The Quantum Opportunity Program: Intensive and Comprehensive Help for At-Risk Youth

Educators and policymakers have long been interested in programs to help at-risk youth complete high school. But today's job market requires further training to allow young people to pursue careers that pay well enough to support a family, as well as provide advancement opportunities and fulfillment.

Three reports present impact and implementation findings from Mathematica’s random assignment evaluation of the Quantum Opportunity Program (QOP) Demonstration, an intensive and comprehensive intervention that ran from July 1995 to September 2001 and targeted youth with low grades entering high schools with high dropout rates. QOP was designed to provide enrolled youth with case management and mentoring, supplemental after-school education, developmental activities, community service activities, comprehensive supportive services, and financial incentives beginning in ninth grade and continuing year-round until graduation or for five years, even if a youth dropped out of school or became incarcerated.

The QOP Demonstration, funded by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) and the Ford Foundation, was conducted in seven sites: Memphis; Cleveland; Washington, DC; Fort Worth; Houston; Philadelphia; and Yakima, Washington. The program cost between $18,000 and $22,000 per enrolled youth over five years for the five sites funded by DOL. The cost was $23,000 for the Yakima site and $49,000 for the Philadelphia site, both of which were funded by the Ford Foundation.

Initial findings reveal that the program increased high school graduation rates in the short run. Enrolled youth also attained a higher short-term enrollment rate in postsecondary education and training than youth in the control group. But the program was less successful in meeting its secondary goals of improving grades and achievement test scores and reducing risky behaviors, such as substance abuse, crime, and teen parenting. QOP’s impacts varied across sites, and impacts for the whole demonstration were substantially—but not entirely—attributable to the impacts of the Philadelphia site alone or the Philadelphia and Yakima sites together.

The complexity of the QOP model and the challenges of implementing it might be factors that explain the mixed findings. The implementation analysis found that two demonstration sites implemented a version of QOP substantially different from the program model, and the other five sites’ versions deviated moderately from the model. For example, most sites did not implement the education and community service components as prescribed. Participation levels were also far below targets.

Impacts were estimated by comparing outcomes for two statistically equivalent groups created by random assignment—a QOP group and a control group. Longer-term impact analyses will be completed in 2004 and 2006. Because many youth were still in high school or had only just graduated when data were collected for the first impact analysis, there is still much to be learned about QOP’s effects on graduation and postsecondary enrollment.

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