Great question, thank you. Through our ITEST grant, we are tracking a wide range of short- and long-term outcomes. In the short-term, we're looking at graduation rates, attendance, and other academic measures of ECEC students vs. their non-ECEC peers. In the long-term, we'll be looking at wage and job progression, college achievement, additional certifications earned, and more. We're excited to announce that the first class of 27 students just graduated and - in a city where only 45 percent of students matriculate to college - 78 percent of our ECEC graduates  are heading to college, and 12 will be continuing to work at their employers.

We are hoping to demonstrate that ECEC is an effective, replicable, and scalable strategy for revitalizing STEM education and improving career pathways for inner-city youth.

Thank you for the kind words! Yes, demand from employers is very high, and the companies have indicated that they are willing to pay IF we can prove that these students become their future workforce. While the demand is there, we're trying scale smartly and support the students as much as possible. We're growing to 100 students next school year :-), and we're figure adding two schools per year is reasonable. Honestly, it comes down to funding, as this program is completely funded through philanthropy and government grants. 

Throughout this process, we have solicited and received feedback from students, schools, and companies on how to improve the program. One essential goal is to fight attrition: through these efforts, like increasing mentoring, attrition has dropped from 27 percent in the first cohort to 8 percent in the second cohort. In addition, we have improved the selection process: we have revised the interview questions, tightened the application requirements, and formalized the orientation. We have also seen the potential of offering additional industry certifications, such as welding, CNC, and CAD. Expanding the number of educational options should increase student engagement in the educational component of ECEC. Finally, we determined that ninth-grade programming wasn't effective, as it was to far from the actual ECEC selection process. Instead, we are intensifying our 10th grade programming to get more students excited in the Fall, then they can go right into interviewing and selection in the Spring.

Using the results and feedback from the students, parents, employers, and schools, we will continue making tangible internal and external improvements in the program!

Yes! I wish we had more time to get into this in the video. Our students take classes at two local community colleges (based on the closest college): Lorain Community College and Cuyahoga Community College. 

We don't use them for mentoring and coaching; instead, we take three approaches:

1. We have two full-time mentors on staff at MAGNET, one for the junior class and one for the senior class.

2. We partner with a local nonprofit, Youth Opportunities Unlimited, to support our students in several ways and connect them to valuable resources.

3. We partner with a private company that specializes in professional development for high school students. Juniors get an hour of professional development every week, and seniors get 6.5 hours every quarter.

We find that this diversified approach really plays to the strengths of all three organizations, instead of asking one organization to do everything.

Hi Jacob - collaboration is indeed challenging. I think our two best practices are

1) have a clear, written contract in place with tangible metrics that both parties agree to, and

2) as part of this contract, there has to be a clear win-win for both organizations. We have been able to use our funding to create a strong client-customer relationship, so we get great service from these nonprofit partners.

Quite honestly, the strengths were identified through trial and error. We also had to hire the right people, people who truly care and will go the extra mile for our students. Education, as you know, is really a "people" business, and we've been blessed to find the right people to make this program a success.

Thank you for your support!

During the high school day; we take them out one full day for their internship and one half-day for their community college classes. It takes a real partnership with each high school to ensure this works for the students, but it has worked well!

So in every school, we tend to have double the number of students interested as we have spots from local companies. We want to be selecting the right students, so we're really focused on quality over quantity. Once we've strengthened the model a little bit more, we can recruit more companies to offer internships. But if I could wave a magic wand, we could double the size of the program overnight :-)

This is a fascinating question! We don't have any hard data yet, but we've had lots of great anecdotes on how both executives and line workers have loved working with students. We've heard everything from, "We have workers specifically requesting to work alongside the ECEC students," and "We were really worried about these students negatively impacting our work culture, but they have done the complete opposite," to the students telling us, "We feel so supported by our co-workers. They will give us some tough love sometimes, but we really appreciate it." Through our ITEST grant and the research it is funding, we'll put some hard data to those positive stories!