Program outcomes themselves (in terms of placement and retention rates and wages) are not sufficient to evaluate our applicants; as we explain in our overview, we believe that individual motivation is important, and that some of those who are placed by our applicants could have found work without help (or with much less help).

None of our applicants sent specific analysis of how people with similar profiles to their clients' do without help (with the exception of HOPE, though we didn't find its "comparison group" strictly comparable). In an attempt to get some idea of likely outcomes for some clients, we used data from the 2000 census (providing data from 1999) and looked at earnings for people in New York City depending on educational attainment, ethnicity, and age.

We believe this data is a somewhat appropriate reference point for programs such as VFI and Year Up, which serve young people whose main obstacle to employment seems to be their low level of education (often lacking a high school degree in VFI's case; having only a high school degree or GED in Year Up's case).

We would be much more hesitant to use it as a reference point for those serving older populations. The mere fact that someone is unemployed or underemployed, and seeking help from a charity, at the age of 30 indicates a lot about them that is not captured in Census data; by contrast, we would expect most young and undereducated people to be without strong job prospects and to look for help.

Year Up and VFI

Year Up. We looked at the earnings of 20-25 year old, African-American and Latino high school graduates in New York City. We found that roughly 3% made more than $37,500 annually in 1999 (which is roughly equivalent to $45,000 in 2007), the average starting salary for Year Up graduates. We estimate that Year Up gets 10% of applicants jobs, and if half earn above average and half earn below average, Year Up ultimately finds 5% of applicants jobs earning better than $45,000 (2007 dollars), slightly beating our benchmark

VFI. We looked at the earnings of 20-25 year old, African-American and Latino non-high school graduates in New York City. We found that 20-25% made more than $17,500 annually in 1999 (which is roughly equivalent to $20,000 in 2007), the average starting salary for VFI graduates. We found that VFI got roughly 20% of its applicants jobs earning this amount (keeping in mind that only about 1/3 of applicants were enrolled in the program - see the Vocational Foundation page for details).

The details

The following data shows the distribution of earnings for Latino and African-American 20-25 year-olds in New York City in 1999. We used the InfoShare website to access this data. There (after logging in), we created “our own two-way table” and used the “Public Use Micro-sample (2000 census) for New York City. Then, using the “Population” category, we pulled “Educational Attainment” and “Wage or Salary Income in 1999.” We then filtered those results by age (depending on the organization) and ethnicity (looking at All, African-American, Latino, and White).