Impact Evaluation of the NPower Tech Fundamentals Program

At the beginning of the program, NPower students participate in a tuition-free, 16-week Tech Fundamentals training course. Students participate in instructor-led training and are given the opportunity to work toward industry-recognized certification. Throughout the program, they are exposed to mentors from the IT industry, complete employment readiness workshops, and receive on-going support from a social support manager who helps them identify and overcome barriers to program completion. Graduates of the training course are placed in a 7-week paid internship with a local company to further develop hard and soft skills. Upon completion, program alumni receive job placement assistance to help them match to an entry level IT position with top employers in the area.

2021-01-04

2022-12-31

Quarterly employment and earnings during the two years following application
An indicator for annual earnings above $30,000 two years after application

We will endeavor to link study participants to additional administrative data sets to measure secondary outcomes. If possible, these will include post-secondary education data from the National Student Clearinghouse, SNAP and TANF receipt data, Medicaid participation and claims, credit bureau records, address histories from Infutor data solutions, and LinkedIn utilization and network data.

We will implement stratified randomization after individuals complete the online application. Randomization will be stratified based on site (Harlem and Dallas), gender (male vs. female/other), and educational attainment (HS diploma/GED vs. some college/Associates vs. currently enrolled/Bachelors).

Those who are assigned to the treatment group will be invited to interview with program staff. Based on their performance in the interviews, treatment group members will either be (i) invited to enroll in the program, (ii) placed on a wait list, or (iii) informed they were not accepted into the program. Those who are assigned to the control group will not be invited to continue the process. The assigned treatment status thus represents an intent-to-treat indicator among NPower applicants eligible for interview.

Not available

The recruitment manager will review the application for eligibility and will determine whether the applicant should be invited to interview with program staff. The recruitment manager will enter eligible and suitable applicants into a lottery to determine treatment status. We will generate a series of random treatment assignments to ensure equal treatment probability (two-thirds) across strata, and assign an applicant the next treatment status on the list at the time they enter the lottery.

Individual

No

1500 individuals

1500 individuals

1000 individuals in treatment
500 individuals in control

We assume a post-randomization take-up rate of 54 percent (share of the treatment group who enroll in the program), 80 percent power, and a type-1 error rate of 5 percent. We base control group means and standard deviations on the reported outcomes in the Year Up evaluation (Fein and Hamadyk,2018). Under these assumptions we are powered to detect the following effects under simple random assignment: Quarterly Earnings MDE: $1,022 increase among those who enrolled in the program; $552 increase for the entire treatment group (mean = $3,600; SD = $3,600) Indicator for earning more than $30,000 per year: 10.1 percentage point increase among those who enrolled in the program; 5.5 percentage point increase for the entire treatment group (mean = 0.15)

NPower Pre-Analysis Plan