them, or remain and struggle to convert their training into economic stability.
CIRCLE research shows financially struggling youth were consistently less civically engaged, with noticeable gaps that held across nearly every one of the seventeen forms of civic action the researchers measured. Struggling youth were less likely to trust that elections are conducted fairly. The same research found that when financially struggling young people did receive civic support, such as exposure to information about voting or a sense of connection to their community, they were far more likely to vote.
When a family's stability depends on whether a shift gets cut or a second job comes through, civic participation, from attending a town council meeting to following local policy debates, becomes a luxury that competes with survival. The young people I know who are most disengaged are rarely disengaged because they do not care; they are disengaged because caring does not pay the monthly rent, and the institutions asking for their civic energy have not shown that participation leads anywhere tangible for them or their families.
The problem is not just whether a job exists, but whether it is a good one. Jobs for the Future's American Job Quality Study found that roughly six in ten U.S. workers do not hold jobs that meet basic thresholds of quality, measured across financial well-being, safety, growth opportunity, voice, and schedule stability, and that younger workers are among the least likely to have one. A job that pays too little, offers no advancement, and gives a worker no say over their time fails not only to provide economic security but also to model the institutional trust and voice that civic participation depends on.
What Helps Young People Overcome These Obstacles
What has consistently helped, in my experience and observation, is not more civic education in the abstract sense (like a one-time infographic) but visible proof that participation produces a return. Young people are far more willing to engage when they can see a direct line between their involvement and an outcome that matters to their own lives. Mentorship also matters more than most programs acknowledge. Having even one adult, ideally someone from the same community, who can point to a viable local path forward changes what feels possible. Without that, civic engagement asks young people to invest in a future they have no evidence they will be allowed to live in.
The most effective mobilization treats young people as decision-makers, not just as a workforce to be trained or an audience to be persuaded. Programs that hand over real authority—actual influence over budgets, hiring partnerships, or program design—produce far more sustainable engagement than programs that only solicit feedback. Young leaders respond to responsibility, not just invitations. Local institutions should consider creating dedicated seats for youth on county workforce development boards, where decisions about training pipelines and employer partnerships are too often made without the people those pipelines “serve”. Local youth advisory councils should be given real authority, not just a public-facing role, in shaping economic development priorities. State workforce readiness organizations should actively recruit young people from smaller, under-resourced cities to inform how "readiness" is defined.
What has not worked is municipalities competing for outside investment poorly matched to the skills and capacities already present in their own residents. Recruiting a single large employer or subsidizing an outside developer's "local" project does little if the jobs don't connect to the training pipeline the community produces, and even less if they aren’t quality jobs. Job quality and geographic fit are civic engagement issues as much as general economic ones, because for young people, the decision to invest in a hometown is inseparable from whether that hometown can offer a livable future.
These changes will not resolve the opportunity gap on their own. But they would ensure that the people most affected by it, and often best positioned to understand it, have a genuine role in closing it.
