The Youth Engagement Contract – young people at risk of dropping out: a quantitative evaluation

Beneficiaries of the ‘CEJ – Jeunes en rupture’ programme and support

In total, the roll-out of the ‘CEJ – Jeunes en rupture’ programme enabled 24,988 young people to be identified between January 2023 and June 2024. Of these, 7,451 young people received support through the Missions Locales.

• Just under 50 per cent of the young people receiving support do not have a qualification.
• At the start of their support with the programme provider, 39 per cent cited difficulties relating to housing and 34 per cent relating to their health.
• 47 per cent of the young people receiving support did not sign a ‘CEJ – Jeunes en rupture’ contract with a Local Mission. These were mainly young people who had been referred to another organisation, or who had chosen to discontinue their support.
• Young people enrolled in the ‘CEJ – Jeunes en rupture’ programme at the Mission Locale are further removed from the labour market than those enrolled in a ‘standard’ CEJ programme: for example, 96 per cent do not have a driving licence and 14 per cent have housing problems, compared with 91 per cent and 6 per cent respectively for young people in the ‘standard’ CEJ programme.
• Contrary to the notion that this target group is initially ‘invisible’ to public employment services, 40 per cent of young people who started a CEJ-JR in 2023 had been registered with the Mission Locale for over a year. Several qualitative findings suggest that some young people were in contact with the Mission Locale, despite the initial guidelines stipulating a five-month timeframe. This significant proportion of young people benefiting from the ‘CEJ – Young People at a Crossroads’ programme, who were already known to the Missions Locales, is described by the Fédération des Acteurs de la Solidarité (2025) as a category of young people ‘at a crossroads in the sociological sense, that is to say, with life stories marked by disruptions to their life paths, life-altering events and major difficulties in integration, without these young people being unknown or ‘on hold’ from the Mission Locale’s perspective’.

Impact assessment of the scheme

• When comparing trends in the population supported by Local Missions that have implemented the ‘CEJ – Young People at a Crossroads’ programme with those of organisations that have not implemented it, no significant change is observed in the characteristics of the young people supported by the Local Missions concerned.

NB: This result should be interpreted with caution. On the one hand, this is because the sample size does not provide sufficient statistical power to detect small effects (fewer than 1 per cent of new registrants at these organisations in 2023 were beneficiaries of the CEJ-JR). On the other hand, the precise identification of young people who have ‘dropped out’ is based on a complex reality, linked to the diversity of their profiles and life trajectories. This situation can manifest itself in various forms, some of which are difficult to observe using the available data. The variables available to the authors make it possible to identify certain characteristic situations (such as a lack of accommodation or qualifications), but do not cover all the factors that might indicate a young person is at risk of social exclusion.

• The second part of the CEJ-JR impact analysis focuses on the paid employment trajectories of young beneficiaries. There is an increase in the proportion of days worked in paid employment following the start of the programme. These young people consistently have lower employment rates than those in the CEJ scheme.
• A striking initial observation is the sharp drop in the proportion of days worked immediately prior to entering the programme. This is a well-documented phenomenon in the literature, known as the ‘Ashenfelter dip’ (Ashenfelter 1978). This suggests that the CEJ-JR targets young people who are particularly far from the labour market, facing a dual obstacle: structurally difficult (professional/vocational) integration into employment, exacerbated by a negative cyclical shock at the individual level, such as the loss of a job. However, this type of negative shock is also observed among CEJ beneficiaries.
• The staggered-design analysis of the CEJ-JR’s impact on pathways to paid employment shows that the programme helps to partially mitigate the initial shock experienced by young people. By the end of the ninth month, young people in the treatment group are in paid employment, on average, 7 percentage points more than the control group, which consists of young people who will join the CEJ-JR programme at a later date. This average treatment effect (ATT) is estimated at 0.07 with a p-value of 0.09, indicating that it is not statistically significant at the 5 per cent threshold, but becomes significant at the 10 per cent threshold.

NB: The authors do not have sufficient data to measure the programme’s effect beyond a 10-month horizon.