| Abstract: | Using data on approximately 2,000 low‐income welfare recipients in a three‐site random‐assignment intervention conducted in the early 1990s (the NEWWS), we examine the role of cognitive and non‐cognitive factors in moderating experimental impacts of an adult education training program for women who lacked a high school degree or GED at the time of random assignment. Both cognitive and noncognitive skills (in particular, locus of control) moderate treatment impacts. For the sample as a whole, assignment to an education‐focused program had a statistically significant (albeit modest) 8 percentage point impact on the probability of degree receipt. For those with low cognitive skills, virtually all of these program impacts were eliminated. However, non‐cognitive skills play a substantively important role such that women with high cognitive skills but low non‐cognitive skills are only half as likely to earn a degree as their counterparts with high skills of both types. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. |
