Abstract
Increasingly, parents of young children need postsecondary credentials to compete in the labor market and meet basic family needs. This study uses a quasi-experimental design to examine the effects of CareerAdvance, a two-generation education intervention that offers postsecondary career training in healthcare for parents paired with Head Start for children. Overall, we find that CareerAdvance promotes low-income parents’ educational advancement during the first three years after program entry, with weaker evidence of benefits to career progress and psychological wellbeing, and no evidence of economic gains. The two-generation program promotes greater educational and career advancement among parents without postsecondary credentials at baseline, than for parents who began the program with postsecondary credentials. In contrast, exploratory analyses suggest that parents entering the program with postsecondary credentials experienced benefits to some individual markers of economic and psychological wellbeing within three years.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 936-977 |
| Number of pages | 42 |
| Journal | Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2024 |
Funding
Health Profession Opportunity Grant 90FX00100, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Health Profession Opportunity Grant-University Partnership 90PH0020, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. W.K. Kellogg Foundation Grant P3020014. Foundation for Child Development Grant Northwestern 06-2014. The most comparable study to ours to date is the experimental evaluation of the Health Profession Opportunity Act (HPOG) programs (HPOG 1.0 and HPOG 2.0), administered by the Administration for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services and designed to train low-income adults for careers in healthcare. In fact, CareerAdvance was funded in part by HPOG grants, though the program was not included in the national, experimental evaluation. The second HPOG study (HPOG 2.0) began in 2015 and is ongoing with only short-term findings. That training promoted educational progress and increased healthcare employment in the first 15\u2009months but did not promote general employment or earnings gains (Klerman et al., ). Interestingly, short-term (15-month) benefits to educational progress were larger for parents (with child age unspecified) than for those without children as well as for participants with postsecondary credentials at baseline, compared to those without such credentials.
Keywords
- Head Start
- Parents
- education
- policy
- propensity score
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Education
