Children who attended one of the nation’s leading early learning programs were more likely to graduate from college and maintain stable employment, while they were less likely to rely on public aid, a new study found.

The study is the latest to show that benefits of well-designed early education programs help students long after they graduate. In this case, students who attended the Abecedarian Project  were four times more likely to finish college than those in a control group, according to research published in Developmental Psychology, an academic journal, last week.

In addition, when former Abecedarian students turned 30, 75 percent had worked full-time jobs for a minimum of 16 of the previous 24 months, while 53 percent of adults in the control group maintained this job record, researchers reported. (You’ll need a subscription to read the article, but you can get a lot of the highlights in this summary.)

Only four percent of students who attended the program used public benefits for 10 percent or longer during the last seven years, while 20 percent of those in the control group fell into that category, according to the summary released by the FPG Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which leads the Abecedarian Project.

“I believe that the pattern of results over the first 30 years of life provides a clearer than ever scientific understanding of how early childhood education can be an important contributor to academic achievement and social competence in adulthood,” Craig Ramey, a co-author of the study and a professor at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, said in the summary. “The next major challenge is to provide high quality early childhood education to all the children who need it and who can benefit from it.”

Last summer, another study found that “Students in Top Early Ed Program More Likely to Graduate, Less Likely to Land in Jail.” 

In one of the most comprehensive studies of its kind, researchers followed 1,400 students – 957 from the well-regarded Child-Parent Center Education Program and 529 from a control group. A quarter of a century after enrolling in the center, 28 percent fewer had been incarcerated and 22 percent fewer had been arrested for a felony, compared to the control group, the study found.

-- 6/9/11. Birth to Thrive Online.