In Phoenix, Arizona, six high school graduates cross the stage in caps and gowns. They don’t look like high school graduates—all are well over 18 years old, and each person missed the opportunity to graduate on time for one reason or another. Just a few years ago, these six adults never would have had this opportunity, this moment. But thanks to Goodwill and with support from Notre Dame, these six graduates, along with countless more, now have access to a new future.
Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) is an essential part of Notre Dame's new University-wide Poverty Initiative and is known for partnering with nonprofit organizations, service providers, and local governments — especially those dealing with poverty — to assess what programs work and what might not.
Patrick Turner, an associate research professor at LEO, detailed, “We partner research with the wonderful work being done with social service providers across the country. We bring in scientific evaluation methods to quantify the impact that they’re having on the lives of the clients that they serve, the clients who are experiencing homelessness or seeking job training or looking for a better life.”
The LEO team was asked to assess the efficacy of the Goodwill's Excel Centers, a tuition-free charter high school for adults that creates an individualized academic plan including necessary high school credits, industry-recognized certifications in fields such as health care and manufacturing, and college credits. Using data from Goodwill and the state of Indiana, the team was able to compare those who enrolled in an Excel Center and graduated, to those who started the program but did not complete it, to those who applied but did not enroll. The team found that although there was a slight dip in students’ earnings while actively in the program, within five years, those who graduated were earning 40 percent more than their peers. In total, Turner said, graduates see more than an $80,000 increase in earnings throughout their lifetimes.
“There are 18 million adults in the US that don’t have a high school diploma, and we don’t know a lot about how to best serve folks and help them be successful in the labor market,” Turner said. “One of the exciting things about this research project is that we’'ve been able to show and highlight a highly successful program that does have a big impact on the lives of the students that they serve. That furthers my hope of being a force for good in this world, that we can share that information and help grow those programs and serve more people.”
