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The Linking Learning to Careers (LLC) program offered high school students with disabilities an individualized and targeted approach to strategically plan for their futures. The Vermont Division of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR) designed LLC to build on its usual services for high school students to emphasize unpaid and paid work-based learning experiences (WBLEs) in integrated environments, college exploration and coursework opportunities at the Community College of Vermont, team-based guidance and support from DVR staff, dedicated support for assistive technology, and additional transportation funding. To support a rigorous evaluation, DVR relied on a randomized controlled trial design, recruiting 803 participants to participate. This report presents evidence on LLC's impacts up to two years after students enrolled in the program. The demonstration had impacts on services and education that were consistent with the LLC model and findings from the implementation evaluation. However, the program did not have consistent impacts on employment.

Key findings: (1) LLC had a large impact on service use in the two years after youth enrolled, particularly services that LLC intended to offer (such as work-based learning experiences, assistive technology, postsecondary education, and certain preemployment transition services); (2) LLC had a large positive impact on enrollment in postsecondary education, with 31 per cent of LLC participants having enrolled in postsecondary education programs (compared with 22 per cent of control group members); and (3) LLC did not affect employment for all participants within the first 24 months of program enrollment, but it did increase the likelihood of earnings among later enrollees by 11 percentage points. Factors for the lack of consistent impacts could include many youth having worked before enrollment, most youth still attending high school 24 months after enrollment, or the LLC model not being sufficiently different from usual services.

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The purpose of the Youth Transition Demonstration (YTD) was to assist youths aged 14 to 25 with disabilities to successfully transition from school to economic self-sufficiency. Successful transitions included pursuing a post-secondary education or employment. Through agreements with community-based agencies at six sites in five US States, YTD provided a broad array of transition-related services and supports to participants. The YTD staff also established partnerships with other agencies and with employers to improve employment and educational outcomes. Services included: individualized work-based experiences; youth empowerment; family supports; system linkages; social and health services; and benefits counseling. Recognizing that a major barrier to employment for youths with disabilities is the fear of losing Social Security benefits, the YTD provided five waivers of program rules designed to allow participants to keep more of their earnings and encourage both savings and their continued education.

This document reports on the evaluation of YTD undertaken by Mathematica Policy Research for Social Security Administration (SSA). The purpose of the evaluation was to identify and test the most promising service strategies, combined with SSA waivers of certain program rules to enhance work incentives, for helping youth with disabilities maximize their economic self-sufficiency as they transition to adulthood. SSA selected six project sites into the evaluation based on their adoption of promising strategies to support youth with disabilities and on their capacity and willingness to support evaluation activities. Projects entered the YTD random assignment evaluation in two phases spaced several years apart. There were systematic differences between the phases in how the projects were implemented and their impacts on youth. The evaluation's three-year impact analysis examined each project's impacts on youth outcomes in five domains: (1) paid employment and earnings; (2) youth income; (3) participation in productive activities; (4) contact with the justice system; and (5) self-determination. The implications of the YTD evaluation for policy and practice will not be fully known until findings from SSA's long-term benefit-cost analysis become available. At a minimum, that will be several years in the future. In the meantime, six implications based on the findings presented in this report and the site-specific interim reports are outlined.

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The U.S. Department of Labor's Office of the Disability Employment Policy and its federal partners seek to build the evidence base for promising strategies to improve the employment outcomes for youth ages 14 to 24 who receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI). This report documents promising strategies to promote sustained, gainful employment for youth SSI recipients. An important challenge is that there is no single way to identify the most promising of the reviewed strategies. Testing strategies for youth SSI recipients could range from smaller interventions to large-scale demonstration projects. Smaller intervention tests could involve current innovations in evaluation techniques, such as behavioral nudges, rapid-cycle evaluations, and technical assistance integrated with strategies, that encourage specific practices or outcomes. Larger demonstration projects might build from existing large Social Security Administration demonstrations targeted to youth SSI recipients, which would provide evidence on a larger set of interventions at a much higher cost.

Key findings include: The Youth Transition Demonstration (YTD) evaluation provides the most comprehensive information about promising strategies to improve the employment outcomes of youth SSI recipients and points to the potential for employment services to influence outcomes for this population; Random assignment evaluations of federal demonstrations for individuals receiving adult SSI and Social Security Disability Insurance show the positive impacts of case management, health plans, supported employment, work incentives, and other supports; Various strategies targeted to youth and young adults with disabilities show consistent promising evidence on employment outcomes, though much of this evidence is based primarily on descriptive or non-experimental studies, and a larger number have involved transition programs that provide participants with employment services coupled with other services.

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