President Obama spotlighted a national crisis last year when he launched My Brother’s Keeper, an initiative that encourages communities, nonprofits and the private sector to focus on ways to improve the lives of some of the nation’s most vulnerable young people. According to the White House, the private sector has since directed nearly $500 million to various projects aimed at expanding opportunity for this group.

The crisis, in a nutshell, is the isolation of millions of young black and Latino men, who are disengaged from school, work and mainstream institutions generally. The task of bridging that gap has been left to the philanthropic community, which understands the crisis and has undertaken various educational initiatives. But the country as a whole seems largely unaware that a large number of young people exist wholly apart from the mainstream, a situation that is enormously damaging to them and to the rest of society.

The scope of the problem is outlined in a new study of nearly 100 American cities by Measure of America, a policy group at the Social Science Research Council. The study finds that more than 5.5 million people ages 16 to 24 are neither working nor in school, a significantly larger group than before the recession.

At a time when the economy is requiring workers to have higher levels of skills, one in seven of America’s young adults can’t even get started. And even if they find jobs, they are likely to earn significantly less than their peers, be more dependent on public assistance programs and end up worse off physically and mentally than their more fortunate peers.