Publications

This program combines a tuition-free scholarship with additional forms of support, such as a campus coach and personalized communications, to keep students on track to graduate. A three-year evaluation shows that the program helped students stay enrolled in school and earn more credits, but had no impact on degrees earned.

For over 20 years, MDRC has designed and evaluated strategies that use the housing subsidy system to support economic self-sufficiency. This memo reviews what is known about these strategies, how people respond to them, and what elements should be considered when designing economic mobility programs for families receiving housing assistance.

In this commentary originally published by New America, Meghan McCormick and Christina Weiland argue that states should make investing in high-quality early childhood and kindergarten programs a priority in their pandemic recovery efforts.

The City University of New York (CUNY) ASAP program doubles three-year graduation rates for community college students in New York City and Ohio. This brief from CUNY and MDRC summarizes findings from the replication of ASAP in Ohio and provides lessons for colleges interested in implementing their own ASAP programs.

Colleges often use standardized testing to determine whether incoming students need developmental courses. But those tests do not predict students’ college readiness accurately. This brief explains how the use of alternative multiple measures can improve placement decisions, increase college-level course pass rates, and boost progress toward graduation.

The Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt (PJAC) project integrates procedural justice (the idea of fairness in processes) into enforcement at six child support agencies. This brief explains which parents these agencies refer to civil contempt for not paying child support, and describes the business-as-usual contempt proceedings.

This paper presents new estimates of the effects of the City University of New York (CUNY) Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) model, evaluated first in New York and later in Ohio. It shows long-term effects in New York on degrees earned and consistent effects in both states.

Living-wage jobs increasingly require postsecondary education, though nonacademic career and technical education can also boost earning potential. But noncredit program benefits can be limited, so some community colleges are bridging the academic-nonacademic divide. This brief describes methods and strategies for connecting and promoting noncredit and credit pathways for students.

Some estimate that the expansion of the Child Tax Credit could help ameliorate the economic impact of the pandemic and, if made permanent, cut child poverty in the United States in half. But to achieve the promise of these estimates, policymakers should improve the design and delivery compared to the current child tax credit to minimize burdens and barriers for recipients. Here are four research-backed ways to do it.

Participants in the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program are more likely to obtain a GED or high school diploma, earn college credits, and be employed. This study evaluates an expansion called Job ChalleNGe, which includes more court-involved youth and includes an add-on residential training program.

New approaches to child support enforcement aim to be less punitive and to serve the whole family, not just child support recipients. Lessons from Washington State's Alternative Solutions Program show how this shift in perspective has made a difference during the pandemic.

Creating Moves to Opportunity greatly increased the number of families with young children leasing in areas with high upward income mobility in the Seattle area. It offered education, coaching, housing search assistance, landlord engagement, and financial supports to Housing Choice Voucher program applicants. This report offers lessons about implementing the model.

This post describes the creative adaptations to the COVID-19 pandemic of two employment providers that use the Individual Placement and Support model to help people find and keep jobs despite multiple, serious barriers to employment.

This brief from the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness, a project of the Community College Research Center and MDRC, presents four case studies on how community college state systems changed course placement policies and supported new placement practices in the midst of the pandemic.

The Rent Reform Demonstration is testing an alternative rent-setting system for housing choice voucher recipients. It offers an employment incentive and aims to reduce administrative complexity and cost without burdening participating households. This report presents impacts on labor market and housing-related outcomes through roughly three and a half years.

In this commentary originally published in Route Fifty, experts from MDRC’s Center for Applied Behavioral Science and BIT North America describe how government agencies can use behavioral science to adapt policies, programs, and services during the continuing pandemic crisis.

MDRC, Ascendium Education Group, and Rural Matters partnered to present an audio series about higher education that aired on the Rural Matters podcast. This special supplement presents summaries of all four installments in that series.

In this commentary originally published in Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, MDRC President Virginia Knox explains that public and philanthropic investments have built a foundation of evidence that can inform decision makers as they work to build economic mobility and reduce inequality.

This Issue Focus highlights MDRC’s efforts to incorporate principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion into the content of our work and how we conduct it, providing examples of current and ongoing initiatives to advance those goals.

This report from the Building Evidence on Employment Strategies for Low-Income Families project examines programs that integrate employment services with treatment and recovery services for people with substance use disorders. It explores the role employment plays in recovery and reviews limited but promising evidence on the effectiveness of these integrated programs.