Des Moines Area Community College's Workforce Training Academy Connect Program: Three-Year Impact Program

WTA Connect was an effort to help low-skilled adults improve their basic skills and engage in occupational training in high-demand, high-growth fields. In particular, it aimed to provide a pathway for students to enroll in occupational certificate courses when their low levels of basic skills made them otherwise ineligible for admission. This research was undertaken to evaluate whether WTA Connect was successful in providing training to low-income, low-skilled adults and whether the program’s efforts led to impacts on credentials, earnings, healthcare employment, and other life outcomes.

The three-year findings summarized below focus on the pre-specified confirmatory and secondary outcomes. There is one confirmatory outcome in both the education and the employment domains, which are the outcomes that we determined to be the most critical to judging the program’s success. Secondary outcomes are other important outcomes related to expected changes if the program is successful.

After 18 months, WTA Connect had increased credential receipt but not career progress. Analyses in this report indicate that after three years:

• WTA Connect modestly increased the receipt of exam-based credentials.

The program had a statistically significant positive impact on the receipt of exam-based certifications and licenses. However, credential receipt in both the treatment and control group was low. By the end of the three-year follow-up period, 18 percent of treatment group members had received an exam-based certification or license, compared with 13 percent of control group members. The difference of 5 percentage points is not significantly different from the impact found at the 18-month follow-up.

• WTA Connect had no detectable impact on average quarterly earnings in follow-up quarters 12 and 13 (the study’s confirmatory outcome) or on employment.

The difference in average quarterly earnings in quarters 12 and 13 between the treatment group and control group was not significantly different from zero. There was also no detectable impact on employment at the time of the three year survey. At that time, slightly less than two thirds of each group reported being employed.

• WTA Connect increased confidence in career knowledge, but not access to career supports.

The treatment group reported greater confidence in their career knowledge and their perceived career progress than the control group, but there was no detectable impact on access to career supports.

• WTA Connect had no detectable impact on measures of job quality or family economic well-being.

The program did not significantly improve any measures of job quality, such as working in a job for at least 32 hours per week or working straight shifts. There were also no detectable impacts on a range of family economic well-being measures including receipt of means-tested public benefits, debt levels, and signs of financial distress.

To assess the effectiveness of WTA Connect, the PACE project used an experimental research design in which program applicants were assigned at random to a treatment group that could access the program or a control group that could not, then compared their outcomes. From April 2012 to December 2014, nearly 1,000 applicants were randomly assigned. The impact study primarily used data from a follow-up survey conducted three years after random assignment and earnings records from the federal National Directory of New Hires.

Des Moines Area Community College's Workforce Training Academy Connect Program: Appendices for Three-Year Impact Program (PDF)

Hamadyk, Jill, and Randall Juras. 2021. Des Moines Area Community College’s Workforce Training Academy Connect Program: Three-Year Impact Report. OPRE Report 2021-98. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.