In 2010, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded the first round of five-year HPOG grants (HPOG 1.0) to 32 organizations in 23 states; five were tribal organizations. The purpose of the HPOG Program is to provide education and training to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients and other low-income individuals for occupations in the healthcare field that pay well and are expected to either experience labor shortages or be in high demand. HPOG 1.0 grantees designed and implemented programs to provide eligible participants with education, occupational training, and support and employment services to help them train for and find jobs in a variety of healthcare professions. The ACF Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation supports a multipronged research and evaluation strategy to assess the success of the HPOG Program.

To assess its effectiveness, the first round of HPOG programs was evaluated using an experimental design in which program applicants were assigned at random to a “treatment” group that could access the program or a “control” group that could not, and then their outcomes compared. This document reports on the programs’ implementation and short-term impacts, those that arose roughly five calendar quarters after random assignment. It reports an average impact across the diverse HPOG 1.0 programs.