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Improving career readiness and job access for youth and young adults is vital. Millions of low-income Americans need better access to high-quality career pathways to escape poverty. This is no easy task— economic opportunity has shrunk dramatically in the United States in the past half-century (Chetty et al. 2016). Meanwhile, employers face rising shortages in the supply of skilled workers, making it harder to compete on the global market (World Economic Forum 2021). As the nation’s workforce ages (BLS 2021), the career readiness and labor force participation of youth matters more than ever.

Recent trends are discouraging. Labor force participation among young adults ages 16-24 has declined steadily over the last two decades. It is likely to worsen in the coming one (BLS 2022). During the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the proportion of youth who disconnected from both work and school spiked, doubling between 2019 and 2020 (Lewis 2022). Disconnection rates were also uneven: Native Americans and African American youth disconnected at higher rates than Whites (Lewis 2022, Youth.gov). In 2021, youth disconnection rates returned to pre-pandemic levels of over 10 percent.

Recognizing this urgency, national, state, and local agencies invest in workforce programs to help low income young adults prepare for post-secondary and career success. However, getting low-income youth to participate in and fully utilize these programs can be challenging, even in the best of times (Dunham et al. 2020). Listening sessions in 2020 with workforce boards suggested that these challenges became acute during the shift to remote service delivery during the pandemic.

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has previously used behavioral insights to improve program engagement and service take-up among adults. Behavioral insights are an approach to policy and program improvement that combines insights from cognitive science, psychology, and social science with empirical testing of results to discover how people make choices and act on decisions. DOL’s Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) engaged a study team to test whether behavioral insights could explain the barriers young adults face in program participation and inform strategies to improve service use.

The study team partnered with Ohio’s Comprehensive Case Management and Employment Program (CCMEP) leadership and 11 counties in Ohio that wanted to improve program impacts. CCMEP provides services to low-income young adults to help them develop career paths, become employed, and move out of poverty. The study team tested whether sending weekly text messages informed by behavioral science over 12 weeks could improve CCMEP service use. The study team found compelling, statistically significant results.

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Research Questions

• Can a text message-based engagement strategy drawing on behavioral science improve service take-up among CCMEP participants?
• Does the intervention increase the likelihood of completing at least one program service?
• Do the effects of the intervention vary for participants with different characteristics?
• What can we learn about the implementation of the intervention?

Key Takeaways

• The text messages increased the number of services started by CCMEP participants within their first 60 days in the program. On average, every other person who received the text messages started one more service than they would have otherwise.
• The text messages substantially increased service completion rates. They increased the likelihood that a CCMEP participant would successfully complete at least one program service within their first 60 days in the program by 10 percentage points. This was a 46 percent improvement on the control group mean.
• The text messages had higher impacts on 60-day service completion rates for participants who were: (1) younger than 18, (2) basic skills deficient, and (3) not parents.
• The text messages had no impacts on outcomes measured within the first 90 days—neither the number of services started nor the likelihood of completing at least one service.
• The impacts of the text messages on the number of services started were no different for any of the four subgroups analyzed: (1) younger than 18, (2) basic skills deficient, (3) parenting, and (4) in school.
• County program administrators see clear benefits of sending behaviorally informed texts to encourage youth engagement but highlighted potential risks and adverse effects as well. There was consensus that these messages should be templates that CCMEP coaches can personalize and customize to reflect participants’ recent interactions with the program.

Citation

Amin, S., Davis, S., Fatima, S. (2023). American Institutes for Research. Using Behavioral Insights to Increase Youth Use of Workforce Services in Virtual Contexts: Final Report. Chief Evaluation Office, U.S. Department of Labor.

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The Department of Labor’s (DOL) Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) sponsors independent evaluations and research, primarily conducted by external, third-party contractors in accordance with the Department of Labor Evaluation Policy and CEO’s research development process.