Three-Year Outcomes for Low-Income Parents of Young Children in a Two-Generation Education Program

Abstract Increasingly, parents of young children need postsecondary credentials to compete in the labor market and meet basic family needs. This study uses a quasi-experimental design to examine the effects of CareerAdvance, a two-generation education intervention that offers postsecondary career training in healthcare for parents paired with Head Start for children. Overall, we find that CareerAdvance promotes low-income parents’ educational advancement during the first three years after program entry, with weaker evidence of benefits to career progress and psychological wellbeing, and no evidence of economic gains. The two-generation program promotes greater educational and career advancement among parents without postsecondary credentials at baseline, than for parents who began the program with postsecondary credentials. In contrast, exploratory analyses suggest that parents entering the program with postsecondary credentials experienced benefits to some individual markers of economic and psychological wellbeing within three years.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness

• Publication date

  2023-11-09

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/19345747.2023.2273511
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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