As the first major effort to use a behavioral economics lens to examine human services programs that serve poor and vulnerable families in the United States, the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project demonstrated the value of applying behavioral insights to improve the efficacy of human services programs. The BIAS…

Access to college has increased substantially over the last 50 years, but student success--defined as the combination of academic achievement and degree or certificate completion--has largely remained stagnant. The gap between access and success is particularly noteworthy for male Black and Hispanic students, whose college completion rates lag…

Large numbers of young people in the United States were in foster care or in juvenile justice custody as teenagers, and many of them have a difficult time making a successful transition to independent adulthood as they leave these systems. Most of them faced a number of disadvantages during childhood and often have poor outcomes across several…

Young people have been hit especially hard by changes in the labor market over the past decades. Unemployment among 16- to 24-year-olds increased the most of any age group during the recent recession, and remains more than double that among older adults. The unemployment rate is especially high for young people without high school diplomas.…

Family Rewards was an innovative approach to poverty reduction in the United States that was modeled on the conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs common in lower- and middle-income countries. The program offered cash assistance to low-income families, provided that they met certain conditions related to family health care, children's education,…

Children living in poverty face considerable developmental risks. This report presents interim results from an evaluation of parental employment and educational services delivered within a two-generational, early childhood program targeting low-income families who are expecting a child or who have a child under age 3. This study is part of the…

Young people who drop out of high school face long odds of success in a labor market that increasingly values education and skills. This report presents interim results from a rigorous, ongoing evaluation of the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program, which aims to "reclaim the lives of at-risk youth" who have dropped out of high school.…

This report presents an assessment of the implementation and the two-year impacts of a program in Texas that aimed to promote job placement, employment retention, and advancement among applicants and recipients to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. The program in Texas is part of the Employment Retention and Advancement…

This paper is part of the Next Generation?s working paper series. The Next Generation is a project that examines the effects of welfare, antipoverty, and employment policies on children and families. Drawing on rich data from recent welfare reform evaluations, the project aims to inform the work of policymakers, practitioners, and researchers by…

In the past decade, school districts around the country have sought to improve struggling urban high schools, where high dropout rates, poor student achievement, and low rates of graduation and college-going remain all too prevalent. In a field crowded with reform initiatives, Project Graduation Really Achieves Dreams (GRAD) stands out as…

This report analyzes the experiences of welfare "cyclers," a group that has received relatively little attention in previous research on welfare dynamics. For this study, "cycling" is defined as receipt of welfare benefits during three or more discrete spells during a four-year observation period. The goals of this report are to understand the…

This report concludes the main portion of MDRC's Project on Devolution and Urban Change, an eight-year effort to chart the course of welfare reform in four big urban counties: Los Angeles, Cuyahoga (Cleveland), Miami-Dade, and Philadelphia. The goal of the study was to find out whether federal welfare reform would lead to meaningful changes in…