By State Senator Pat Boone, District 27
Thirty-two thousand young New Mexicans between the ages of 16 and 24 are neither working nor in school. That is not a statistic. That is a failure, and we need to own it.
A recent Legislative Finance Committee report laid out the numbers. But numbers do not capture what is really happening: a generation is being lost on our watch, and the leadership that has been running this state for decades has no serious answer for it.
We did not lower expectations by accident. We did it deliberately, gradually, and called it compassion. For generations, young New Mexicans worked after school, learned trades, helped on ranches, and understood that a life worth living required effort. Somewhere along the way, we decided that was too much to ask. We softened the standards, excused the absences, and built systems designed to catch people rather than challenge them. We shouldn’t be surprised by the results.
The problem is not a lack of opportunity. The problem is a lack of leadership willing to demand that young people seize it.
New Mexico already has Career Technical Education programs, generous scholarship funding through the Lottery and Opportunity Scholarships, and community colleges with real pathways into real careers. Businesses across the state in healthcare, agriculture, construction, and energy are begging for workers. Those jobs exist today. And yet 32,000 young people are not connected to any of it. That disconnection did not happen by accident. It happened because our state’s leadership chose, year after year, to lower the bar rather than raise it.
New Mexico deserves leaders who will tell young people the truth: that opportunity without effort is worthless, and that this state has been underestimating them for too long. We need earlier career exposure, more hands-on learning, more trade pathways, and leaders who are not afraid to expect more.
Thirty-two thousand is not acceptable. Not in a state that has poured money into education and workforce programs for decades. The opportunities exist. The failure is in the leadership that never demanded they be used. It is time for that to change, and time for the people who allowed this to get so bad to answer for it.
