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Senior year of high school can be a pivotal time in a young person's life. For some, it is the last step on the path to college and work. For others, finding stable employment or attending university after high school is far from guaranteed. Urban Alliance, headquartered in Washington, DC, helps students at risk of becoming disconnected from work or school transition to higher education or employment after high school. Through its High School Internship Program, it offers participating high school seniors training, an internship, and mentoring to help them succeed. The Urban Institute recently completed an evaluation of the program in Washington, DC, and Baltimore. Using an experimental design, the study revealed several key findings approximately two years after high school.

Urban Alliance serves at-risk youth through its high school internship program, which provides training, mentoring, and work experience to high school seniors from distressed communities. The program aims to help youth move on to higher education or employment after graduation. The Urban Institute is conducting a six-year, randomized controlled trial evaluation of Urban Alliance's high school internship program. This report presents findings on participating youth in Washington, DC, and Baltimore during the 2011-12 and 2012-13 program years; it shows how the program affected these youth in early adulthood, including their college attendance and job preparation. The following are appended: (1) Survey Methodology; (2) Differential Attrition; (3) Full Sample and Subgroup Impact Tables; and (4) Survey Instrument. [Additional support was provided by the World Bank Group's Community Outreach Program.]

This report presents baseline and process study findings of an evaluation of the Urban Alliance high school internship program, which provides training, mentoring, and work experience to high school seniors from distressed communities in Washington, DC, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, and Chicago. The report, which focuses on the program's operations in DC and Baltimore in the 2011-12 and 2012-13 program years, explains the internship program model and its various components; describes the characteristics of youth participants; and presents findings from dozens of interviews and focus groups with program staff, youth, job mentors, and other stakeholders. An appendix contains a detailed description of the data and methods used during the course of the process study.

Americans change residences frequently. Residential mobility can reflect positive changes in a family's circumstances or be a symptom of instability and insecurity. Mobility may also change neighborhoods as a whole. To shed light on these challenges, this report uses a unique survey conducted for the "Making Connections" initiative. The first component measures how mobility contributed to changes in neighborhoods' composition and characteristics. The second component identifies groups of households that reflect different reasons for moving or staying in place. The final component introduces five stylized models of neighborhood performance: each has implications for low-income families' well-being and for community-change efforts. Appended are: (1) "Making Connections" Neighborhood Information; (2) Components of Neighborhood-Change Methodology; and (3) Cluster Analysis of Movers, Newcomers, and Stayers Methodology. (Contains 13 tables, 10 figures, and 18 notes.)