Education and Employment

Chapter 3 examines the roles of education and employment in the lives of young people experiencing homelessness, showing how exclusion from institutional systems often begins before homelessness and is reinforced by instability, limited credentials, and systemic discrimination. These disruptions undermine the traditional promises of integration through school and work. Before becoming homeless, many participants already had fragile connections to education and employment, marked by low qualifications, placement in segregated classes, and insecure or informal jobs. National differences emerge: in France, youth were more engaged in the labor market, while in the United States, schools played a greater role. Yet in both contexts, experiences of academic failure, unemployment, and gradual disengagement were common. After the onset of homelessness, these vulnerabilities deepen. Some manage to keep tenuous ties to education or work, but most depend on survival strategies such as informal labor, panhandling, or petty crime. The chapter concludes by highlighting how national contexts shape these disrupted trajectories, with French participants showing distinct patterns in the ways their educational and work experiences are altered or reconfigured.