Opportunity Youth: Disenfranchised Young People

way. Results from quasi-experimental evaluations should be interpreted with some caution.
Such evaluations may be more or less rigorous depending on the study design used.
An implementation or process study is an evaluation that focuses on a program’s implementation,
examining whom it serves, how it operates, and how well it achieves its intended
goals. Implementation studies may include data on participant outcomes. They may stand alone,
or may be combined with impact studies. Though an implementation study does not assess an
intervention’s impact, it can offer a valuable opportunity to learn about best practices and about
what factors facilitate or impede successful program implementation. An implementation study
that includes in-depth interviews or focus groups with disconnected young people also reveals
the needs and experiences of the population served by the program.
The evaluations discussed next include randomized controlled trials, quasi-experimental
studies, and implementation evaluations. Only evaluations conducted by third-party evaluators
are included. While many programs report their outcomes on websites or other forums, such
self-reported data were not included in this evidence scan.
Evidence on Programs
This section focuses on evidence concerning specific programs that serve disconnected young
people, specifically on findings from evaluations of programs that are currently operating. 28 The
discussion is divided into four main sections, organized by the program or intervention’s primary
target outcome. Employment-focused programs are discussed first, followed by educationfocused
programs. A third section focuses on outreach and case management models, which
often serve the most disconnected segment of the population. A fourth section focuses on behavioral
and therapeutic interventions. A summary of this information is provided in Appendix
A. It should be noted that these categories are arbitrary in some ways — programs often target
multiple outcomes. A synthesis of “what works” is provided at the end of the section.
The studies covered here largely focus on education- or employment-related outcomes.
These outcomes are often the easiest to measure because programs generally already collect
data on them. There are also state and federal sources of data on these outcomes; using data that
are already collected as standard practice lowers the cost of evaluations and can allow easier
comparisons across programs. However, a program may produce outcomes in other aspects of a
young person’s life that are harder to measure, but that are linked to a person’s well-being. The
Youth Transition Funder’s Group Well-Being Framework outlines these areas, which include
28 Evaluations of programs that are no longer operating were mostly excluded from the scan, though some
evaluations of discontinued programs found impacts on employment and education outcomes. These discontinued
programs include the National Supported Work Demonstration, JOBSTART, and the Youth Incentive
Entitlement Pilot Project.
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