Educationally Disadvantaged Older Youth: Employment

Overall, programs for older youths do have positive impacts on employment, but only three of them have been found to have lasting impacts.  Participants in Youth Corps worked 40 percent more hours by the end of the program than youths in the control group (YC), and participants in New Chance were more likely than control youths to be employed six months after the program ended (NC1).  At the two-year follow-up, participants in the Nurse Home Visitation Program were more likely to be employed (NHV4) and worked more than twice as many hours (NHV1) as young people in the control group.  Likewise, participants in the Teenage Parent Demonstration were more likely to be in school, job training or employed at the two-year follow-up and they participated in the program longer than youths in the control group (TPD1).  At the four-year follow-up, Job Corps participants were slightly more likely to be employed and worked more hours per week than those in the control group (JC2).  However, for two programs, impacts disappeared in the long-run (after the 6-month follow-up for New Chance and by the 5-year follow-up for TPD) (NC1, TPD2). 

One interesting finding was for JOBSTART.  Employment impacts of this program developed over time, rather than immediately, and then faded after the program ended.  Compared to youths in the control group, participants in JOBSTART were less likely to have worked in the first year (JS1, JS2) and more likely to have worked in the second year following assignment to the program (JS2).  In the third- and fourth-year follow-ups, there were no differences in employment between participants and control group members (JS2).