Future to discover: Seventh year post-secondary impacts report

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Résumé (français)

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Résumé (anglais)

This report presents the final results from the Future to Discover project. It is the fourth and final in a series produced for New Brunswick, evaluating new ways to tackle a key challenge provinces face in meeting their future needs for skilled workers: engaging enough young people in post-secondary education. Promotion of high school students’ access to post-secondary education is a major goal of Canadian governments, in part because of its increasingly important role in helping individuals attain social and economic success. Yet, uncertainty remains as to the best policy interventions to encourage students to make the transition. Future to Discover tested two interventions, separately and in combination. The research design produces rigorous evidence about what works to increase access to post-secondary education, particularly for lower-income students and those whose parents have little or no post-secondary experience. Future to Discover offered either or both of two interventions in early high school: Explore Your Horizons (EYH) that offered enhancing early career education in workshop sessions run after school for Grades 10, 11, and 12; Learning Accounts (LA) a “guarantee” of a $8,000 grant to pursue PSE, made to lower-income students; Explore Your Horizons plus Learning Accounts (EYH+LA), whereby some students received offers of both interventions. All the results of this report are presented for lower-income students (from families with below-median income) and are summarized in Table ES1. The key impacts: Enrolment. In this report, both interventions have strong and significant positive impacts on enrolment in post-secondary education (defined for this report as university and college enrolment). The impacts persist over time. However, the story is more complicated when the impacts on types of post-secondary education are considered. The results to date show that the different types of intervention increase participation in very different types of post-secondary programs. The EYH intervention – enhancing early career education from Grade 10 – had significant positive impacts on enrolment in university but not on enrolment in college. In contrast, the pattern observed for Learning Accounts on its own was opposite to that of EYH. When the interventions are combined, the results largely follow the pattern for EYH. These results are consistent with findings in the previous report. Graduation. For most participants, data on program graduation cover seven years since they left high school. The differences in post-secondary graduation rates match differences in enrolments by program type. The graduation outcome for those offered EYH is quite surprising since EYH induced more students into university programs and has yet to generate significant impacts on graduation. LA on the other hand, induced students into typically shorter college programs and generated striking impacts on post-secondary graduation. Despite the fact that both interventions induced higher enrolments, providing enhanced career education to students (in the EYH intervention) and providing a promise of funding to them (LA intervention) lead to different pathways and outcomes. The final report using an additional year of graduation data will confirm the longer-term development of these patterns. Student aid. EYH has a strong and consistent positive impact on the proportion of students receiving student financial aid, with students offered EYH receiving a modest increase in aid payment amounts. In contrast, students offered LA were not more likely to receive aid and also received lower amounts of funding on average, which is not surprising given that they are entitled to more resources through the LA grant. Employment and self-employment: The intervention’s impacts on employment and self-employment were not substantial. Regardless of the type of intervention, all participants maintained a high level of employment throughout seven years of the postsecondary period and there was no evidence of substantial withdrawal from the labour market for post-secondary education. Only girls offered LA or EYH+LA experienced slightly lower levels of employment. There were no statistically significant impacts on accumulated earnings with the exception of a negative $8,800 impact among Francophone youth offered the combined intervention of EYH+LA. While there were no statistical significant impacts on the receipt of cumulative self-employment earnings in the seven years of the post-secondary period among EYH or LA participants, LA had a small negative impact on Anglophone participants in year 10 contrasted with a small positive impact among Francophone participants. Boys offered the combined intervention also experienced a statistically -significant increase in self-employment. Subgroups of interest. Both interventions produced significant impacts on enrolments, graduation (LA and EYH+LA) and receipt of student aid. This is particularly notable for students from lower-education backgrounds, and for boys, which suggests that the interventions worked well to target key groups with traditionally lower rates of post-secondary attendance. Generally, Francophone students were more likely to experience post-secondary impacts than Anglophone students. The increased receipt of student aid among Francophone EYH participants coincided with a similar decrease in use of RESP funds, suggesting EYH either led to student aid displacing family savings for funding PSE, or that EYH’s impact on PSE among Francophone students was concentrated among those without family savings. Earlier reports had noted the interventions’ impacts on delayed high school graduation for Anglophone students. The impacts of EYH on post-secondary outcomes are largely concentrated in the Francophone sector. Modest impact on receipt of student aid by Anglophone students reported in the previous report did not persist. Similarly, LA impacts on graduation are largely concentrated in the Francophone sector. Anglophone sector impacts noted in the previous report did not persist. LA had a significant impact on boys graduating from post-secondary education. But, the main long-term impact on girls was lower levels of student financial aid receipt. Changes since the last report: The additional year covered by this report resulted in very little change in the scale or pattern of the impacts that the tested interventions produced in the previous report. The fact that differences in outcomes between the program and control groups persist seven years post-high school is notable. These findings indicate that, EYH and LA did not just accelerate changes in behaviour that would have happened anyway but produced lasting changes in young people’s lives. The interventions did have impacts on switching between post-secondary institutions. These were noted in some earlier reports but they were not statistically significant in the last report. Also, the interventions’ impacts on leaving post-secondary education without graduating persisted for Francophone students.