Summer Youth Employment Programs to improve opportunities for youth

Young people from low-income households face substantial barriers to economic mobility, from lower rates of school engagement to higher risk of involvement in the criminal justice system. Evidence from randomized evaluations in Boston, Chicago, and New York City consistently showed that young people who participated in summer youth employment programs (SYEP)  were less likely to engage with the criminal justice system, more likely to be employed over the summer, and, in some cases, perform better in school. These findings have informed sustained and growing public investment in SYEPs as a core youth development and public safety policy tool across major cities in the United States. Combined, these three programs currently serve over 141,000 youth each summer including 10,500 students in Boston,¹ 31,000 in Chicago,² and 100,000 in New York City.³

The Problem

SYEPs are a promising way to address multiple challenges youth from low-income households commonly face. 

The decade between ages 14 and 24 is marked by critical transitions. During these formative years, the opportunities and support available to young people can influence their long-term trajectories into adulthood. Lack of access to economic opportunity, school disengagement, and involvement in the criminal justice system are challenges that can reinforce each other and impede a successful transition to adulthood.

Early employment is generally associated with better labor and wage outcomes in the future, potentially because it helps youth to develop soft skills, a job history, and connections to employer networks. However, youth from low-income households face substantially lower rates of employment than their higher-income peers.⁴ Youth—especially those without access to employment or educational programming—can be particularly vulnerable during summer time. During these idle months, young people face heightened risks of involvement in criminal activity. Youth are twice as likely as adults to be both victims and perpetrators of violence, with violent crime disproportionately affecting nonwhite youth.⁵ 

One way to address these challenges is SYEPs: locally administered programs that provide youth ages 14 to 24 with paid, part-time employment and supplemental support services during the summer months. SYEPs disproportionately serve youth from low-income households or who identify as Black or Hispanic.⁶ Multiple cities have adopted SYEPs as a solution to high youth unemployment rates because they can achieve multiple policy goals simultaneously. These programs are seen as a way to provide participants with access to the labor market, a constructive way to spend out of school time that deters them from riskier activities, and an opportunity to develop “soft skills” that can be beneficial in multiple settings.⁷

Funded through a mix of public and private sources, programs typically offer five-to-seven-week placements across public, nonprofit, and private sector employers, with eligibility based primarily on age and residency. Some programs further target specific populations, such as students from schools in neighborhoods with high rates of poverty. Beyond job placement, most SYEPs incorporate supplementary supports that are meant to enable success in their roles, including work-readiness training, financial literacy workshops, social-emotional learning curricula, and structured mentorship to foster broader youth development.⁸

The Research

Randomized evaluations from three major US cities found consistent evidence that SYEPs can increase summer earnings, reduce criminal justice involvement, and, in some contexts, improve educational outcomes.

New York City, Boston, and Chicago operate some of the largest and most established SYEPs in the United States. Over the past decade, these cities have also been at the forefront of using rigorous program evaluation to refine SYEP implementation and inform policy-making.

• New York City: The NYC Summer Youth Employment Program is the largest SYEP in the nation, and has been evaluated by J-PAL affiliated researcher Judd Kessler (University of Pennsylvania) together with Sara Tahamont, Alexander M. Gelber, and Adam Isen. Researchers found that, from 2005 to 2008, program participation reduced the probability that youth were arrested during the program summer, particularly for youth who had prior arrests and were therefore considered at higher risk of ongoing engagement in the justice system.⁹ Moreover, participation reduced the probability of incarceration. In addition to justice outcomes, the program also generated broader social and economic benefits: mortality rates declined and summer earnings increased. 

  To learn more about incarceration, mortality, and employment outcomes, please see the evaluation summary. 

• Boston: The SuccessLink Summer Youth Employment Program has been evaluated by J-PAL affiliate Alicia Sasser Modestino (Northeastern University) independently to assess criminal justice outcomes, and together with Richard Paulsen to assess academic outcomes. The studies found that participation reduced the number of arraignments for both violent and property crimes in the seventeen months following the program summer. Participants were also more likely to graduate high school on time and experienced less chronic absenteeism. A cost benefit analysis of the academic data found that the program was likely to produce $2 benefits for every dollar spent. Many of the improvements in academic outcomes were driven by improvements in related work habits (e.g., showing up on time) and higher career aspirations.

  To learn more about this research, please see the respective evaluation summaries on criminal justice and academic outcomes. 

• Chicago: One Summer Chicago Plus (OSC+) began as a smaller pilot under the broader One Summer Chicago summer jobs program (now known as Chicago Youth Works). In its first year, OSC+ focused on serving youth in high-violence high schools, and in subsequent years it expanded to include youth recruited from justice-system adjacent institutions who were not required to be in school. OSC+ was evaluated several times by J-PAL affiliate Sara Heller (University of Michigan) independently and together with Jonathan MV Davis.  The program generated modest but meaningful increases in summer earnings, but its most striking effect was reducing criminal justice involvement. For the 2012 and 2013 cohorts, participation reduced arrests for violent crime by more than half in the first year after the program summer. A subsequent cohort in 2015 also showed signs of continued decline for overall arrests in the years after program participation.¹⁰ These results were observed in years that the program was rapidly expanding and changing, suggesting that the basic program structure matters more than the details of delivery for reducing criminal justice system contact.  

  To learn more about this research, please see the evaluation summaries: on outcomes related to rates of violence and employment for the 2012 and 2013 cohorts, and an overview of the evaluation of the 2015 cohort.  

To learn more about research findings across these and other jurisdictions, please see J-PAL’s evidence review on summer youth employment. Academic-practitioner partnerships with J-PAL affiliates have now produced thirteen papers drawing on experimental evidence to assess the effects of SYEP participation. Research has found that SYEPs can improve the lives of young people across outcomes as diverse as criminal justice involvement, summer earnings, and education. 

From Research to Action

Rigorous evidence generated by strong researcher-practitioner partnerships enabled scale-ups of Summer Youth Employment Programs that were sustained across elected administrations in New York, Boston, and Chicago. 

New York City

While New York’s SYEP, which dates to 1963, had long been considered a foundational experience for many youth, it had never been formally evaluated. The Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD) pursued a randomized evaluation to better understand both the economic and public safety impact of the program. The findings led DYCD to view the program as a preventative intervention for youth at risk of involvement in or already involved in the justice system. As a result, the city greatly expanded the portion of the program reserved for at-risk youth. The strength of the relationship with the research team led DYCD to welcome the research team's suggestions for modifying operational decisions and testing their impact, leading to the development of a new letter of recommendation component, for example.¹¹

When Mayor Eric Adams took office in 2022, violence reduction was one of his central priorities. As part of Mayor Adams’ Blueprint to End Gun Violence, his administration made a $79 million investment to expand the SYEP from 75,000 to 100,000 jobs with the stated goal of keeping youth engaged and safe over the summer months. The announcement explicitly cited evidence of the SYEP’s impact on youth arrests, convictions, and long-term incarceration in New York: “Research shows summer jobs save lives, cut crime, and strengthen communities.”¹²  

The program has continued to deliver 100,000 jobs each year,¹³ with institutional support persisting through a change in administration. Research findings have become embedded in the program's policy rationale: a press release from the Mamdani Mayoral administration about the launch of the 2026 SYEP cited research evidence on the program’s impact on arrests and incarceration.¹⁴

Boston

A decade-long research partnership between J-PAL affiliate Alicia Sasser Modestino and the City of Boston has directly informed the city’s youth employment policy. By using the engage-think-do model of research collaboration on impact evaluations and ongoing data analysis, Alicia has built deep trust with the City of Boston and acts as a general advisor for program design decisionmaking. In 2020, while other programs were halted due to the Covid-19 pandemic, research findings informed Mayor Walsh’s decision to invest US $4.1 million into the SYEP to sustain and grow youth employment opportunities in Boston.¹⁶ 

Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration expanded this policy commitment, citing research findings in support of this decision. In 2023, Mayor Wu announced an investment of $18.7 million in summer jobs programming,¹⁷ successfully placing over 9,000 young people in summer jobs.¹⁸ In 2024, her administration further formalized this commitment through her Mayor’s Youth Jobs Guarantee, a policy pledge to ensure universal access to summer jobs for all eligible Boston Public Schools students through futureBOS, the city's youth employment initiative.¹⁹ In summer 2025, the City of Boston's Office of Youth Employment and Opportunity placed over 10,500 youth in jobs in partnership with more than 200 Boston-based organizations,²⁰ demonstrating the program's sustained capacity to deliver on that commitment at scale.

Chicago

In Chicago, commitment to using evidence to address an urgent social problem paved the way to scaling summer jobs. In 2012, the city was experiencing its highest homicide rate in 10 years, with youth disproportionately impacted as both victims and offenders. Mayor Rahm Emmanuel had made violence reduction a top policy priority, and at the same time was actively encouraging city agencies to use data and evidence to guide programming.²² As part of that effort, the city made administrative data available to University of Chicago researchers in an unprecedented way. 

Evelyn Diaz, then-Commissioner of Chicago Department of Family and Support Services, wanted to understand if her department’s investment in the One Summer Chicago jobs program  was moving the needle on their three priority outcomes of education, violence, and employment. In collaboration with J-PAL affiliated researcher Sara Heller and the University of Chicago Crime Lab, they developed a pilot program specifically focused on high violence neighborhoods, dubbed One Summer Chicago Plus, to test whether summer jobs could reduce violence. 

When the study was published in 2014, it received extensive local and national news coverage. In a budget-constrained context, this public visibility was crucial for elected officials to continue championing the program. Because of the credibility and strength of the evidence, the Mayoral administration was able to raise $10 million in philanthropic funds to immediately continue OSC+.²³ The following year, Mayor Emmanuel cited study findings when he announced that the city would double the number of youth served by OSC+. The city also continued to work closely with researchers, launching another evaluation in 2015.

The strong SYEP evidence base has had a long-term impact on resource allocation decisions in Chicago. In 2021, the City of Chicago formally cited the research on SYEPs in Chicago and elsewhere in its Covid-19 Recovery Plan, proposing a $65 million investment to expand access to youth employment and out-of-school programming.²⁴ Upon taking office in May 2023–over a decade after OSC+ was first piloted–Mayor Brandon Johnson issued an Executive Order that directed increased funding toward youth employment opportunities citywide, pointing to research showing the link between youth employment and violence prevention.²⁵

The SYEP evidence base’s role in supporting the expansion and sustainability of programs in New York, Boston, and Chicago not only demonstrates the power of using research to demonstrate impact, but the importance of researcher-practitioner partnerships that center trust, collaboration, and policymaker priorities. 

References

Davis, Jonathan M.V. and Sara B. Heller. 2020. “Rethinking the Benefits of Youth Employment Programs: The Heterogeneous Effects of Summer Jobs.” The Review of Economics and Statistics 102 (4): 664–677. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_00850.

Gelber, Alexander, Adam Isen, and Judd B. Kessler. 2016. “The Effects of Youth Employment: Evidence from New York City Lotteries.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 131 (1): 423–460. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjv034

Heller, Sara B. 2014. "Summer Jobs Reduce Violence Among Disadvantaged Youth." Science 346: 219-1223. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1257809

Heller, Sara. 2022. “When scale and replication work: Learning from summer youth employment experiments.” Journal of Public Economics: 209. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2022.104617

Kessler, Judd, Sarah Tahamont, Alexander Gelber, and Adam Isen. 2022. “The Effects of Youth Employment on Crime: Evidence from New York City Lotteries. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. 41: 710-730. https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.22393

Modestino, Alicia Sasser. 2019. "How do summer youth employment programs improve criminal justice outcomes, and for whom?" Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 38 (3): 600-628. https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.22138.

Modestino, Alicia Sasser and Richard Paulsen. (2023). “School's Out: How Summer Youth Employment Programs Impact Academic Outcomes.” Education Finance and Policy 18 (1): 97–126. https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00371