In Boston, Chicago, and New York City, research has shown that summer jobs programs lead to a large decrease in violent crime and incarceration. However, in some places, the impacts on earnings are more muted in the short-term.
In Boston, Chicago, and New York City, research has shown that summer jobs programs lead to a large decrease in violent crime and incarceration. However, in some places, the impacts on earnings are more muted in the short-term. In episode five of J-PAL Voices: The Impact and Promise of Summer Jobs in the United States, we learn how agencies like New York City’s Department of Youth and Community Development are working to ensure that summer jobs programs can create a pathway to good jobs. We learn how these programs teach their participants transferable skills and empower them to chart a future that best suits each individual’s needs.
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Julia Breitman
The distinction between a job and an opportunity and a career was really not something I recognized until it was maybe a little too late. And I think that's the problem for a lot of the young people we serve. They don't have anyone in their lives that can really talk to them about what it means to seek opportunities. Or they don't have the option to be that selective, right? You take the job that will give you the earnings, not necessarily the experience, or the connections.
Narrator
Julia Breitman is the Senior Director of Youth Employment Programs in New York City’s Department of Youth and Community Development. She was raised by immigrant parents who were unfamiliar with what opportunities might be available to young Julia. Informed by some unfortunate early job experiences, Julia’s current role is devoted to exposing youth to these opportunities as early as possible.
Larry Katz
We think summer youth employment programs have a lot of potential. But they do need to be, you know, I think there's a lot of work in trying to link them with experiences and connect and create a record for the achievements of kids over the summer so it can have a more persistent impact and be the pathway to good jobs, potentially linking up with other programs which create these more durable employment connections and training. And summer youth jobs could be a first step in that sort of longer run empowerment and improvement in human capital and earnings opportunities.
Narrator
Connections, or access to network, is a crucial part of the theory of change behind how summer jobs programs might foster upward mobility. Larry Katz is a member of the US Partnership on Mobility from Poverty, and his takeaways are echoed by Angela Rudolph, Deputy Commissioner for Youth Services in Chicago’s Department of Family and Support Services.
Angela Rudolph
One of the bigger hindrances for upward mobility is access to network. It's not just about whether or not you have been exposed to information, or if you are educated. It often comes down to who you know. And so, that in itself lies the opportunity that driven, public invested summer employment programs provide. The opportunity for young people to be able to broaden not just their knowledge about particular fields or particular jobs, but broaden their network of professional people, both to inspire, but also as a way for them to be able to have linkages to someone, to help them to understand and navigate the path forward.
Narrator
From J-PAL North America, this is J-PAL Voices. I’m your host, Rohit Naimpally. On this season of J-PAL Voices, we take a close look at the impact and promise presented by summer jobs programs in the United States. We will bring you the stories behind the impact, as told by the people who create, participate in, and sustain these programs. Episode Five: Create Access to Good Jobs.
Judd Kessler
The jobs that the summer youth employment program generally gives are daycare jobs, day camp jobs, camps outside the city you know, where you get on a bus and you go take some kids somewhere, which are super important, valuable jobs and provide public goods to the community. But, they're not the kinds of jobs that you could do in term time. You know, it's not like a retail job where you can take hours after school and earn money during the school year. And you know, they're generally limited in terms of number of hours, even in the summer.
Narrator
That’s University of Pennsylvania economist Judd Kessler describing the types of jobs available through New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program. Judd and his team have found that while the program leads to significant reductions in violent crime, incarceration, and mortality, the impact on employment outcomes is more muted.
Judd Kessler
This question of are they giving youth a leg up in their careers or in their future labor market or educational attainment? I think we're surprised to find that in fact, there was no positive benefit that we saw of the program on those outcomes. If anything, what we observed was a slight decrease in earnings for the three years after the program if you got lotteried in and took the job versus didn't.
Narrator
Given that the program is motivated to some extent by the desire to set youth on a path towards good, well-paying jobs, I asked Judd to walk me through what may be driving these results.
Judd Kessler
The interesting thing for us as researchers is, their earnings affects are negative, but that could mean lots of different things. It's not necessarily bad in the sense of, you know, what might happen is I work as a camp counselor and I realized that I love it. I love helping mentor these younger kids. I love providing a benefit to the community, you know, cause a lot of these jobs are with nonprofit camps or nonprofit daycare centers where it's sort of providing a benefit to the community. And so, it could be that what we're doing when youth are in these jobs is that we're sort of training them in something that they end up really liking and want to keep doing. And so, then the earnings results are not as...we're not as aversive to them.
Narrator
As it turns out, the earnings effects are driven by the youth largely returning to the jobs that they fell in love with over the summer, many of which may not be what they want in the long term. Moreover, they may not always be setting themselves up to explore alternative careers, or jobs that would be better career fits for them. And that exploration can be a feature of summer jobs programs, as Rashad Cope in Boston’s Department of Youth Engagement and Employment told me.
Rashad Cope
Young people explore career pathways, and I think career pathways is so incredible because you want to make sure that there's early career exploration and connecting young people to careers that they may be interested in. That can be things such as finance, computer science. It could be trades, vocations. It can be, you know, education. So, summer jobs gives them an opportunity to explore career pathways.
Narrator
The opportunity to explore these career pathways is a big attraction for young people like Erica Chen, who spoke glowingly of her time in the Ladders for Leaders program in New York City.
Erica Chen
What originally led me to apply was, actually just getting exposure to different work fields. Like, I specifically looked into civic engagement ‘because I thought I wanted to go into law at that time. And it gave me experiences and insights that I wouldn't have gotten anywhere else.
Narrator
Another participant, Habiba Khan, described the career readiness assistance that she received as part of the Ladders for Leaders program with Commonpoint Queens.
Habiba Khan
One of the things that I really liked is in our workbook, a lot of it was about career exploration. So, we were required to research a certain career that we were interested in. So, something that we might research would be like, “Oh, what requirements do you need to, you know, like what education, do you need to become this, you know, to get this position. How long would it take to do this?” How much money might it take? And after finding out more like the technical details of some of this stuff, I think, I’m not as lost as before. Because before, I was like, “Oh my God, there's just so much stuff to do, so many options!” Like where do I, like, I know I'm interested in this field, but even within this field, there's just so many options. So, where do I begin? And I think with the career exploration part of the workbook, I just learned a lot about what I wanted to do. Which is, as of right now, I'm really interested in biomedical engineering. So, I'm planning on going in that pathway.
Judd Kessler
There is this fear, and I think it's a very legitimate fear, that the reason youth return to those jobs and subsequent summers is not because they love the job and they really want to keep doing it. It's because that was the job they had last summer and they don't have the ability or, you know, they're not given a way of translating that work experience into a type of job that they might actually prefer and might be hired.
Narrator
Armed with the earnings and employment results, and knowing the value that broader career exploration and preparedness plays, Judd Kessler is now teaming up with fellow economist Sara Heller and New York City to see how summer youth employment programs can be even more powerful in creating access to the right jobs for each young participant.
Judd Kessler
Sort of motivated by this question of, is there a way to enhance the summer youth employment program so that it can give youth the opportunity having been a participant, to then find their ideal job in the next summer, the next year, and sort of test this question of whether they're gravitating back towards these industries because they really, really want to be there because that's the only thing that they've done before and that’s where their connections are.
Julia Breitman
And that's the next evolution of the program, is really not just expanding opportunities and creating opportunities, but also tying them to school-day learning. And how that career pathway that I mentioned, for a program that's really for older youth. This is, how do you start that career pathway earlier on at the high school level?
Narrator
Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend at the Philadelphia Youth Network gets a first-hand look every day at the value of early exposure to the right career pathway.
Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend
We certainly believe that having early exposure to work not only increases your earning potential later but also gives young people a greater sense of where they might want to invest their energy in terms of a career. And so, what our alums tell us all the time is that right WorkReady was the opportunity that they either learned what they really like to do or what they really did not like to do. And both of those, that lesson is valuable, right? So, it helped them to tailor their interests around studying. It helped them to think through what is the best path for me based on my interest.
Narrator
Given how formative someone’s specific summer experience can be, it is especially important to expand the career pathways and opportunities that youth can consider as they embark on their careers. In studying the summer jobs program in Boston, Northeastern University economist Alicia Sasser-Modestino has found that the program improves job readiness skills, a finding that is especially meaningful in the context of rising inequality in the labor market.
Alicia Sasser-Modestino (~6:28 of Alicia’s Voice Recorder recording)
When I was at the Boston fed six years ago, one of the last things that I worked on was a foundational study of youth employment that revealed a structural decline in labor force participation and employment among youth since 2001, even before the great recession. I found that over half of unemployed teams reported that they were searching for their first job, which suggested that there were fewer pathways for youth to get into the labor market. And that the greatest difficulties were faced by African American and Hispanic teens, especially those from low income families in more impoverished neighborhoods.
Narrator
As the nature of work changes and we shift our focus to recovering equitably from a pandemic that has had unequal impacts, we need to design programs like summer jobs to best prepare our young people for the future. As big as this task is, Chekemma at the Philadelphia Youth Network sees both a challenge and an opportunity.
Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend
And so now, the future of work, the world of work, work as we knew it before COVID is not the same. And so, it is even more critical that we work together so that we ensure that that first job doesn't become extinct for a population of young people, because the economic recovery has to be equitable. And part of being equitable is not just about addressing racial equity or just racial discrimination and injustice. It is also about ensuring that the system connects seamlessly along the developmental trajectory. That means that young people can't be left out of the conversation. That means we've got to knit together, much more closely what's happening in our afterschool programs, our out of school-time programs in our classrooms, towards the needs of our economy. And it also means we have to teach young people, not just about becoming employees, but also about job creation and entrepreneurship. And so, this is an opportunity I see for us to not only continue doing the necessary work of preparing our future workforce, but to expand how we're doing it and to use technology in impactful ways to create a greater impact.
Tatiana Arguello
When you talk about workforce development, a lot of is a new field in the sense of we're focusing on employees now, we're focusing on building skills, we're focused on building resiliency, we're focusing on adaptability.
Angela Rudolph
As young people go through the deck, they kind of acquire more badges that at the end of the program, once they get to becoming a, you know, ready to go to a real brick and mortar job, they can present these badges to show that, you know, I'm someone who knows how it is to be prepared, to be ready on the first day of the job.
Tatiana Arguello
These skills are transferable. It doesn't matter what job you're in right now. But what we do know as an economy is that we need to be able to move the needle and that you aren't probably going to be in the same job that you're in for the rest of your life. You know, if you look, decades ago, it probably was the case that you had your one job and you got to see that through through your lifetime. Now what we're seeing is just more mobility in the job market. We're seeing different kinds of jobs, whether that is actual employees, whether that is that you are more working like a consultant, or if you were working as a gig employee. There's just so many different levels of what it means to be in the workforce nowadays.
Narrator
That was Tatiana Arguello at United Activities Unlimited in Staten Island, New York, talking about how her organization is trying to keep up with the changing demands of the labor market. The challenges seem immense, as summer jobs programs try to simultaneously keep up with the shifting work landscape, a devastating pandemic, and racial and socio-economic inequality. But I am given hope when I hear from the people involved with driving these programs forward. We will hear a lot more on that front in the next episode, the final one of this series. For now, let’s leave it with Julia Breitman at New York City’s Department of Youth and Community Development.
Julia Breitman
There's really no better vehicle out of poverty than the self-empowerment that a young person feels with their first job experiences. Our job is to provide those opportunities, provide career exploration, make them believe in themselves, make them see what they're capable of and what's open to them. But it's also our job to be able to provide those opportunities and grow those opportunities. There really is no limit to what we can do with these programs if we have the right resources.
Narrator
J-PAL voices is produced by Dave Lishansky and written and narrated by Rohit Naimpally. Elizabeth Bond designed our logo. Special thanks to Yijin Yang for her inputs and support. Transcription assistance was provided by Caroline Garau and Yiping Li. For this week’s interviews, we thank Julia Breitman, Larry Katz, Angela Rudolph, Judd Kessler, Rashad Cope, Erica Chen, Habiba Khan, Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend, Alicia Sasser-Modestino, and Tatiana Arguello. Our email address is podcasts@povertyactionlab.org; we would love to receive your comments and feedback.
Narrator
On the next episode of J-PAL Voices...
Angela Rudolph
I think far too often, we have this sense as older people that young people are lazy, young people aren't really interested in doing that much. Everybody wants to stay linked physically to their devices. And one of the biggest lessons that I walked away from this summer with, was the deep and unabiding desire that young people have to feel like they have agency and the ability to make things better.