1 of 29

Building a More Holistic and Inclusive Workforce Development System for Boston's Youth

Alicia Sasser Modestino, Northeastern University

City of Boston Learning Lab April 28, 2025

2 of 29

Prior research conducted by Northeastern in partnership with the City demonstrated that the Boston Summer Youth Employment Program improves behavioral, academic, and economic youth outcomes.�

Improvements in academic aspirations and work habits linked to a 4-percentage point increase in high school graduation rates due to better attendance and grades (Modestino and Paulsen, Education Finance and Policy Review, 2022).

Private sector jobs are also shown to increase the likelihood of taking the SAT and enrolling in college, shifting from 2- to 4-year institutions (Modestino, Paul, and McLaughlin, American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings, 2022).

Raises academic achievement through aspirations and work habits

Reduces crime by fostering community engagement and soft skills

Improvements in soft skills linked to a 35% reduction in violent crime and a 29% fall in property crime for the treatment group during the 18 months after program end (Modestino, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2019).

Boosts employment through job readiness

Improvements in job readiness skills linked to a 9-percentage point increase in employment and a 30 percent increase in wages during the year following participation for opportunity youth of color ages 19-24 years (City of Boston, Reducing Inequality Summer by Summer, 2017).

The best way for me to define what I’m talking about is by example

Early work experience — such as that provided by summer jobs — can keep teens out of trouble, improve soft skills, and provide post-secondary and career pathways, particularly for disadvantaged youth.

Every year, nearly all of the 30 largest cities in the U.S. and many other mid-sized metro areas sponsor summer youth employment programs to help level the playing field for low-income inner-city youth. These programs are large and often oversubscribed. For example, across cities such as Boston, Charlotte, DC, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle, these programs receive nearly 200,000 applications for roughly 100,000 slots every summer.

But until recently, there was little data and analysis about the impact of summer job programs on youth outcomes making it difficult for mayors to justify the additional investment needed to bring these programs to scale.

Since 2015, we have been engaged in a research practice partnership with the City of Boston funded by the William T. Grant Foundation to study the summer jobs program and move the needle on policy and practice nationwide.

Our evaluation found that Boston’s program reduced violent crime by 30%, increased the likelihood of high school graduation, and boosted subsequent employment and wages – with greater impacts for black and brown youth. Based on these impacts, we estimated that the summer jobs program yielded a benefit-to-cost ratio of 3 to 1.

Fast forward to 2020 when the economic disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic placed summer job programs in jeopardy exactly when they were needed most. The unemployment rate for youth skyrocketed to 30% at the same time that large cities in the U.S. faced sharp increases in violent crime among youth. Yet in the face of steep budget shortfalls, cities like New York canceled their summer jobs program leaving 75,000 low-income youth unemployed. This prompted William T. Grant to offer us rapid response funding to work with Boston and find a way to prevent the City from canceling its summer program.

A key question was how the City of Boston could quickly design an alternative to the traditional in-person summer job that would yield the same impacts as in past years and at a scale that would employ the same number of youth and at the same rate of pay.

Working with my Northeastern colleagues, we developed a virtual internship model to help employers take their youth summer jobs online with a set of ready-made projects and an online platform to track team communications, deliverables, and feedback from supervisors.

How did we measure the impact of this engagement? Our virtual internship model, along with our prior research evidence, was used by then Mayor, now Secretary of Labor, Marty Walsh, to justify an additional $4 million in CARES Act funding for the program which prevented the loss of 10,000 youth jobs that summer paying $1500 in wages per youth.

But the story doesn’t end there. We then took that learning to the national stage, informing hill staffers, state practitioners, and city leaders through a series of webinars, policy briefs and op-eds arguing that cities could build back better by using virtual options to connect more young people to better job opportunities.

This prompted President Biden to cite our research in a speech this past summer, highlighting Boston’s program as an example of how cities could combat youth violence and urging mayors to use some of the $350 billion earmarked for localities in the American Rescue Plan as a way to expand their summer jobs programs.

I want you to take away three things from this example.

First, this work was done with an interdisciplinary team of researchers that I had never met before summer 2020. Since then, we’ve written 6 grant proposals together, four of which have been funded, and three of those with engineering faculty.

Second, it might seem like I was just in the right place at the right time but that is the point: when you are co-creating the research and the solution with a policy partner you are virtually guaranteed to have impact. And that’s why William T Grant has doubled down on their initial investment in Northeastern with the award of an Institutional Challenge seed grant to spur conversations like this that will enhance the capacity of our researchers to do more of this type of work.

Third, this is a perfect case study showing how we can use Boston or other cities in the global network as metro learning labs for figuring out what works, how it works, and for whom – and then transfer that policy knowledge either nationally or even globally.

3 of 29

In addition, our annual surveys and focus groups also capture first-hand the positive impacts that youth, their families, and employer partners experience each summer through the Boston SYEP.