Making Summer Matter

Download or read book Making Summer Matter written by Amy Ellen Schwartz and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holding a summer job is a rite of passage in American adolescence, a first rung towards adulthood and self-sufficiency. Summer youth employment has the potential to benefit high school students' educational outcomes and employment trajectories, especially for low-income youth. This paper examines New York City's Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP). SYEP provides jobs to youth ages 14-24, and due to high demand for summer jobs, allocates slots through a random lottery system. We match student-level data from the SYEP program with educational records from the NYC Department of Education, and use the random lottery to estimate the effects of SYEP participation on a number of academic outcomes, including test taking and performance. We find that SYEP participation has positive impacts on student academic outcomes, and these effects are particularly large for students who participate in SYEP multiple times. These findings suggest substantial heterogeneity in program effects, and an important avenue for policy makers to target the program to those who might benefit from it the most.