Peru's newest household survey has produced a precise, uncomfortable count: 336,000 teenagers between 14 and 17 — nearly 15% of everyone that age in the country — are not enrolled in school at all. More than a third of them have already swapped classrooms for paid work, according to figures the Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática released this month.
The count landed days after Peru's newly published PISA 2025 scores confirmed a second, related problem: math and reading performance among Peruvian 15-year-olds slid back to where it stood roughly ten years ago. Two separate data releases, published within the same week, point toward one conclusion — the country is losing teenagers from classrooms and losing ground with the ones who stay.
What the Household Numbers Actually Show
INEI's quarterly count splits Peru's 14-to-17-year-olds into four groups: 70% attend school and do nothing else, 14.7% study while also helping with family work or chores, 6.3% have left the classroom for paid work, and 8.6% do neither. That last group — the "ninis," short for "ni estudian ni trabajan" — actually shrank compared with the same quarter of 2025, when it stood at 11%. The share that combines study with family obligations grew over the same period, from 13.2% to 14.7%, suggesting some teenagers are stretching themselves across both rather than dropping out outright.
Poverty, Not Preference, Is Driving the Exit
Felipe Berckemeyer, who directs the education program at Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, describes the pattern less as a career choice than as a household survival strategy. He points to Peru's interior, where informal and illegal mining operations pull in teenagers as young as 14 to work as laborers because the cash moves fast and the barriers to entry are low. "We're facing a survival scenario, tied to poverty and practicality," he said, describing families where a teenager's earnings become necessary rather than optional.
The PISA figures released this month reinforce that same sense of stagnation. Peru's average math score came in at 382, down from 387 in 2015 and nine points below its own 2022 result. Reading fell further, to 390 from 398 in 2015 — an 18-point drop since the last test cycle alone. Seven in ten Peruvian students failed to clear the minimum proficiency bar in math, and just half a percent scored among the top performers across math, reading and science combined, a share thin enough that education researchers are describing the country's trajectory as a full ten years of progress erased rather than a routine dip.
Why Economists Are Watching the Informal Sector
Labor attorney César Puntriano, a senior partner at Estudio Muñiz, warns that teenagers who exit both school and formal employment become easier recruits for illegal enterprises as Peru's shadow economy keeps expanding. "These young people can fall into illegal activity, in a context where these economies keep growing," he said, adding that the country would need sustained growth above 5% to absorb them into legitimate jobs — a rate Peru has not been hitting. Roughly 70% of Peru's workforce already operates informally, and once a teenager enters that track, the wage gap and skills deficit tend to widen with time rather than close.
The Same Story, Repeating a Few Years Later
The risk doesn't stop at adolescence. A separate INEI-based tally, reported by Infobae in late August using the most recent year of comparable data available (2024), found that 1.4 million Peruvians aged 15 to 29 — 17.4% of that wider group — neither studied nor worked. The gap by gender is stark: 23.3% of young women fell into that category versus 11.6% of young men, a split researchers connect to caregiving duties that fall disproportionately on girls once they leave school. The age range is broader than this week's 14-to-17 count, but the overlap is hard to miss — the teenagers exiting classrooms today make up the same pipeline that shows up in those older-youth numbers a few years down the road.
No New Plan on the Table Yet
Neither INEI nor Peru's education ministry has announced a program aimed specifically at the 14-to-17 group since this data was published. With the country absorbing its steepest PISA decline in years at the same moment hundreds of thousands of teenagers sit outside any classroom, the two trends increasingly look like a single, compounding problem rather than two separate ones.
