Youth Employment and Training Programs The YEDPA Years (1985) / Chapter Skim
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6 Effectiveness of Labor Market Preparation Programs
6 Effectiveness of Labor Market Preparation Programs
Pages 119-136
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From page 119... ...
For example, we were not able to evaluate summer programs designed to maintain or improve educational skills of youths over the school vacation or the many career exploration programs offered as a supplement to regular school programs. In terms of numbers of participants, the programs that met our criteria for tIt is not entirely clear how some programs should be classified, particularly those that provided several alternative treatments (such as the AYES project)
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From page 120... ...
Career Exploration Program, Project STEADY (Special Training and Employment Assistance for Disadvantaged Youth) , and the Job Corps Educational Improvement Effort (EIE)
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From page 123... ...
RTP Career Exploration Program The Recruitment Training Program (RTP) Career Exploration Program provided summer instruction in career preparation to economically disadvantaged, unemployed out-of-school youths, both dropouts and graduates, in several cities.
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From page 124... ...
The gains reported for this less intensive summer program were as large as the gains reported for the full 6-month AYES program studied by Vera. The findings could be attributed to the fact that the RTP Career Exploration Program addressed a less disadvantaged population: approximately 25 percent of treatment and control group members were enrolled in college at the 3- and 8-month follow-ups.
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From page 125... ...
Alternative statistical tests were used to gauge the effectiveness of Project STEADY. Statistically significant gains for participants relative to controls were found in both job-holding skills and job-seeking skills when sites were pooled.
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From page 126... ...
The Job Corps Educational Improvement Effort (EIE) is noteworthy in its attempt to use random assignment of Job Corps participants to treatment and control groups to test alternative teaching techniques.
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From page 127... ...
The key analysis performed for each of the programs uses preprogram to postprogram differences in Stanford Achievement Test (SAT) scores as the dependent variable in an analysis of covariance in which "treatment" is the independent factor and the covariates include sex, age, race/ethnicity, highest grade completed in school, hometown size, whether family receives welfare, and score on SAT pretest.
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From page 130... ...
, differential attrition among black participants eliminated the significant difference in racial composition that had existed earlier between the experimental and control groups. The evaluation results indicate that the participants' school attendance improved and their criminal recidivism was reduced at 3 and 8 months postprogram compared with a randomly assigned control group.
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From page 131... ...
While initially based on an experimental design, random assignment was abandoned due to insufficient sample sizes, and all youths expressing an interest in the program were allowed to participate. Comparison group members were high school seniors from the same schools as participants.
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From page 132... ...
Participants and comparisons in the second year program were, of course, younger than those who participated the previous year; they were also of lower economic status, had less prior employment experience, and scored lower on pretests on a variety of cognitive measures. At program exit, participants exhibited significantly larger gains than did comparisons on each of the seven items in the SAS test battery.
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From page 133... ...
There were no significant differences in the number of repeat pregnancies, in school enrollment or completion, or in employment. While the evaluation design of Project Redirection was superior to that of other programs for pregnant and parenting youths, several shortcomings limit our confidence in the findings.
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From page 134... ...
The pooling of the two samples may account, in part, for the apparent decline in program effects between the 12-month and 24-month results. The interim report results rely exclusively on data from the initial sample while the 24-month results include data from the second sample, which account for a significant share (40 percent)
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From page 135... ...
CONCLUSION Programs offering labor market preparation were the largest single category of programs we reviewed. Although 15 reports met the committee's standards of evidence for determining program effectiveness, many suffered from serious methodological deficiencies that led to questions about their results.
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From page 136... ...
Many of the labor market preparation studies produced by the YEDPA knowledge development effort are not discussed in this report because we found their methodological deficiencies too serious to allow reliable interpretations of their results. The most common shortcomings in these evaluations were the inadequacy of the control or comparison groups and sample attrition.
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