Education and Labour Market Impacts of the Future to Discover Project

The key objective of this report is to present the labour market returns of FTD interventions on “marginal” students — those who would not have attended PSE in the absence of the tested interventions — by means of estimated impacts on labour market outcomes as reported in participants’ tax returns. [...] The labour market outcomes of FTD participants in New Brunswick follow a few important patterns: FTD interventions had no substantial impact on the proportion of students who reported employment earnings in each of the seven years of the postsecondary period, suggesting that most students did not withdraw from the labour market completely despite increased participation in PSE studies. [...] We use the term net present value to mean the current value of an investment (such as education) plus the current value of its future returns, minus the initial cost of the investment and the present value of any future costs. [...] In the interests of brevity, the report focuses on the impacts of the interventions relative to “business-as-usual” career education and student aid experiences of control group students (the “counterfactual”) and does not include results comparing one type of intervention to another. [...] For example, in the following sections, the difference on any given outcome between the group offered EYH and the control group receiving no program offer is the estimate of the impact of EYH on the outcome (for verified lower-income families).