| Principal Investigator: | Heath J. Prince, PhD |
| Sponsor: | JPMorgan Chase |
| Project Duration: | August 2021 – August 2026 |
| Description: | With the support of JPMorgan Chase, the Ray Marshall Center will study the pathways taken by Opportunity Youth in Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. This five-year grant represents one of the largest efforts undertaken in Texas to date to study the systems that serve, and the trajectories taken by, disconnected young adults (between the ages of 18 and 24 who are neither enrolled in school nor working) after participation in a youth-serving program. The study aims to determine the size of the OY population in each of these cities, as well as measure programmatic impact in terms of employment and/or enrollment in postsecondary education. In addition to providing a clearer picture of the OY landscape, it is our expectation that the study findings will inform OY policy for the state. |
| Reports Available: |
Researching ACC’s Rainy Day Savings Program
| Principal Investigator: | Greg Cumpton, PhD |
| Sponsor: | Austin Community College |
| Project Duration: | April 2021 – March 2022 |
| Description: | Austin Community College’s (ACC) Student Money Management Office (SMMO), established in 2016, supports Austin Community College student success by providing accessible and relevant money management education, enabling students to make informed financial decisions.
In fall 2018, SMMO piloted the Rainy Day Savings Program, modeled after the successes of Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) which have helped low-income people save and attain assets. In the Rainy Day Savings program, students earn up to $100 in cash incentives for completing certain tasks and meeting milestones. These tasks and milestones were chosen because of their potential impact on future financial wellness, such as setting up direct deposit, completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), and meeting with a financial coach. Savings accounts were opened for students at University Federal Credit Union (UFCU) exclusively for the purposes of the Rainy Day Savings Program, and students worked towards amassing at least $500 savings. Based on the initial results, ACC viewed this program as a tool to increase student retention and completion and sought to expand and refine the program. ACC received funding from Trellis Foundation in January 2020 to support this effort. ACC enrolled approximately 600 students in the Rainy Day Savings Program in fall 2020. Enrollment focused on two key student groups: First-time in college (FTIC) and Adult Education (AE) students. The program helped students establish a savings account at a local financial institution and provided cash incentives as they set aside money for a financial emergency. ACC is partnering with the Ray Marshall Center (RMC) to study the effectiveness of the Rainy Day Savings program. This research study will provide actionable information about the success of the intervention allowing for ACC and Trellis to make decisions about and program modifications and sustainability. |
| Reports Available: | Research Study of Austin Community College’s Rainy Day Savings Program Date: August 2021 Publication Type: Report, 28pp. |
Applied Data Analysis Training and Support
| Principal Investigator: | Heath J. Prince, PhD |
| Sponsor: | Coleridge Initiative, Inc. |
| Project Duration: | April 2021 – February 2023 |
| Description: | The Ray Marshall Center (RMC) will provide data management, research, and governance assistance to the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC). As a part of an initiative at the Coleridge Initiative, Inc. to expand access to state data to policymakers and state agency employees, the RMC will provide staffing and support to facilitate the Applied Data Analytics training program created by the Coleridge Initiative, Inc. The RMC will provide support and staffing to implement the training developed by the Coleridge Initiative for state agencies in Texas and surrounding states. The curriculum is designed to expand access and use of administrative data to inform policy. This training model is designed to be repeated in support of data initiatives within Texas after this engagement.
The Coleridge Initiative is a not-for-profit start-up, originally established at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. The Coleridge Initiative became fully independent in August 2020. The Coleridge Initiative works with government agencies to break down the barriers to accessing confidential data. They set up and manage a secure computational research platform, the Administrative Data Research Facility (ADRF), to promote access to sensitive and confidential microdata (fully secure and de-identified of course). They then train analysts and researchers how to access and use this data. The Initiative has already worked with over 100 federal, state, and local agencies and trained over 500 agency staff. |
| Reports Available: |
Data Linkage for LEO’s Texas Research Study
| Principal Investigator: | Ashweeta Patnaik, MPH |
| Sponsor: | Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities, University of Notre Dame |
| Project Duration: | June 2021 – June 2023 |
| Description: | The Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) at the University of Notre Dame conducts impact evaluations in partnership with non-profit and government agencies focused on reducing poverty by creating evidence based programs that move people from poverty to self-sufficiency. LEO is currently conducting a large research study in Texas to test assumptions about self-sufficiency programs. The research examines the impact of multiple self-sufficiency programs being implemented in locations across the state of Texas. Partners include Catholic Charities of Galveston-Houston, the Goodwill Excel Center in Austin, Catholic Charities of Dallas, Jewish Family Services, NPower, Combined Arms, and Lubbock County, and the Tarrant County Homeless Coalition. This research will help in understanding the impact of anti-poverty programs on populations ranging from school age children, to elderly, to veterans to people and families at low-income levels.
LEO is partnering with the Ray Marshall Center (RMC) at The University of Texas at Austin to utilize state administrative data to support this research. LEO and RMC researchers will use the data to demonstrate the impact of these self-sufficiency programs on outcomes such as earnings, employment and public benefit usage. By testing what works to move people to self-sufficiency, LEO and RMC will inform and improve poverty programming across the state and inform policymakers as they make decisions about funding and programming. |
| Reports Available: |
Nuru Ethiopia, Nuru Kenya, and Nuru Nigeria Impact
| Principal Investigator: | Heath J. Prince, PhD |
| Sponsor: | Nuru International |
| Project Duration: | April 2021 – February 2023 |
| Description: | The Ray Marshall Center will assist Nuru International’s M&E team with analyzing and reporting Nuru Ethiopia, Nuru Kenya, and Nuru Nigeria’s impact. |
| Reports Available: |
America’s Job Center of California Evalutation
| Principal Investigator: | Heath J. Prince, PhD |
| Sponsor: | Corporation for a Skilled Workforce |
| Project Duration: | June 2020 – April 2022 |
| Description: | With assistance from the California Workforce Association (CWA), the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW) and the Ray Marshall Center (RMC) of the University of Texas are partnering to evaluate the effectiveness of American Job Centers of California (AJCC) system using a mixed-methods and multi-part research design to achieve the objectives below:
– To understand how the four different models of service delivery in use in California affect a) overall access to services and, more importantly, b) the mix of services provided to the client population served. – To understand how investment decisions pertaining to AJCC infrastructure, staffing levels, and number of locations affect a) overall access to services and, more importantly b) the mix of services provided to the client population served. – To understand whether there is any relationship between participant program outcomes and the mix of services provided to the client population served. Do some models of service delivery and some types of investment decisions pertaining to AJCCs appear to be systematically related to participant program outcomes?
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| Reports Available: |
Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Protection Resilience Efficiency and Prevention for Workers in Industrial Agriculture in Changing Climate
| Principal Investigator: | Heath J. Prince, PhD |
| Sponsor: | National Science Foundation, Belmont Forum |
| Consortium Lead: | University of Gothenburg, Sweden |
| Project Duration: | January 2020 – December 2022 |
| Description: | Chronic kidney disease of undetermined cause (CKDu), affects millions of workers in Latin America and Asia. Treatment is expensive, resulting in early death for those affected. Strenuous work in extreme heat without sufficient rest and hydration is considered a main driver. Industrial agriculture is the most affected, especially the sugarcane sector. Without prevention, this epidemic is likely to accelerate due to climate change. Increasing temperatures, coupled with decreasing precipitation in drier agricultural regions, is also causing pesticides and other toxins to concentrate at higher levels.
As a response to this heat stress related disease, we have collectively implemented the Adelante Initiative, a workplace intervention with focus on adequate water, and rest in shade together with improved ergonomics, designed to prevent CKDu among workers at a sugarcane mill in Nicaragua. Due to the high prevalence of CKDu among sugarcane workers, we are concentrating our efforts in this sector; from there we will adapt the program to other geographies and industries. Our proposed project builds on current efforts and investigates the following: 1) the immediate and long-term impact the intervention has on workforce health (kidney health and heat related injuries) and productivity; 2) the economic and social impacts on those affected by the disease and whether our intervention aids in resilience, including mitigating migration pressures; 3) the economic burden on health systems treating CKDu; and 4) an analysis of public health policies to understand what policies, or absence of policy, have contributed to the disease while investigating what policies are required to effectively address it. The knowledge gained will create the groundwork to expand to other sugarcane mills and eventually other industries at-risk for heat stress and CKDu. As climate change means more extreme temperatures in already impacted regions, and the likelihood that regions further north and south of the equator will also be impacted by CKDu, it is essential a model to protect worker health and productivity is developed. |
| Reports Available: | A Measure of the Return on Ingenio San Antonio’s Investment in the Adelante Initiative: An Initial Estimate of Costs and Benefits of a Water, Rest, and Shade Intervention Author: Heath Prince, PhD Date: May 2020 Publication Type: Report, 7 pp. Prepared for the La Isla Network, with funding from the Deutsche Investitions und Entwicklungsgesellschaft (DEG) The Economic Impact of CKDnt on Households: Survey Findings from a Pilot Study of a Workers’ Association, Asochivida, and of the Communities of La Isla, Manhattan, and Candalaria, Nicaragua |
HPOG Secondary Data Analysis
| Principal Investigator: | Christopher T. King, PhD |
| Sponsor: | Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation |
| Project Duration: | December 2019 – December 2021 |
| Description: | The Ray Marshall Center will evaluate the variation in program characteristics – including program components, implementation features, local context, and participant traits – to explore which characteristics are associated with Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) program participant’s healthcare profession career pathway outcomes. This research will address the following questions:
Similar to the previous research on the impact of HPOG program characteristics on educational achievement (Peck et al., 2018 and Walton et al., 2019), this research expects to identify supports such as childcare and transportation assistance, tuition, and other financial assistance, as well as employment supports and emergency assistance associated with CNA participant achievements along a career pathway. Practitioners, policymakers, funders, and researchers may be interested in which combination of program components, implementation strategies, participant characteristics, and local context may impact a CNA participant to pursue the next step along a healthcare profession career pathway. Insights from this research can inform future program design and implementation within the broader field of entry level healthcare provider workforce development. |
| Reports Available: |
Pursuit of Advanced Training in High-Demand Skills (PATHS) for Texas
| Principal Investigator: | Heath J. Prince, PhD |
| Sponsor: | Workforce Solutions Greater Dallas |
| Project Duration: | January 2020 – March 2022 |
| Description: | The Ray Marshall Center will provide research support to the PATHS (Pursuit of Advanced Training in High-Demand Skills) for Texas project in partnership with Workforce Solutions Dallas. The goal of the PATHS project is to implement a statewide retail sector incumbent worker career advancement strategy. The RMC’s primary role under this grant will be to evaluate outcomes in order to provide evidence of success and efficacy for expansion and regional replication. Specifically, the RMC will undertake the following tasks related to (1) performing an independent evaluation of quantitative outcomes for PATHS; (2) conduct an end-of-grant cost-benefit analysis; and (3) the RMC will conduct the final evaluation report. |
| Reports Available: |
Child Care Cost of Quality Modeling Study
| Principal Investigator: | Daniel Schroeder, PhD |
| Sponsor: | Texas Workforce Commission |
| Project Duration: | May 2019 – April 2022 |
| Description: | Researchers from the Ray Marshall Center (RMC) will conduct a study of the cost of providing quality child care in the state of Texas, the purpose of which is to provide estimates of how much more additional funding, in terms of daily rates, should be paid to providers who meet quality standards to care for children, relative to how much providers who do not meet such standards are paid. The study will be done in conjunction with the Texas Institute for Child and Family Wellbeing (TICFW), who will be responsible for consulting on the design of a pair of surveys to capture important quality factors and pricing information, and fielding the surveys to carefully selected samples of home- and center-based child care facilities. |
| Reports Available: |
