A Two-Generation Human Capital Approach to Anti-poverty Policy

We propose a two-generation anti-poverty strategy to improve the economic fortunes of children in the United States. Our policy bridges two traditionally siloed interventions to boost their impacts: Head Start for children and career pathway training offered through community colleges for adults. We expect that an integrated two-generation human capital intervention will produce greater gains than either Head Start or community college alone for developmental and motivational, logistical and financial, social capital, and efficiency reasons. We suggest a competitive grant program to test and evaluate different models using federal dollars. We estimate average benefit-cost ratios across a range of promising career fields of 1.3 within five years and 7.9 within ten years if 10 percent of Head Start parents participate in two-generation programs.