Opportunity Youth: Disenfranchised Young People

tials. 36 These numbers indicate that a strong majority of young people who disconnect from
school eventually achieve secondary credentials.
There are multiple ways young people can achieve secondary credentials. Young people
who have not aged out have the option of returning to public school, and many are served
through alternative schools, which are either operated by the district or by charter organizations.
The number of alternative schools that target at-risk and disconnected young people has increased
in recent years. But for some young people, returning to school is not an option, either
because they have aged out or because they are reluctant to return to institutions that were not
able to meet their needs the first time around. For these young people, a number of program options
can lead to a secondary credential. These programs vary in their structure and approach,
but roughly fall into two categories: comprehensive programs that specifically target young
people, and programs that target postsecondary education and serve a range of ages. Some of
these programs incorporate career pathway approaches.
Comprehensive Youth Programs
Programs in this category specifically target young people and have age limits on eligibility.
They tend to combine support services to address participants’ academic, employment,
and life goals. Many of these programs are federally funded and operate at the national scale,
and evaluation data from studies of these programs offer lessons on promising strategies to help
disconnected young people.
Two comprehensive youth programs are residential: Job Corps and National Guard
Youth ChalleNGe. Job Corps is the largest federal program for disconnected young people,
serving more than 60,000 each year across 125 centers. Participants can earn high school diplomas
or equivalency credentials and receive career training in one of many fields, such as
business, health, or construction. Participants also get health care, stipends, career counseling,
and transitional support for a year following graduation. A four-year random assignment study
found that the program increased the amount of education and training participants received,
and increased literacy rates. The program generated employment and earning gains through a
four-year follow-up period, but these effects were not sustained after the end of that follow-up
period, except for young people who entered the program when they were 20 to 24 years old. 37
In ChalleNGe, participants engage in a five-month, intensive residential program that
includes eight core components: education, life-skills training, leadership-skills development,
community service, citizenship building, physical fitness, health and hygiene, and job-skills
training and career exploration. The program also helps participants set up structured mentoring
36 Belfield, Levin, and Rosen (2012).
37 Schochet, Burghardt, and McConnell (2006).
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