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YOUTH ~ EMPLOYMENT iNDTRAINING ~ PROGRAMS THE YEDPA YEARS Charles L. Betsey, Robinson G. Hollister, Jr., and Mary R. Papageorgiou, editors Committee on Youth Employment Programs Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences anc! Education National Research Council NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS Washington, D. C. 1985

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National Academy Press · 2101 Constitution Avenue, NW · Washington, DC 2041X NOTICE: The project that is the subject of this report was approved by the Governing Board of the National Research Council, whose members are drawn from the councils of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. The members of the committee responsible for the report were chosen for their special competences and with regard for appropriate balance. This report has been reviewed by a group other than the authors according to procedures approved by a Report Review Committee consisting of members of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. The National Research Council was established by the National Academy of Sciences in 1916 to associate the broad community of science and technology with the Academy's purposes of furthering knowledge and of advising the federal government. The Council operates in accordance with general policies determined by the Academy under the authority of its congressional charter of 1863, which establishes the Academy as a private, nonprofit, self-governing membership corporation. The Council has become the principal operating agency of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering in the conduct of their services to the government, the public, and the scientific and engineering communities. It is administered jointly by both Academies and the Institute of Medicine. The National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine were established in 1964 and 1970, respectively, under the charter of the National Academy of Sciences. This project has been funded with federal funds from the U.S. Department of Labor under contract number 99-3-3239-75- 120-01. The contents of this publication do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Department of Labor. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Main entry under title: Youth employment and training programs. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. YEDPA programs-Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Youth-Employment-United States-Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Occupationaltraining-United States-Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Betsey, Charles L. II. Hollister, Robinson G. II. Papageorgiou, Mary R. IV. National Research Council (U.S.). Committee on Youth Employment Programs. HD6273.Y6548 1985 331.3'42592'0973 85-25856 ISBN 0-309-03595-3 Printed in the United States of America

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COMMITTEE ON YOUTH EMPLOYMENT PROGRAMS ROBINSON G. HOLLISTER, JR. (Chair), Department of Economics, Swarthmore College ROBERT F. BORUCH, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University RAYMOND l. CARROLL, Department of Statistics, University of North Carolina NAMES S. COLEMAN, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago ROBERTO M. FERNANDEZ, Department of Sociology, University of Arizona JUDITH M. GUERON, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, New York JOEL F. HANDLER, School of Law, University of California, Los Angeles PATRICK W. MOORE, San Diego Regional Employment ant! Training Consortium RONALD L. OAXACA, Department of Economics, University of Arizona JOHN OGBU, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley PAUL OSTERMAN, Department of Economics, Boston University PAUL E. PETERSON, Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. HARRIET B. PRESSER, Department of Sociology, University of Maryland WILLIAM l. WILSON, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago DAVID A. WISE, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University CHARLES L. BETSEY, Study Director MARY R. PAPAGEORGIOU, Research Associate CHARLES TURNER, Senior Research Associate · · ~

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Contents Preface 1 Summary, Conclusions, and Recommendations Youth Employment and Unemployment 34 Implementation of the Youth Employment and Demonstration Projects Act . . . 69 4 Procedures Used in Evaluating the Effectiveness of YEDPA Programs Effectiveness of Occupational Skills Training Programs .................... 6 Effectiveness of Labor Market Preparation Programs ....................... 7 Effectiveness of Temporary lobs Programs ................................ 8 Effectiveness of Job Placement Programs 9 Evidence of Program Effectiveness From National Data Bases References Appendices · ·····~ A Standardized Data Collection for Large-Scale Program Evaluation: An Assessment of the YEDPA-SAS Experience 193 Charles F. Turner 99 108 119 137 161 175 183 193 B R I T i ct 220 C Implications of the Youth Employment Experience for Improving Applied Research and Evaluation Policy 231 Robert Boruch D Estimates of Effects of Employment and Training Programs Derived from National Longitudinal Surveys and Continuous Longitudinal Manpower Survey Valerie Nelson and Charles F. Turner v 254

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Commissioned Papers ..... 281 Knowledge Development Under the Youth Employment and Demonstration Projects Act, 1977-1981 281 Richard F. Elmore The Social Context of Youth Employment Programs Elijah Anderson Youth Joblessness and Race: Evidence from the 1980 Census George Cave Hispanic Youth in the Labor Market: An Analysis of High School and Bevond Roberto Fernandez The Participation of Young Women in Employment and Training Programs Margaret Simms Index .... .... 348 ... 367 ... 410 462 V1 . 487

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Preface In October 1983 the U.S. Department of Labor requested that the National Research Council undertake a study assessing knowleclge about youth employment and training programs, based primarily on programs carried out under the Youth Employment and Demonstration Projects Act (YEDPA). The Committee on Youth Employment Programs was formed in the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education to carry out that task and worked on it from fall 1983 through spring 1985. This report is the result of the committee's efforts. The rationale of this report can best be understood in light of the charge to the committee, the nature of the Youth Employment and Demonstration Projects Act activities, and the fashion in which the committee went about its work. The committee's charge covered four tasks: · To review what is known about the effectiveness of the principal types of YEDPA programs; · To assess existing knowledge regarding the implementation of youth employment pro- grams; · To evaluate the YEDPA research strategy; · To summarize the lessons learned from YEDPA for future policy development and program implementation. The Youth Employment and Demonstration Projects Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in late 1977. The programs grouped uncler this act ran approximately from 1978 through 1981, after which they were terminated or reorganized by the new administration. YEDPA represented a substantial and rapid increase in expenditures by the federal govern- ment on youth employment and training programs, and YEDPA activities encompassed several different major types of programs. The diversity of programs was further increased by the explicit injunction in the legislation "to test the relative efficacy of different ways of dealing with these [youth employment problems] in different local contexts" and the result- ing substantial allocation of money to demonstration and research activities that were in- tended to demonstrate a wide variety of program concepts and attempt to assess them. It is estimated that over the 4-year period of YEDPA operations, about $600 million was allocated for explicit demonstration programs and their related research and that, even in the first year, 197S, as many as 60 distinct demonstrations were funded in about 300 sites. The Office of Youth Programs, which administered YEDPA, stressed the "knowledge development" aspects of these demonstration and research activities anc! sponsored extensive reporting and data gathering concerning them. It is not surprising, then, that our committee found itself faced with more than 400 reports, · ~ V11

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gathered by the Employment and Training Administration of the Department of Labor, which became the basic raw materials for our review of YEDPA. We found this mass of material both too much and too little. It was too much in the sense of presenting a serious challenge to the committee to design a strategy that would make it possible to assess so much material thoroughly and in the time available. It was too little in that such reports on individual programs were not likely to provide broacI and comprehensive views of either the nature of youth employment problems or the nationwide operations of YEDPA. In this preface I attempt to indicate how we sought to solve these problems and, at the same time, to outline for the reader the structure and rationale of the report. As a first step, the committee members and staff sought to review and summarize the research on the nature of the youth employment problem; some of the research had been sponsored by YEDPA, but much of it was carried out independently, or under other spon- sorship, by scholars and research groups. The fruits of this work are represented in Chapter 2. This task was made considerably easier by the existence of several excellent overviews of research in this field (which are referenced in Chapter 2~. When entangled in a review of the details of YEDPA processes and programs, it is easy to lose sight of the very serious employment difficulties faced in 1978 by those youths whom YEDPA was designed to serve, problems that youths in 1985 appear to face in roughly the same degree. For that reason the committee found the material in Chapter 2 both a very important background and a reminder, as we proceeded through the rest of our work, not to lose sight of the situation of the population at risk. We hope readers will find that material useful in a similar fashion. A second element in our strategy was to seek to deal with the more than 400 reports. The committee developed a set of criteria standards of evidence according to which the reports were to be vetted. The stanclarcts constituted the minimum required for a report to be judged good social science evidence of the effects of a program on its participants. The staff, assisted by several outside consultants, screened all the reports according to the standards and then classified those meeting the standards according to program type and target groups served. (This screening process is described in Chapter 4.) This process resulted in a severe reduction in the number of projects that were to be reviewed in depth: only 28 projects met our standards for in-depth committee review. This sharp reduction in the number and scope of projects that met even our minimal standards of evidence greatly surprised us, and it must be discouraging for those who had hoped for more in terms of sheer volume of results from the YEDPA knowledge development process. The committee then turned to an in-depth review of those projects. This was accomplished by dividing into four subcommittees, one for each of the four major categories of program types: occupational skills training, labor market preparation, temporary jobs, and job place- ment. The subcommittees and staff thoroughly reviewed all the reports, and the committee then held a five-day working conference to review and debate the subcommittee conclusions and begin drafting what eventually became Chapters 5 through 8. Those chapters contain our review of what is known and not known about the effectiveness of youth employment and training programs, based primarily, though not exclusively, on the YEDPA experience. The draft reports of the subcommittees were edited, amended, supplemented, and converted into the present report chapters primarily by staff member Charles Betsey. Important additional work on assessing the sizable data base on YEDPA programs created by the Educational Testing Service was undertaken by staff member Charles Turner and appears as Appendix A. Chapters 5 through 8 represent the bulk of the committee's work, and we have chosen to present that work in considerably greater cletai! than is the practice in more general reviews. We felt it was important to make it possible for readers to find the details of evidence upon which our conclusions and recommendations are based and to lay bare the unevenness in coverage and weaknesses of the material we used, as well as the strengths. We also faced, as part of our charge, the task of drawing lessons about the implementation 1 · · ~ V111

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of youth programs from the YEDPA experience. This called for assessments of implementa- tion both at the national level of YEDPA design and at the local level of program realization. The latter assessment could, to some degree, be drawn from the mass of 400 reports on YEDPA activities. Thus, as the reports were screened according to our criteria of effective- ness, we also noted those cases in which the reports appeared to provide useful information regarding program implementation. These reports provided a body of material on specific program implementation, but we wanted to supplement this material to broaden our view of implementation. This desire led us to the third major element of our strategy: to reach outside the committee and its staff. To deal with the task of drawing general conclusions about implementation at the local level, we commissioned three short papers based on the material identified during our screening process and the authors' own experiences with youth employment and training programs. These papers by Erik Butler, lames Darr, and Philip Moss provided useful addi- tions to our own review. We also wanted to obtain a very broad perspective on the design and implementation of YEDPA at the national level. To this end, at a relatively early stage in our deliberations, we asked Richard Elmore to carry out a substantial review of the development and administration of YEDPA. This review was critical for the committee both because of its comprehensiveness and quality and because of its timeliness; it appears as the first of the commissioned papers in this volume. Elmore was able to provide the committee with a draft of his review prior to our five-day working conference and to attend the conference for a few days to discuss the details of his review with the committee. Many committee members, myself included, found his paper a very important part of our education about YEDPA; it brought together many elements of the development and administration of YEDPA at the national level and presented the views of many of the key actors in those events. This does not mean that the committee endorses all the characterizations of events or conclusions about processes given in Elmore's paper, but we believe it is a valuable paper for understanding the YEDPA experience, and it was helpful to us in drafting Chapter 3 (as well as other sections of our report). Chapter 3, then, provides the details of our review of implementation of YEDPA programs, based on the program reports themselves and the other materials. The chapter was largely drafted by staff member Mary Papageorgiou. The third element of our strategy reaching beyond the committee for assistance in filling gaps in information and knowledge involved not only the papers on issues of implementa- lion but also on other topics for which the committee felt its own expertise was lacking or for which reviews of the literature proved insufficient to fill important gaps. It should be noted that all of the papers we commissioned were written under considerable time pressure, as in most cases we did not identify the gaps in knowledge until our deliberations were well under way. In those cases in which we felt the commissioned papers not only served the immediate needs of the committee but also were likely to be of general interest to readers of this report, they are included in this volume. We reached outside the committee and staff not only through papers but also through personal contacts. At a very early stage of our work, Andrew Sum of Northeastern Universi- ty, who has had a broad and continuing acquaintance with youth employment and training programs, met with the committee and provided an overview of programs and youth employment problems that helped many of us to become quickly acquainted with develop- ments in this field. Seymour Brandwein of the Department of Labor, who was at the National Research Council as a visiting scholar during our study, provided continuing advice and guidance to the committee and staff on the basis of his long and thoughtful experience with employment and training programs. Several committee members and staff met with staff members of two other organizations that had been involved in reviews of YEDPA program effectiveness: Andrew Hahn and Robert Lerman of Brandeis University and Linda Cole, 1X

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Norman Freeberg, Jules Goodison, and Donald Rock of the Educational Testing Service. Both groups gave generously of their time, as well as of materials they had developed for their own reviews. In addition to reaching beyond the mass of reports on YEDPA programs through commis- sioned papers and personal contacts, we felt it important to consider other sources of data that had been, or could be, used to assess the effectiveness of youth employment and training programs. Conspicuous among these sources were two national data bases, the Continuous Longitudinal Mannower Survev (CLMS) and the special youth sample of the National r - J ~ ~ 1 ~ Longitudinal Surveys (NLS). Our review and assessment of studies based on these two major data bases is provided in Chapter 9, which was largely drafted by Valerie Nelson, who served as a consultant throughout the project, and staff member Charles Turner. While this review of studies from CLMS and NLS did not alter in any respect our conclusions about the effective- ness of youth programs, it did provide some very important information bearing on appropri- ate methods of evaluation of youth programs that we believe significantly strengthens the basis for our recommendations on the use of random assignment. Now, at last, we come to the rationale for the chapter that we have placed first, "Summary, Conclusions, and Recommendations." This chapter constitutes the committee's response to the charge with which we began our work, which is the principal reason we have elected to put it at the front of our report. Readers will find in this chapter the committee's major findings, conclusions, and recommendations about the nature of the youth employment problem, the implementation of youth employment and training programs, the effectiveness of different types of programs for different segments of the youth population problem, the strengths and weaknesses of methods of research on and evaluation of youth programs, and the future evolution of youth employment and training programs and research on them. We are grateful to staff member Mary Papageorgiou for drafting and redrafting many versions of this chapter as the committee debated the issues. Chapter 1 obviously cannot stand entirely on its own, but depends on the detailed material that is provided in the rest of the report. However, as I noted above, because the material that the committee was asked to assess was so sizable and complex, we felt that the main chapters of the report had to have greater detail than is usual in such reports. Since not all readers will want to work their way through that detail in order to reach our summary statements, we chose to broaden the opening chapter of conclusions and recommendations to provide a reprise of major themes and to make explicit the limitations of our review and the references to the particular programs upon which each conclusion is based. In addition to the efforts of the committee and its staff, the contributions of several other people should be acknowledged. Fred Romero and William Showler of the U.S. Department of Labor provided essential support to the project and access to the materials on which the report is based. David A. GosTin, Executive Director of the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education provided useful guidance at several critical junctures. Eugenia Grohman, Associate Director for Reports of the commission, worked with the authors and the National Academy Press to edit and produce this volume. lean Shirhall provided additional editorial assistance, and Deborah Faisson prepared the manuscript through many revisions. This report would not exist without the contributions of these people. In closing this preface, I would like to emphasize that the committee and staff members have been motivated throughout our work by awareness of, and concern about, the continu- ing problems of young people in our society particularly those who have dropped out of school, black and Hispanic youths, and women, especially those who are unmarried and have children in obtaining and holding a decent job. We have not hesitated to indicate when evidence is inadequate, or completely lacking, to point the way toward more effective policies and programs, and we have tried to draw the lessons from past experiences that may help to avoid the repetition of past mistakes. Since, however, the problems persist, we are concerned x

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that the identification of mistakes of the past not become a basis for failure to act in the present. We must continue to try to enhance youth employment opportunities. It is our hope that this report helps to delineate such a path for continuing efforts. Robinson Hollister, Jr., Chair Committee on Youth Employment Programs X1

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yOUTH I-MPLOYMENI , _ . . . ~ ~ END RAINING P] JOGRAMS THE YEDPA YEARS

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