This is one in a series of 15 two-page, evidence-based framing memos on pressing education and social issues prepared by MDRC for the incoming Obama Administration and the new Congress.

Bottom Line

Nearly 1 in 7 18- and 19-year-olds is disconnected from the worlds of school and work. In a labor market in which education and skills are more and more important, these young people are at a serious disadvantage. Unfortunately, the record of success for programs for out-of-school youth is disappointing. The next step would be to build on the early promise of several current youth programs and to mount demonstrations of new models that would be carefully evaluated.

What Do We Know?

Too many young people are disconnected from the worlds of school and work, putting them at serious risk for getting into trouble today and not succeeding in the future.

• Nationally, about 30 percent of high school freshmen do not graduate in four years; in the 50 largest U.S. cities, the dropout rate is closer to 50 percent.
  
  
• Moreover, a significant number of young people become profoundly “disconnected” from both school and work. Nationally, about 14 percent of 18- and 19-year-olds have not graduated from high school, are not attending school, and are not working. The comparable figure is 23 percent for African-American 18- and 19-year-olds.
  
  
• Teenagers’ employment rates have plummeted to their lowest level in 60 years, while the employment rates of young adults 18 to 29 have continued to cascade downward. Among 18- to 29-year-olds not enrolled in school, nearly one in four are not currently working, and one in six did not work at all in the previous year.
  
  
• Besides failure in the labor market, disconnected youth are more likely to have other poor outcomes, like nonmarital births and criminal justice involvement.

• Training programs for out-of-school youth operated under the Job Training Partnership Act in the 1980s showed, at best, no impact on earnings. Participants in JOBSTART and New Chance, two intensive community-based education and training models of the 1980s and 1990s, were more likely to obtain a GED than their counterparts in a control group, but this did not translate into greater success in the labor market. Even the intensive, residential Job Corps program, the nation’s largest program for out-of-school youth, produced no long-term increases in employment or earnings for its participants (though it did increase receipt of both GEDs and vocational certificates).
  
  
• One of the few bright spots came from an evaluation of Conservation and Youth Service Corps, which found a variety of modest but positive impacts on employment and education outcomes, particularly for African-American males, over a relatively short follow-up period.
  
  
• A current random assignment evaluation of the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe, a 22-week residential program with a one-year nonresidential mentoring component, shows early signs of success, particularly on educational outcomes.

Key Choices

The first policy option should be to prevent young people from dropping out of school in the first place (see MDRC’s transition memos on education). But once youth become disconnected, states and localities need assistance to develop effective programs. In fact, in recent years, several big-city mayors have launched ambitious initiatives to create new systems to track and serve disconnected youth. However, the federal government plays an important role — providing funding, compiling best practices, and supporting research. Evidence-building is especially important in the youth field because the self-selection issues are so severe: only the most motivated young people voluntarily come forward to participate in programs. But these are the same young people who are likely to have found another way to succeed on their own. The 2003 final report of the White House Task Force for Disadvantaged Youth recommended that “a cross-agency research agenda based on large, randomized field trials be created and implemented to assess the effectiveness of interventions to improve outcomes for disadvantaged youth.” Such an agenda might have two parts:

• Continue to build evidence about the most promising current youth-serving programs. A new generation of youth programs now exists — YouthBuild, National Guard Youth ChalleNGe, Gateway to College, Year-up, and City Year, all of which create pathways to either jobs or postsecondary education or both. The service corps models, like City Year and the state and city conservation corps, have shown early positive results. Are the intensive programs like YouthBuild effective? How about the much more costly residential programs for disadvantaged youth?
  
  
• Invest in new demonstration programs that build on the lessons of the past. For instance, to address the dual problems of the deteriorating youth labor market and high dropout rates, a demonstration project could be created in a few high-poverty school districts that tested a variation of the Youth Incentive Entitlement Pilot Program of the 1970s. This was a job guarantee program for 16- to 19-year-olds conditioned on school attendance and performance. The project generated high participation rates (56 percent overall and 63 percent for black youth) and eliminated the black/white employment gap, but the study ended before policymakers could get clear answers about the long-term effects of the job guarantee. This model could be adapted for disconnected 18- to 24-year-olds who re-engage in school or work. Students would receive financial incentives conditioned on continued forward progress in school and work. Students who graduate could be eligible for performance-based scholarships as an incentive to pursue postsecondary education as a pathway to better jobs.

Another option would be an adaptation of the popular Career Academy program for out-of-school youth. Career Academies are small schools organized around a career themes and feature employer partnerships and work internships. A MDRC study of Career Academies with 12 years of follow-up shows that Career Academies produce large earnings gains, without reducing the chances that students enroll in and complete postsecondary education. There were also effects on marriage, independent living, and family stability. Career Academies could be run as alternative or charter schools for returning dropouts.

Key References and Resources

MDRC's Projects for Disconnected Youth

Sum, Andrew, Joseph McLaughlin, and Ishwar Khatiwada. 2008. The Collapse of the 2008 Summer Teen Job Market: A Record 60-Year Employment Low for the Nation’s Teens. Boston: Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University.

The White House Task Force for Disadvantaged Youth. October 2003. Final Report. Washington, DC: Author.