Improvement Testing in the Year up Professional Training Corps Program: Final Grant Report

In 2015, Abt Associates received a grant from the Institutes for Education Sciences (IES) for a five-year "Development and Innovation" study of PTC. The purposes of the study were to gauge progress in implementing PTC and to develop and test improvements where needed. Fein et al. (2020) summarize the IES study's approach and findings. A subsequent grant from Arnold Ventures provided support for extending the two analyses--to three follow-up years for Study 1 and to four years for Study 2. This report provides findings from these longer-term analyses. Study 1 found no difference in average earnings or months enrolled in college in follow-up Years 2 and 3 between young adults assigned to PTC and their control group counterparts. (As expected, the PTC group earned less and spent more time in college than the control group in Year 1, when participants were still in the program.) The results also show modest increases in receipt of credentials (mostly short-term certificates based on credit earned at partner college during PTC).