Low school attendance rates and school dropout in many urban high schools
present serious hurdles for policy efforts to close the academic
achievement gap that exists along socio-economic and racial lines. At
the same time, policymakers and researchers are paying increased
attention to how students’ experiences when school is out of session,
especially during the summer, influence educational success.
Recent work by Jacob Leos-Urbel (link is external), associate director the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities (link is external) at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, provides
new evidence regarding the impact of large-scale summer youth
employment programs on high school students’ school attendance and
academic achievement in the following school year.
Many
cities across the country, including throughout California, offer
publicly-funded summer youth employment programs. Although not
explicitly focused on bolstering school attendance or academic success,
summer youth employment may lead to improvements in school attendance
and other educational outcomes.
Beyond
increasing financial well-being, employment may foster non-cognitive
skills such as responsibility, positive work habits, motivation, time
management, determination, and self-confidence. Summer employment may
also benefit youth by keeping them engaged in positive supervised
activities when school is out of session, and is considerably less
likely to detract time from educational pursuits compared to work during
the school year.
Little
prior research has examined the impact of work during the summer on
students’ educational outcomes. Leos-Urbel estimates the impact of
summer work experiences on high school students’ attendance and
educational outcomes in the following school year using data from New
York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP).
Due
to high demand for jobs through SYEP, the city uses a lottery system in
an effort to equitably allocate program slots. This lottery system
effectively assigns the offer to participate or not participate in SYEP
at random, creating a control group of youth who apply to SYEP but are
not chosen, which allows for causal estimates of the relationship
between summer jobs and academic success.
The
study uses SYEP data for 36,550 program applicants in 2007 matched to
education files from the New York City Department of Education. The
primary outcome of interest is school attendance in the school year
following application to SYEP. Additional analyses examine statewide
high school math and English exams attempted and passed, and scores on
these exams.
The
author finds that overall SYEP has a positive impact on school
attendance of 1 to 2 percent on average, or roughly 2-3 days. Increases
are larger for students who may be at greater educational risk; those
age 16 or older who did not attend school at high rates in the prior
school year. For these students, the average increase in attendance is
approximately 3 percent, or 4-5 additional school days attended. In
addition, for this group SYEP increases the probability of attempting
and passing English and math statewide (Regents) exams, although there
is no significant effect on test scores. The increased probability of
passing appears to be due to the increased probability of attempting the
exams rather than improved test performance.
Research
on summer jobs programs is especially salient in the current economic
climate, in which the availability of summer employment for teens has
decreased considerably and public funding for summer jobs has waxed and
waned. For example, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
provided an influx of funding for summer jobs for low-income youth but
was only temporary.
This
study is one of the first to provide causal estimates of the effect of a
large-scale summer youth employment program on students’ academic
outcomes. The findings suggest that, although not explicitly focused on
improving educational outcomes, summer youth employment programs may be
an important tool amid policy efforts to address the problem of low
school attendance.
Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) is an independent, non-partisan research center based at Stanford University, the University of California – Berkeley, the University of Southern California, and the University of California – Davis.
