Grant Recipient: Northeastern University
Principal Investigator: Alicia Modestino, Ph.D., Northeastern University
Term: 2021 – 2023
Funding: $273,667
Summary: This project is a long-term follow-up of an ongoing randomized controlled trial (RCT) of Boston’s Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP). SYEPs provide youth aged 14 – 24 with a minimum wage, part-time job during the summer in either the nonprofit, government, or private sector. These programs are widely implemented across the United States: in Boston alone, SYEPs receive approximately $10 million in city, state, and private funding to connect over 10,000 youth with around 900 local employers. Despite recent press and policymaker attention on SYEPs as a promising violence reduction strategy for communities, the program’s long-term effects on violent crime have not yet been well established.
To date, six large-scale RCTs of SYEPs have been conducted across four major U.S. cities: Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. Across the six studies, researchers have consistently found that SYEPs produced reductions in one or more measure of youth’s involvement in the criminal justice system (i.e. arrests, arraignments, and convictions) in follow-ups ranging from 7 weeks to 1.5 years after random assignment. However, these effects have generally faded to small and near- or non-significant in follow-ups ranging from two to five years after random assignment.
The well-conducted RCT of Boston’s SYEP, with a sample of 4,235 youth, found that the program produced modest, statistically significant impacts on the number of violent crime and property crime arraignments at the 1.5 year follow-up. In addition, an analysis of educational outcomes conducted four years after random assignment found the Boston SYEP also produced a 4 percentage point impact on on-time high school graduation. A longer-term follow-up of this study is needed to determine whether the program’s impacts on both violent crime and educational outcomes are sustained over the long-term.
Under this project, the research team will extend the follow-up of the Boston SYEP RCT, examining impacts on two primary outcomes: (i) violent crime arrests and (ii) post-secondary enrollment through six years after random assignment. Violent crime arrests will be measured with administrative records from the Boston Police Department, and post-secondary enrollment will be measured with National Student Clearinghouse data.
The study’s pre-specified analysis plan is posted here.
