What Giving People a Second Chance Really Takes

Every few years, the same debate resurfaces. Governments use public funds to support training programs for people who left school early or lost their jobs, and someone questions whether that investment is worthwhile. The evidence is genuinely mixed, which helps explain why the debate has never reached a lasting resolution.

I have devoted a considerable part of my career to studying this question. In a series of papers I worked on, we used experimental designs that randomly assigned individuals either to technical training or to a group that received no training, then tracked their outcomes over time. What we discovered changed my perspective. I would summarize the conclusion this way: the training itself is seldom the problem. The problem is expecting training to succeed by itself.

Why I Chose to Study This Question

I was born an American citizen, but I grew up in Colombia, where the conditions that later shaped my research were part of everyday life, not something I first learned about in a classroom. My parents were deeply engaged in social projects, and they often brought me along to shantytowns surrounding Bogotá and to rural communities far outside the city. We traveled across the country by car. I also spent summers with my maternal grandparents in a department that was among Colombia's poorest.

Those experiences exposed me to homelessness, child labor, and communities without reliable access to basic necessities such as drinking water and electricity. I still remember spending most of a day stranded on a road with my parents because the road had been destroyed. Experiences like that are difficult to forget.

What stayed with me was more specific than a broad concern about poverty. I came to understand that limited access to employment lies beneath many other forms of disadvantage. When people cannot find paid work, the effects extend well beyond their earnings. They appear in unequal access to education, housing, healthcare, the legal system, and eventually political power. That realization led me toward labor economics. To me, employment was not simply another part of the problem. It was where much of the chain began.

What We Set Out to Test

The programs we studied were not designed to provide advanced academic degrees. Their purpose was to teach practical, job-specific skills, such as electrical work, plumbing, and professional driving. These are occupations that economies depend on and that individuals can pursue without spending many years in formal education.

The research design was relatively simple. Participants were randomly assigned either to receive technical training or to receive no training. This created a clear comparison, allowing us to identify the effects of the program rather than differences between the people who chose to participate. Such clean experiments are not always feasible in labor economics. Much of my other research uses carefully selected non-experimental settings to establish causal relationships. For this series of papers, however, I conducted randomized experiments.

The results showed that technical training alone often produced limited benefits. Outcomes improved substantially when programs combined technical instruction with what researchers sometimes describe as soft skills or life skills, along with transportation and childcare support.

That final finding deserves particular attention. Transportation and childcare may sound like administrative details, but they can determine whether someone participates at all. A person who cannot travel across a city or find someone to care for a child may never reach the classroom. Even an excellent curriculum cannot overcome those barriers. A program that overlooks them is not simply less effective. It may be inaccessible to a substantial portion of the people it was created to serve.

Why the Time Frame Matters

One common and reasonable criticism of positive results in vocational training research is that the improvements may not last. Participants finish a program, experience higher earnings for a year or two, and eventually see those gains disappear.

We therefore examined what happened to participants ten years later and even further into the future. The earnings improvements remained. We also discovered something we had not initially set out to investigate. Individuals who completed vocational training were returning to the formal education system. For them, the training program had become a pathway back to schooling they had previously left behind.

That finding is especially convincing to me. A brief intervention that improves someone's earnings for a couple of years has value, but its impact is limited. An intervention that helps someone resume an educational journey they had abandoned represents something much more significant.

The Results Depend on What We Measure

Economists are trained to look carefully for unintended negative consequences. That is an important practice because it often reveals genuine problems. In this research, however, the unexpected effects were positive. The benefits extended beyond the individuals who received training. They reached other household members and spread into the surrounding communities.

This has major implications for cost-benefit analysis. The conclusions depend heavily on which outcomes are included in the calculation. If we measure only participants' immediate wages, these programs may appear to offer relatively small returns. But when we account for long-term earnings, renewed participation in formal education, and benefits experienced by family members, the overall picture changes considerably.

I believe this illustrates a limitation of conventional accounting methods. They can be too narrow to capture everything a program accomplishes. Accurately measuring total benefits alongside total costs is challenging, and many of the most important disagreements in policy analysis arise from precisely this difficulty.

What the Findings Mean for Program Design

Four practical lessons emerge from this research, and none requires a complicated solution.

Combine the services. Technical instruction offered as an isolated service is the form of vocational training most likely to produce disappointing outcomes. Unfortunately, it is also the least expensive option, which helps explain why it continues to receive funding.

Plan for participation, not merely instruction. Transportation and childcare should not be treated as optional additions to vocational training. For a significant share of participants, these services determine whether they can enroll, attend regularly, and finish the program.

Measure results over longer periods. Evaluations that stop after two years are likely to underestimate the full value of these interventions. One of their most meaningful outcomes, helping people return to formal education, often takes more time to become visible.

Include broader social benefits. An evaluation focused exclusively on the individual participant will overlook much of the value created for families and communities.

What Second Chances Really Mean

A substantial part of my research has examined how public policies affect access to employment, including labor regulations, capital market regulations, immigration, and trade. Yet I continue returning to this particular area of study. I think that is because it concerns people who have already been let down by existing systems.

Across many low-income and middle-income countries, though certainly not only in those places, large numbers of people leave formal education and are effectively excluded from further opportunities. Sometimes this happens to entire generations of students. Deciding whether to fund second chances is therefore about more than the technical details of training programs. It raises a broader question about whether society is prepared to invest in people whom the education system failed to retain the first time.

The research indicates that these investments can work, as long as we recognize everything required to make them successful. Learning practical skills matters. Having the bus fare to reach the classroom matters, too.

The Research

“Hard and Soft Skills in Vocational Training: Experimental Evidence from Colombia” (with Felipe Barrera and Mikko Silliman). World Bank Economic Review, March 2023. https://doi.org/10.1093/wber/lhad007

“The Long-term Impacts and Spillovers of Training for Disadvantaged Youth” (with Maurice Kugler, Juan E. Saavedra, and Luis Omar Herrera). Journal of Human Resources 57(1), January 2022. http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/57/1/178.abstract

“Subsidizing Vocational Training for Disadvantaged Youth in Colombia: Evidence from a Randomized Trial” (with Orazio Attanasio and Costas Meghir). American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3(3): 188-220, July 2011. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.3.3.188