School's Out: How Summer Youth Employment Programs Impact Academic Outcomes

Abstract

Recently there has been an emphasis on how time spent outside of the classroom can affect student outcomes, including high school graduation, with the hope of closing academic achievement gaps along socioeconomic and racial lines. This paper provides experimental evidence regarding a particular type of out-of-school activity—early work experience—on high school academic outcomes for low-income inner-city youth. Using randomized admissions lotteries for students who applied to the Boston Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP), we estimate the effect of being selected to participate on academic outcomes as measured by administrative school records. We find that SYEP lottery winners are 4.4 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school on time and 2.5 percentage points less likely to drop out of high school during the four years after participating in the program relative to the control group. These improvements appear to be driven by better attendance and course performance in the year after being selected for the program, with the program's impact on attendance persisting into the second year. Survey data suggest that the Boston SYEP may affect academic outcomes by increasing aspirations to attend college, gaining basic work habits, and improving social skills during the summer.

Impact of summer programmes on the outcomes of disadvantaged or ‘at risk’ young people: A systematic review

“…A further notable finding pertains to summer employment programmes' effect on education outcomes. When participants find purpose and meaning in their work, potentially further facilitated through the provision of financial and/or non‐financial incentives, they are more likely to see the importance of education in achieving their life goals (Leos‐Urbel, 2014; Modestino & Paulsen, 2019c). As detailed in the background section on how the intervention might work, Modestino (2019) identifies a mechanism through building aspiration, self‐belief, emotion control and a longer‐term work ambition.…”

“…In summer employment programmes , the positive relationships that staff – including programme staff and workplace supervisors – build with participants are also highlighted as likely to be playing a role in improving attendance and programme completion. Where participants in summer employment programmes report improved social skills, such as asking staff for help and support, this is positively correlated with improvements in attendance (Modestino & Paulsen, 2019c; Reich, 2018; Theodos et al, 2014, 2017). This suggests that where staff members foster the development of these social skills, attendance outcomes may improve.…”

“…Targeting based on academic outcomes is also common, with some programmes targeting students with lower attainment, or at risk of not transitioning to higher education or meaningful work (Theodos et al, 2014, 2017). Most programmes have a high proportion of ethnic minority participants, particularly African American and Hispanic participants – in many programmes, these groups make up over half of participants, although this is often a result of self‐selection and the overlap between ethnic identity and the forms of disadvantage used as eligibility criteria, rather than an explicit eligibility criteria (Gelber et al, 2016; Heller, 2014; Leos‐Urbel, 2014; Modestino & Paulsen, 2019a; 2019c; Modestino, 2019b; Reich, 2018; Sum, 2015; Theodos et al, 2014, 2017; Valentine et al, 2017).…”

When scale and replication work: Learning from summer youth employment experiments

“…Experiments in Chicago, New York, and Boston have found generally similar patterns of SYEPs' effects: large declines in criminal justice involvement and violence, with little improvement in future employment on average (Heller, 2014;Davis and Heller, 2020;Kessler et al, 2021;Gelber et al, 2016). Education impacts are more mixed, with most studies finding small or no improvements in high school or college outcomes (Schwartz et al, 2015;Leos-Urbel, 2014;Davis and Heller, 2020;Heller, 2014;Gelber et al, 2016), and one suggesting larger benefits (Modestino and Paulsen, 2019). But the Chicago and Boston studies focus on a relatively small subset of the cities' summer programs, with service providers selecting into the evaluation.…”

“…To ease interpretation, we focus only on the outcomes where negative effects are desirable. One could also do this exercise with the positive educational effects in Leos-Urbel (2014),Schwartz et al (2015), andModestino and Paulsen (2019), but we avoid that here in part because those results differ from the education effects in this paper, while the other results are more consistent across studies.30 Standardizing the outcomes could be a partial solution. But since so many outcomes are indicator variables, focusing on mean changes rather than standard deviation changes is more directly interpretable.…”