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General Lessons
What lessons can be extracted from the review of material on
Canadian and international experience with youth programs? As a starting
point, a number of key messages deserve to be highlighted.
- In Canada, the evidence strongly indicates that labour
market success is correlated with educational attainment. Over the
past 15 years, high school drop-outs are increasingly worse
off; those who have higher degrees are increasingly
better-off. Educational attainment is correlated with labour market
success because the skills learned in school are vocationally
relevant and because the possession of higher degrees implies
the possession of other qualities intelligence, motivation,
persistence and the capacity for hard work that are useful in
the labour market. Within the school system, greater effort needs
to be placed on providing more clearly articulated pathways in
and out of formal education, trying to reduce the stigma attached
to vocational training, and providing innovative opportunities
for young people to combine work and schooling.
- Even when programs produce positive results, their impacts
are generally modest in size. Therefore, in launching any
initiative, it is important not to oversell it. The fact that a program has
only a small impact does not necessarily mean that it is not
worth-while. It may still be cost-effective producing a positive
return on the investment of public funds and may be critical to
turning around the lives of particular young people.
- Young people's needs are many and varied. Therefore, no
single intervention can be expected to deal with the full range
of problems. Inevitably, a range of programs and services has
to be called on; there will not be a single solution. The
potential clientele for any program, even one designed with a
specified target group like youth in mind, faces a wide range of
problems and, consequently, they have a wide diversity of needs.
This heterogeneity of client needs means that what works
for some people will not work for others. In examining program
effectiveness, attention needs to be paid to variations among
sub-groups for example, by gender, ethnicity, age, rural or
urban location, length of unemployment, educational attainment,
and family income. Knowing for which particular groups a
program works best allows the program to be more appropriately
targeted.
- Most effective programs for young people provide
sustained adult contact. The roles played by adults varies from program
to program teacher, mentor, case manager, counsellor,
supervisor. The key factors are that there be ongoing contact with
an adult over an extended period of time and that it
includes elements of monitoring, as well as support. In some cases,
the approach adopted has been a nurturing one aimed at
supporting the young person's overall development; other
programs use "tough love" and stress the penalties associated with
failure to meet program requirements. The overall goal is to provide
the participants with structure and the motivation to do well.
- The modest program impacts mentioned above can be
the result of two very different targeting strategies. A program
can make a modest improvement in the situation of many
people whose employment problems are not too serious (and
for whom, therefore, the scope for achieving sizeable impacts is
limited). Or it can try to help the seriously disadvantaged who
face multiple barriers to employment. In this case, those who
benefit will likely benefit a great deal. But many participants will drop
out and many others will not succeed despite the
intervention; therefore, the average impact will be modest. It is important
to decide whether it is more important to provide broad
coverage with a program or to provide help to those who need it the most.
- The most effective strategy for disadvantaged
out-of-school youth would be one that is multifaceted combining a
training component with strong links to the employer community,
more formal training linked to on-the-job training and work
experience, and, for the most disadvantaged, job search
assistance and transitional wage subsidies.
- For young people who do drop out of school, it is important
to intervene as soon as possible after school leaving. The later
the intervention, the more likely it will be that the
self-reinforcing dynamics of low education and few skills, chronic
unemployment, poverty, welfare dependency, and declining
self-esteem will make the problem almost insurmountable.
- Better preparation for the labour market increases the
probability that young people will obtain and retain employment
but only if jobs exist. Supply-side measures cannot, on their
own, solve youth labour market problems. The state of the
economy the availability of jobs is an important determinant of
program effectiveness. Parallel strategies on the demand-side, to
ensure the availability of and access to employment opportunities,
must be part of any coherent set of labour market policies. In
this respect, government needs to engage the private sector in
the provision of job opportunities for youth. HRDC's
Stay-in-School Initiative provides an example of how a social marketing
initiative can increase public awareness and build pressure
for change. A similar approach might be part of a larger effort
to enlist employers in a youth job opportunity program.
In addition to these general comments a number of important
lessons can be drawn concerning specific types of
interventions.
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