Youth Employment and Training Programs The YEDPA Years (1985) / Chapter Skim
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1 Summary, Conclusions, and Recommendations
1 Summary, Conclusions, and Recommendations
Pages 1-33
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YEDPA programs ended in 1981 with the change in presidential administration. At that time the products of YEDPA's research had not been comprehensively evaluated, and there were questions about what had been learned from this undertaking.
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While some may regard in-school employment opportunities of lesser importance, researchers have found that, holding measured characteristics constant, those youths who work during school years have higher employment rates and wages after their school years. This finding may simply reflect that youths who are more motivated (an unmeasured characteristic)
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The exceptions were studies of three programs that began before YEDPA, the Job Corps, the Summer Youth Employment Program, and Supported Work. We have attempted to test the individual YEDPA research reports against reasonable standards of scientific quality with respect to both the data collected and the methods used to measure program effects.
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FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS ON PROGRAM IMPLEMENTATION The conditions under which YEDPA was implemented severely constrained both the potential effectiveness of the programs themselves in reaching their objectives and the related research and demonstration activities that sought to evaluate program effects and to create a reliable knowledge base for future youth programs. Implementation was affected by: (1)
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National Office Management of YEDPA The tasks of designing and implementing YEDPA programs and research activities strained the capacity of DOL's Office of Youth Programs (OYP) given its very small staff and limited research capability.
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The support provided by the Center for Employment and Income Studies was effective in documenting and assessing YEDPA programs, but CEIS's technical assistance and oversight of YEDPA research were not -- and given the scale of the task, could not have been -- sufficient to ensure the comprehensiveness of its research design or the quality of its execution, at least as evidenced by our review. CONCLUSION: The resources provided to the Office of Youth Programs were woefully insufficient to its charge to mount and manage YEDPA programs and research.
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Targeting, Recruiting, and Retaining Youths Research on YEDPA programs cites numerous problems with targeting and recruiting sufficient numbers of eligible youths from the designated target groups: in-school and out-of-school youths meeting criteria of economic disadvantage. This problem was attributed in part to the short planning time and the resulting tendency of prime sponsors to base needs assessments on outdated information and to overestimate target group size.
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Enrollment of Young Women Most of the youth programs we reviewed enrolled substantial numbers of young women, and evidence from some programs suggests more positive effects for young women than for young men. Many of the programs, however, encountered difficulties maintaining enrollment of economically disadvantaged young women, apparently because of the high incidence of teenage pregnancy and childbearing.
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The Job Corps is a comprehensive program providing occupational skills training, basic (and remedial) education, counseling, health care, and job placement to youths more disadvantaged than typical participants in youth programs.
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Nonresidential skills training would certainly be less expensive to operate than the Job Corps; however, YEDPA Produced no reliable evidence on the effectiveness of occupational skills training Provided in a nonresidential setting for out-of-school , youths generally or for the severely disadvantaged population of out-of-school youths served by the Job corps. Occupational Skills Training Programs for In-School Youths m e committee found few studies of occupational skills training programs operated under YEDPA.
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CONCLUSION: YEDPA programs providing labor market preparation for out-of-school youths resulted in some positive effects on employment in the 3 to 8 months following Program Participation (Alternative Youth Employment Strategies, the Recruitment and Training Program, Project STEADY)
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each was so seriously flawed in one respect or another that we could draw no conclusions regarding the effects of such in-school labor market Preparation programs on employment, earnings, educational attainment, or other goals. Temporary Jobs Programs Programs providing temporary subsidized employment have until recently, with the passage of the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA)
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CONCLUSION: m e evaluation of the Supported Work program for severely disadvantaged school dropouts provided strong evidence of no long-term gains in employment and earnings. In addition to their value as a source of immediate employment and as a bridge to longer-term unsubsidized employment, temporary jobs programs have sometimes been seen as yielding social value in the form of return to school by dropouts or entrance in alternative education (GED)
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This effect may be viewed by some as contributing to the goal of greater social equity and as of sufficient merit, in itself, to justify the program regardless of other benefits. Others may believe, however, that an important objective of temporary jobs programs, even for in-school youths, is improvement in postprogram employment and earnings.
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One of the purposes of temporary jobs programs for in-school youths was to prevent youths from dropping out of school in order to find employment. The entitlement project in fact set school enrollment as an eligibility requirement for a subsidized job and had as a major objective the retention of youths in school.
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, we could not find sufficient reliable evidence to assess the efficiencY, in terms of social benefits and social costs, with which youths programs achieved their effects. FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS ON YEDPA RESEARCH We often found it difficult, as noted above, to reach firm conclusions about the effectiveness of YEDPA programs given the quality of the available evidence.
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It would be unfortunate, however, to conclude that rigorous research cannot be conducted on youth programs. On the contrary, we found several examples of research studies on youth employment and training programs that provided strong evidence, both positive and negative, on program effectiveness (Job Corps, Supported Work, and Alternative Youth Employment Strategies)
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The Job Corps evaluation also, despite efforts to correct for biases in the constructed comparison group, was ultimately less convincing in its estimates of effects than would have been the case had random assignment been used. CONCLUSION: YEDPA research did not make sufficient use of random assignment in defining participant and control groups.
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For most programs, follow-up measures were available only at 3 or 8 months after program completion; Job Corps and Supported Work, with over 3-year follow-ups, were notable exceptions. Given the employment objectives of most YEDPA programs, a more reasonable test would have considered longer-term outcomes.
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This undercoverage makes it impossible to generalize to the total population of participants in YEDPA demonstration projects unless one makes highly unrealistic assumptions, for example, that nonresponders were a random sample of program participants. CONCLUSION: Many YEDPA research projects gave inadequate attention to sample design and execution, including defining the sampled population, obtaining data from all members of the target sample, and preventing sample attrition between waves of the longitudinal data gathering.
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There is evidence not only that very large numbers of jobs were provided to youths under YEDPA, but also that the quality of the jobs was more than "make-work." CONCLUSION: A major achievement of YEDPA was that it succeeded in providing large numbers of disadvantaged Youths with jobs _ that were more than make-work. YEDPA demonstrated the capacity of the employment and training system to mount and run large-scale jobs programs for young people.
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m e YEDPA legislation required the involvement of private employers, the schools, and other established agencies, both public and private, In planning and delivering youth services in order to explore alternative mechanisms for more effective service delivery and to encourage the integration of employment and training services into the mainstream of the society. Our review of numerous reports on program effectiveness and implementation suggests that although the involvement of these parties was effective in making better use of local resources, it complicated the planning and delivery process and did not on the whole achieve its goals of improving service delivery and integrating either the programs or their participants into the larger society.
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remediation of the problem by targeting services directly to dropouts in a way that encouraged return to school or an alternative education. Our review of youth programs found no evidence of effective means of either dropout prevention or remediation.
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Youth Programs Committees such as ours invariably recommend further program research and testing. Unless the problems addressed by the programs have disappeared or been substantially ameliorated or unless social priorities have shifted sharply, such recommendations should in good conscience be made.
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Occupational Skills Training The results of the Job Corps evaluation suggest that occupational skills training programs can be an effective means of solving some of the structural employment problems of disadvantaged out-of-school youths, at least of that population of disadvantaged dropout youths served in residential Job Corps centers. The fact that the research to date has not explained the Job Corps' effects in terms of the individual contribution of its many program components or the totality of its residential services, limits the generalizability of the results to other disadvantaged youths in other settings.
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Attainment of this latter objective will require some use of random assignment to alternative components within the Job Corps program. RECOMMENDATION: Nonresidential skills training programs for out-of-school youths should be systematically tested and evaluated.
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Elements of SYEP could be structured so some skills training is added to the pure work experience in order to determine whether such training enhances the long-term employment effects of the program. Women in Youth Employment Programs Although women constitute half of the participants in employment and training programs, little attention has been given to sex differences either in terms of program needs or outcomes.
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We believe that with relatively small amounts of central resources, a strategy and mechanism for evaluation research under JTPA can be implemented which will considerably enhance the likelihood that reliable evidence on youth programs will be derived from JTPA.
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The experience with the use of intermediary organizations to organize research and technical assistance under YEDPA, while it was not all positive, was sufficiently good in a number of cases to suggest that this might be an effective medium through which to interject this evaluation research into the JTPA framework. Such organizations now have experience in negotiating with local operating agencies, adapting research designs to local constraints, and combining technical assistance with research guidance.
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Poor execution will compromise even the best design. Random Assignment Our review of YEDPA research strongly suggests that much more could have been learned, and more confidence placed in the results, if random assignment had more frequently been used.
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RECOMMENDATION: Future researchers should avoid overreliance on subjective measures of program outcomes and devote more resources to studying the relationships that exist between subjective indicators and key objective outcome variables. Postprogram Follow-up m e Job Corps evaluations suggest that some program effects that are not apparent at short-term follow-ups may emerge in the longer term.
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It was very apparent in our review that many of the problems we faced in attempting to draw inferences from YEDPA research resulted from the fact that under YEDPA attempts were made to combine numerous research objectives with massive service delivery. The consequent tensions, conflicts, and overload on the system interfered with the careful planning and conduct of the research and demonstration activities, with the result that the research findings fall short in informing the public policy issues from which YEDPA originated.
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From page 33... ...
The educational system, on the other hand, should not be taken as an exact model for the institutionalization of the employment and training system, since it has not yet found an effective way to prepare a substantial segment of the youth population for later employment. For the most part, the youth programs of the employment and training system have been specifically targeted toward special segments of the youth population, often those perceived as most disadvantaged.
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