June 2008: As a graduate student at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development (GSEHD) at the George Washington University, I worked with two other graduate students to conduct an evaluation of Urban Alliance‘s High School Internship Program (HSIP).

HSIP had been operational for 12 years at the time and was aimed at helping teenagers from under-resourced parts of Washington, DC to gain work experience with the objective that this experience would help them be better prepared and better skilled when they enter the job-market and/or a higher education path.

We designed and implemented a non-equivalent group comparison (NEGD) study. This involved surveying UA alumni and comparing their output indicators on employment, income and college enrollment with those of a comparison group comprised of similar DC based youths drawn from the American Community Survey of the Census Bureau. We tested the hypotheses that participation in UA’s program – as opposed to non-participation – leads to access to better work, better pay and higher access to college.

Acknowledging certain data limitations, we found that participation in the internship program appeared to be associated with better wages and higher college enrollment outcomes, once we had controlled for race, gender and age as confounding background factors. Participation in the program may also have been leading to higher levels of employment.

Interestingly, we also found that UA’s alumni seem to have a disproportionately high percentage of female participants. We wondered whether this is an outcome of social factors within the communities where UA provides services or of UA’s recruitment policies. The overall results of study were positive and we recommended more comprehensive evaluations to analyze HSIP in greater depth.