- Carolyn Heinrich
- Fall/Winter (2012-2013) 2013
- Focus-29-2d
- Link to foc292d (PDF)
- Link to foc292sup (PDF)
The story of Year Up’s founding and expansion is as poignant as it is instructive in an academic sense. In his book, A Year Up: How a Pioneering Program Teaches Young Adults Real Skills for Real Jobs with Real Success, Gerald Chertavian describes his approach to developing the Year Up program, which was simultaneously grass-roots and high-level in its search for guidance and evidence to build an innovative and viable model for helping urban young adults gain access to the job market. In fact, if I had not read this book and had instead come across the Year Up “High Expectations” program model on my own, I would have guessed that Year Up’s founder sat down with all of the academic literature to design this program. In offering comments on A Year Up in this article, I bring both research and policy perspectives to bear in considering the key, inventive aspects of the program model, Year Up’s implementation and reported program results, and its limitations as well as its potential for successful replication and extension of promising features to other interventions for urban youth.