Panel:
What Are Effective Components of Training Programs for Disconnected Youth and How Can They be Improved: Evidence from RCTs of Job Corps, Youthbuild, and National Guard Youth Challenge
(Employment and Training Programs)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Identifying effective programs for disconnected youth ages 16 to 24 to help them improve their education and vocational skills and longer-term labor market prospects is a national priority. This panel will discuss impact findings and lessons learned from large-scale RCTs of three major career technical training and education programs for this population: Job Corps, National Guard Youth ChalleNGe program, and YouthBuild. These programs all provide intensive, and comprehensive services, and all have found positive labor market impacts.
Importantly, these three programs share a focus not only on GED preparation and job skills training, but also on developing non-cognitive skills designed to promote health, life, and workplace success. A growing literature has demonstrated the importance of non-cognitive skills in educational attainment and longer-term employment and earnings growth. These skills—such as perseverance, industriousness, grit, resilience, and self-control—have been shown to contribute significantly to success in adulthood and to upward mobility. While it is difficult to disentangle which program components are most effective, the results from these evaluations suggest that the programs’ emphasis on non-cognitive development played a major role: in contrast, evaluations of less intensive education and training programs focusing on cognitive skills development only have shown scant evidence of success (Miller et al. 2016).
The first paper in this panel will present 20-year impact findings using 2001-2015 IRS tax data and samples from the National Job Corps Study that started in the mid-1990s. The 20-year study found beneficial long-term impacts for the older students (those 20 to 24 at random assignment), but not for those younger whose short-term impacts did not persist. This study is the first to establish that a national program for hard-to-serve disconnected youth can produce labor market gains over the long term, and can be a positive investment to society.
Although the Job Corps model shows promise, the key policy challenge is to improve program services to sustain the earnings gains for the younger students. Accordingly, the second paper will discuss findings from a recent DOL-funded external review of Job Corps to consider a wide range of evidence-based options for enhancing the Job Corps program (Berk et al. 2018). These options include adopting interventions fostering positive youth behaviors and group dynamics; enhancing employment skills and job readiness (through career pathways programs, micro-credentials, workplace learning, and apprenticeships); and changing administrative structures and practices to foster innovation.
The third paper will discuss lessons learned from the evaluations of YouthBuild (Miller et al. 2018) and ChalleNGe (Millenky et al. 2011). As with Job Corps, both programs are designed to foster positive youth development in addition to vocational and academic skills. The presentation will begin with a description of the two models and summarizes the key impact and implementation findings from the two evaluations. These findings helped lead to a DOL-funded pilot of a ChalleNGe program expansion. After discussing this pilot, the paper focuses on new work on the original ChalleNGe study sample, which includes longer term follow up focused on employment, post-secondary education, and other key outcomes.
