An Analysis of 1-Year Impacts of Youth Transition Demonstration Projects

Abstract

This article examines the impacts of the Youth Transition Demonstration, an initiative of the Social Security Administration (SSA) to improve employment outcomes for youth with disabilities. Based on a random assignment design, the analysis uses data from a 1-year follow-up survey and SSA administrative records for 5,203 youth in six research sites to estimate demonstration effects. Three of the six demonstration projects had positive impacts on the rate at which youth were employed during the year after they entered the evaluation. Those impacts were concentrated in sites where the projects provided more hours of services, counterfactual services were weak, and the target population of youth had more severe disabilities.