What do we know about the nearly 1.4 million students experiencing homelessness in the U.S.? Our latest brief, “1.37 Million and Rising: Understanding the National 25% Spike in Student Homelessness” explores national patterns for housing insecure youth across the U.S. Students without stable housing, one of several highly mobile student populations, are more likely to miss school, face disciplinary actions, and fall behind academically. Yet many remain invisible in national education data.
This brief builds upon our research on students experiencing homelessness in California, the epicenter of the student homelessness crisis, and highly mobile youth—including an overview of these student populations and an accompanying policy brief—to uplift the importance of their stability and success.
Understanding these trends is crucial to advancing educational equity. This is critical reading for anyone shaping education policy or practice—from the classroom to the Capitol.
Learn more on the CTS website.
Highly mobile youth (HMY) include approximately 1.9 million school-age students in the U.S., a broad category for students experiencing homelessness (1.2 million), the foster care system (391,000), migrant youth (274,000) and young people who have been detained in the juvenile legal system (25,000).
This policy brief in collaboration with WestEd builds on our initial overview of HMY by offering actionable strategies for federal and state policymakers. We focus on the unique needs of HMY as they face heightened challenges after the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing political shifts in 2025.
Our systems are not designed to meet the complex realities of HMY. The brief offers a policy agenda to change that. We hope this work supports efforts to build more equitable, responsive systems that center the well-being and opportunity of HMY nationwide.
Highly Mobile Youth (HMY) — students experiencing homelessness, foster care, migratory status, or juvenile legal system involvement — are among the most underserved populations in the U.S., facing instability that disrupts schooling, limits access to supportive relationships, and contributes to poor educational and health outcomes. Drawing on federal education, child welfare, and juvenile justice data from 2013–2022, this brief synthesizes national datasets and existing literature to analyze demographic trends, overlapping needs, and patterns of dual-system involvement across HMY populations. Findings reveal that Black and Latine youth are disproportionately represented among HMY and face compounded challenges, including higher rates of disability identification and English Learner status. Migratory youth remain among the most underserved, while youth involved in both child welfare and juvenile justice systems experience particularly stark racial and gender disparities. Foster care and juvenile-system-involved youth also face heightened risks of homelessness, further destabilizing their development and education. Critically, persistent gaps in national data obscure the true scale of these inequities and limit the design of effective supports. The instability HMY experience is rooted in systemic inequities — structural racism and poverty chief among them — that increase the likelihood of involvement in multiple child-serving systems. Addressing their needs will require stronger cross-system collaboration, more robust and consistent data collection, and targeted interventions that disrupt cycles of displacement and disadvantage.
