Future to Discover: post-secondary impacts report

Future to Discover (FTD) is a pilot project testing the effectiveness of two interventions designed to help students overcome certain barriers to post-secondary education, namely lack of career clarity, misinformation about post-secondary education, and lack of financial resources. This report presents post-secondary impacts of the project, which has involved 5,429 students at 51 high schools in Manitoba and New Brunswick since 2004. The project’s two interventions are the following: (1) Explore Your Horizons (EYH), which offers students enhanced career planning and better information about post-secondary programs, and their costs and benefits, early in the high school years; and (2) Learning Accounts (LA), which, during the early years of high school, provides non-repayable financial aid to students from lower-income families should they go on to pursue post-secondary education.

The project set out to test whether these interventions, offered either separately or in combination, would increase high school students’ chances of enrolling in post-secondary education. The current report presents the primary impacts of interest to the study, i.e. students’ participation in post-secondary education. It also presents results from a cost-benefit study, a summary of the implementation results, and includes results from the National Longitudinal Panel (a qualitative study of a sub-sample of participants’ decisionmaking, intended to gain insight on the mechanisms underlying the pattern of program impacts).

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