Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This presentation presents findings to date from studies of the Professional Training Corps (PTC)—a next generation initiative adapting the Year Up model for college settings to enhance scalability. The presentation describes the PTC initiative and summarizes our evaluation strategy. This strategy fuses improvement science with a rigorous impact evaluation at four local offices. Three mini-studies use different research methods to examine potential responses to implementation challenges identified by program staff and college partners. One mini-study uses a random assignment design to test improved responses to student academic difficulties at several sites, exemplifying how experiments can be used to both develop improvements and assess overall efficacy at different sites in the same program.