Almost one in two high school students in the Illawarra doesn't complete Year 12, a landmark study has found.The region's high school retention rate is just 56 per cent - 10 percentage points below the NSW average.The low rate is just one factor contributing to the region's high youth unemployment rate of 22.2 per cent.Family issues, slow regional jobs growth and transport problems are other major factors conspiring against young people trying to enter the workforce, according to the Youth Unemployment in the Illawarra Report. Nearly one quarter of Illawarra job seekers aged between 15 and 24 years are unemployed: the NSW rate is 11.7 per cent and the national rate 10.1 per cent.The region's jobs growth rate also lags behind the state and national averages (see table). In April last year, the alarming Illawarra statistics prompted the Wollongong City Council-convened Illawarra Youth Forum to undertake a comprehensive study into why the region has such high youth unemployment.The report, to be released on Wednesday, takes a new look at the issue, speaking directly and extensively to young people who have struggled to find employment.The study has attracted national attention for obtaining rare access to young job seekers at such grassroots level.It has also attracted broad support from those who work with unemployed youth, in the hope it will pinpoint key problems and identify solutions.Centacare Family Services Personal Support Program assistant manager Eva Fraticelli said the problem was steadily getting worse.The report would give the community a greater understanding of the whole picture and she expected the solution would involve a number of interconnected strategies."You can't pinpoint the one thing," she said.Ms Fraticelli believes the family support system is one important factor in encouraging students to stay at school.Wollongong Youth Services youth development worker Matt Ball runs a program specifically targeting unemployed youth."Hopefully it (the report) will support what we believe some of the problems are and why there is such high youth unemployment in the area. And then we can come up with some solutions," he said.IRIS senior social researcher Scott Burrows said the Unemployment Forum Research Steering Committee study would not have been possible without brave participants telling their personal stories.The committee wanted to discover the reality of what young unemployed people experienced on a daily basis so it could identify exactly what their needs were.The study was funded by BlueScope Steel, the University of Wollongong and the Illawarra Regional Information Service.