The many faces of NEETs
When they aren’t roasting millennials’ outfits or scrolling on TikTok, how are Gen Z-ers spending their time?
Most are either working or attending school. Some are doing both. But a significant number of young people around the world — about 20% of those who are 15 to 24 years old — are doing neither, according to a 2024 report on employment trends from the International Labor Organization, or the ILO.
They are what economists call NEETs, an acronym for young people “not in education, employment or training.”
And despite what you may have heard, they aren’t all playing video games in their parents’ basements.
First, a brief history: The concept of young people not in employment, education or training entered policy debates in Britain in the 1980s, as officials worried about the risks and disadvantages facing young people. In 1996, an official in the Home Office coined the acronym. (In Japan a similar term, hikikomori, emerged in the 1990s.) NEET has since become an indicator monitored by the European Union and the United Nations.
A number of recent articles and social media posts have invoked the NEET concept to suggest that today’s young people are unmotivated to work. But that is not the full picture, said Sara Elder, a senior economist at the ILO.
Though a NEET can be someone voluntarily opting out of education and the labor market, the term can also be applied to someone unable to find work. A 17-year-old high school dropout who cannot find a job is a NEET. So is a 24-year-old caring full time for a family member.
The global NEET rate crested in 2020, coinciding with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it has been on a slow decline over the past two decades, dipping to 20.4% last year from 24.3% in 2005, according to ILO data. In the United States, the share of “discouraged” young people — those who are available to work but are not seeking jobs, a slice of the total NEET population — has also declined in the past decade, Elder added.
“This idea that a swarm of young people are ‘opting out’ is not supported by the data,” she said.
And while many articles about NEETs focus on young men, women actually constitute two-thirds globally, largely because of social factors that limit their access to education, or saddle them with caregiving responsibilities at home.
Being a NEET for a short time is typical, according to Massimiliano Mascherini, the head of the social policies unit at Eurofound, an EU agency that focuses on improving working conditions. But he added that remaining a NEET for too long could have negative economic ripple effects for the individual and wider economy.
Despite the stigma, some young people are embracing the NEET label. In August, the TikTok user Tynara McArthur, 19, posted a slideshow explaining that she was a NEET because of a chronic illness that prevented her from attending school.
Many commenters accused her of being lazy, she said in an interview. But she plans to keep posting to help people understand that NEET status can mean different things for different people.
“People don’t understand how difficult it is being NEET,” she said.
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