Pros
I greatly enjoyed working with the students and having the opportunity to connect with and support them as they navigate office culture. Year Up's connections and program help get several thousand young adults employed each year. The relationships at companies help get (some) changes to occur in hiring and managing practices that can further help more young people and people of color hired and promoted in major companies. The funding and resources allow Year Up to invest more money than most other organizations into Social Workers and other supportive services for students.
Cons
Overall, Year Up seems to succeed in spite of itself and by reinforcing many of the same harmful practices that companes used in the first place that lead to the opportunity divide. A major focus of Year Up's philosophy is using poverty as a teaching tool and inflicting financial penalties on low-income students. Senior leaders rarely listen to the experiences of students or employees who come from the communities they are trying to serve to better understand how to serve all students. They would also oftentimes back their corporate partners over their own students to preserve relationships, ie if a student encountered verifiably racist speech or practices by their co-workers at internship, the organization would tell students to tough it out and that this came with working in the private sector. Year Up claims to have solved how to educate and employ low-income individuals, but there are large sections of that population, such as extremely low income, homeless, young parents, and formerly incarcerated people, that Year Up rarely accepts themselves. In my short time, I saw many employees start at Year Up, eager to serve the mission and the students, only to be disillusioned by the organization's practices and leave to work in other community based organizations.