<i>Youth Employment and Training Programs:</i> A Review

Abstract

[Excerpt] The Youth Employment and Demonstration Projects Act of 1977 (YEDPA) manifested a quantum leap in efforts both to meet the needs and to understand the employment problems of youths in the labor force. Over its brief life (from mid-1977 to early-1981), YEDPA served both as a massive delivery system for new programs and as an extensive laboratory for social experimentation. As such, an assessment of its activities and accomplishments must inevitably become intertwined with the suspicions that exist between those primarily interested in meeting needs and those largely concerned with evaluating the effectiveness of these ventures. These two groups have been cast into the same arena as the result of the congressional tendency to link public funding for social experiments with the requirement that they be evaluated to see if promises are consistent with performance.