Urban Alliance is a national nonprofit that partners with schools, employers, governments, and philanthropies to provide skills training, mentoring, and paid internships to high school students. Urban Alliance’s flagship program, the High School Internship Program, targets high school seniors who are at risk of disconnecting from economically self-sufficient pathways. The program provides year-round training, paid internships, mentoring, and intensive supports to aid young adults’ post–high school transition to education and employment. We partnered with Urban Alliance to conduct a multiyear evaluation including a randomized controlled trial. We estimated the impact of the Urban Alliance internship program on education and job preparation, college enrollment, and employment for its participants.
Why This Matters
Pathways to education and careers are not equitably distributed. Young people from underresourced communities face barriers to employment and postsecondary education that are influenced by social inequities. Discrimination that persists in education, employment practices, the legal system, and throughout society influences the educational and employment outcomes for young people of color. Students from these communities also may have limited access to employment opportunities, experience discriminatory hiring practices, and experience inequities in education such as reduced teacher expectations and higher rates of disciplinary action.
Urban Alliance’s High School Internship Program is designed to empower young people in economically disadvantaged communities through workplace skills training, exposure to professional work and mentorship, support from dedicated case managers, and continued access to resources and support for program alumni. A variety of other training and internship programs are designed to address similar populations with similar needs. But prior evaluations show that not all of these programs achieve their intended results.
What We Found
The Urban Alliance High School Internship Program does not appear to improve the likelihood of graduating from high school, taking the ACT or SAT, filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or applying to college. But in each of these areas, there was little room for improvement beyond the control group.
There is more room for growth in college enrollment and persistence, but we did not find statistically significant effects on either for the full sample. The internship program increased job application comfort, and that increase persisted after two years. Urban Alliance is also associated with a greater likelihood of having a job at some point in the first year after graduation from high school, but the gap between the treatment and control groups shrinks in the second year.
Urban Alliance is adapting its program model to increase impact. Given changes in secondary education and workplace contexts, Urban Alliance is adapting its model to emphasize career outcomes. To better advance employment impacts, Urban Alliance is designing sector-specific learning opportunities, engaging young people earlier (as high school juniors), and building onramps to living-wage careers. The program will emphasize sectors such as health care, real estate, and technology services.
How We Did It
In collaboration with Urban Alliance, we randomized study applicants in the 2016–17 and 2017–18 school years across four areas: Baltimore, Maryland; Chicago, Illinois; Northern Virginia; and Washington, DC. We collected student-level data describing program participation, high school academic performance, college applications, and college enrollment and persistence, and we surveyed participants one and two years after high school graduation. We also accessed state employer wage records in Illinois and Maryland and analyzed deidentified credit histories to examine financial well-being and student borrowing.
We estimated program impacts by comparing the treatment and control groups after the program. We estimated impacts on young people assigned to participate in the internship program through intent-to-treat analyses and the impact of the program on young people who completed it through treatment-on-the-treated analyses.
Additional Materials
We conducted an earlier evaluation of the Urban Alliance High School Internship Program in Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, DC, for the 2011–12 and 2012–13 program years. We were now able to examine their outcomes 10 years after graduating high school. We did not detect any impacts of the program on college enrollment, persistence, or graduation, nor on student loan debt, credit scores, or scorability.
