AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Teenagers across the country are lining up their summer plans right now, and many are hoping for a spot in one of the jobs programs run by city governments. Kids get a job, and the government pays their salary. The bill to taxpayers is usually justified as an investment in developing the workforce down the road. Is it worth it? Sara Heller is an economist at the University of Michigan and studies summer youth employment programs. Sara, thank you for joining us.
SARA HELLER: Thanks so much for having me.
RASCOE: So most big cities around the country have summer jobs programs for teenagers, and some have been around long enough to show some long-term data. So which programs have you studied?
HELLER: So I myself have studied One Summer Chicago. I've worked with Philadelphia WorkReady and a little bit in New York City, their summer jobs program as well.
RASCOE: OK. And what was the big takeaway? Like, does getting a summer job actually help teenagers?
HELLER: Almost all of these programs are oversubscribed. That is, more kids want to participate than can participate. And that sets us up to do something called a randomized controlled trial, where you allocate the slots by lottery. There's a couple benefits to that. One is that it's fair. The other is that it sets us up to really isolate the effect of the program itself.
RASCOE: And you've compared those groups. So basically, you're comparing apples with apples.
HELLER: Exactly. The only difference between those two groups is the flip of a coin.
RASCOE: Is the flip of a coin. And what did you find?
HELLER: So as you said when you started, I think a lot of policymakers think that these programs are workforce development programs. And in practice, we don't really find that. What we do find instead is that crime goes down. So the people who are offered a slot end up arrested less, arraigned less, incarcerated less, and the effects aren't small. They're on the order of 30% to 40%, typically declines in violent crime, although not always. And in fact, in New York, they even found a decline in mortality - an 18% decline in mortality.
RASCOE: You know, it makes sense that a teenager, if they're busier, that they won't get in trouble. But what about the rest of the year, like, after the summer job ends? Do you see an impact there?
HELLER: You can throw out the data from the summer of the program itself, and you still see a decline in violent crime through the year after the program. So the young people are taking something with them from the program beyond just keeping busy - what we would sort of call an incapacitation effect over the summer, where they're just busier in their job.
RASCOE: These are expensive programs. Cities pay millions of dollars to run them. Do you look at this as a good investment? As you said, it lowers crime, and it may keep kids alive. But I guess, like, how do you weigh the cost of all of that?
HELLER: Violent crime, for example, has a range of negative social effects. It affects the victims, obviously, and their families. It harms communities. It harms, you know, the offenders and has legal costs and everything else. And there have been efforts to sort of put dollar figures on that, and so we can try to answer that question. And I think in settings where we see violent crime go down, it seems like the benefits basically outweigh the costs, maybe sort of breaking even, maybe doing a little bit even better than breakeven. And in New York, when programs are, as you say, saving lives, the benefit of saving lives is so large that there it's very clear that these programs passed a benefit-cost test.
RASCOE: That's Sara Heller. She's a professor of economics at the University of Michigan and studies large social programs intended to help disconnected young people. Thank you so much, Sara.
HELLER: It's a pleasure to have been here. Thanks. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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