Outcomes from Transitions in Education and Work

There is enormous interest in building a better understanding of how people transition across different educational and work experiences to sustainable jobs. Transitions of people as they age can be nonlinear and include transitions within and across secondary and post secondary institutions, as well as the use of government services such as disability services, criminal justice interventions, or workforce development. Individuals can also move across political jurisdictions such as state or county lines, making it incredibly difficult to understand the regular patterns in service utilization. The sheer variation on types of transitions individuals can make and the geographical movement across borders opens up opportunities for governments to intervene in more productive ways. The data sharing across states and agencies also provides increasing possibilities for more efficient and effective utilization of government services among vulnerable populations.

Building a common framework across states requires (i) identifying key issues of interest (ii) bringing together data from many sources across both state and agency lines and (iii) bringing together staff from those agencies. These three activities are necessary to work through the important data and measurement issues that are necessary to build operational metrics for decision-making. This workshop will build on a successful collaborative approach developed by the State of Illinois, Coleridge Initiative, Chapin Hall and Ohio State University that uses an inter-agency and inter-state collaborative, classroom environment to address the issues. It will bring together key stakeholders from the MidWest to develop an operational agenda for the spring of 2019. We expect to discuss how to develop such metrics as:

1. What are the main educational and work flows of interest for policy?
2. What data are available?
3. What kind of metrics would be of greatest use to stakeholders?