Getting Your Foot in the Door: The Impact of Public Sector Fellowships on Career Trajectories

Abstract

Governments face significant challenges in attracting and retaining younger talent, leading to a workforce increasingly skewed towards older employees. This study examines the impact of public sector fellowship programs as alternative pathways into government roles for early career professionals. Leveraging data from 17 cohorts of applicants accross four US fellowship programs over 19 years (N = 2141; 31,153 individual‐year observations), we employ a staggered difference‐in‐differences approach to compare the career trajectories of fellows and similarly motivated finalists. We find that fellowship participants are 30 percentage points more likely to pursue government careers, with a significant employment effect persisting up to 8 years after the launch of the fellowship. These findings suggest that scholarship can look beyond motivation‐based theories of who enters and stays in government to better understand how to bring new and different people into the public sector.