Youth with Disabilities at the Transition Crossroads: Employment and SSA Outcomes after Seeking VR Services

The transition to adulthood is a challenging time for any young person, but especially so for youth with disabilities. Employment outcomes for youth with disabilities lag behind those of their peers without disabilities. Further, these youth and their families may also face difficult decisions regarding Social Security Administration (SSA) benefit receipt. To overcome these barriers, eligible youth with disabilities can seek services from state vocational rehabilitation (VR) agencies. VR agencies are well positioned to assist youth and young adults with disabilities who are transitioning from school to work and facing issues related to SSA benefit receipt and employment. This brief, based on a series of three working papers (Honeycutt et al. 2013a, 2013b, 2013c), presents employment and benefit receipt statistics for a cohort of youth ages 16 to 24 years who applied for VR services from 2004 through 2006. It explores state-level variation in the statistics and discusses factors influencing the statistics.