Summary
What do they do? MYEEP combines paid work with preparation and support. This review isolates a summer placement: the 2024 city design describes 140 employment hours plus 10 training hours. The current Workhub page posts $19.61 hourly pay but includes school-year content; applying it to a future summer slot is a modeling assumption. More
Why this approach interests us
- Structured paid work could reduce exposure to dangerous situations and improve connections to adults and services.
Our main reservations
- The selected experiment took place in older NYC cohorts, not SF. A local mortality effect and a privately funded additional summer slot are unverified.
What do you get for your dollar?
Our best guess is $24.84M per better life (10 QALYs) for a marginal summer placement, counting only a transferred mortality pathway. We would not prioritize this program for a health-only donor on this estimate. That is narrower than judging the value of youth wages, opportunity and community connection. Inspect the model and scenarios →
- our best guess
- $24.84M — per 10 QALYs; mortality-only analyst transfer
- positive scenarios
- $2.92M–$959M — Not a confidence interval; null benefit remains possible
- cost per slot
- $5,100 — Bottom-up judgment, not a JCYC marginal quote
- funding room
- Unverified — Existing public allocations are not private-gift capacity
1. What do they do?
MYEEP combines paid work with preparation and support. This review isolates a summer placement: the 2024 city design describes 140 employment hours plus 10 training hours. The current Workhub page posts $19.61 hourly pay but includes school-year content; applying it to a future summer slot is a modeling assumption.
Prepare for work
Training and support help youth enter a placement. Design hours are not observed completed hours.
Fund a summer placement
Model an additional place with wages and delivery costs, not a donation replacing an existing public allocation.
Test the safety pathway
Transfer a fraction of a cumulative experimental mortality effect, then model the healthy survival gained.
Scope of this review. The city presentation describes a $6.335M annual allocation and 900 annual youth across a wider program scope. Neither that ratio nor a later mixed-year budget is a summer-only unit cost.
2. Monitoring and information sharing
NYC summer-employment cohorts, 2005–08
Randomized lottery with instrumental-variable participation estimates. The selected paper reports lower cumulative mortality through 2014; subsequent earnings did not improve and college enrollment was unchanged.
Our assessment. Different city, age mix, risk environment and program vintage. The full-sample mortality effect is used once, not annualized or adjusted twice for take-up.
SF MYEEP
Official design and current program description. Design dosage and posted wage establish a plausible program and bottom-up cost anchor.
Our assessment. No local experimental mortality coefficient, summer-only marginal quote or additional capacity is established.
3. Qualitative assessment
Structured paid work could reduce exposure to dangerous situations and improve connections to adults and services.
Key reservations
- The survival horizon and timing are judgments. An early mortality difference may attenuate rather than create the assumed long-term healthy survival.
- The transferred absolute effect may be much smaller in a different-risk cohort. The positive range does not exclude no effect or harm.
- Summertime placements and school-year programming must not share an effect estimate automatically.
- Youth wages and opportunities matter beyond health utility. Excluding them makes this a narrow health comparison, not a claim that the program has no value.
Benefits not included in our estimate
- Current earnings and household consumption gains
- Incarceration and nonfatal injury benefits
- Education and longer-run earnings gains, which are not established by the selected experiment
- Public-payer savings and broader societal value
4. What do you get for your dollar?
Our best estimate: $24.84M per 10 QALYs.
The external mortality reduction is 0.073 percentage points, or 0.00073 probability per participation. We retain 25% for local transfer, assume 75% funding additionality and credit 15 discounted QALYs per death prevented. The effect is cumulative—not annual—and already participation-scaled.
A better life is our comparison unit of 10 additional quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), potentially spread across people. These are uncertain estimates, not measured returns or verified donation offers.
How we calculate the estimate
DOLLARS PER BETTER LIFE: 10 × $5,100 ÷ (0.00073 × 25% × 75% × 15)
≈ $24.84M per 10 QALYs
Model inputs and assumptions
- Donor cost per additional summer slot
- 5100 (range: 4000 / 5100 / 7000). 150 hours * $19.61 * 1.12 + $1,800 = $5,094.48, rounded to $5,100. Design hours and current posted wage are anchors; paying all training hours, 12% loading, $1,800 delivery allowance and transfer to a future summer cohort are assumptions, not a JCYC quote. Explicit analyst assumption.
- Share of external mortality effect retained
- 0.25 (range: 0.75 / 0.25 / 0.05). 25% is a subjective allowance for different baseline risks, program design, geography, vintage and uncertain marginal participant mix. It is not an estimated SF effect. Explicit analyst assumption.
- Share of a funded slot that is additional
- 0.75 (range: 1 / 0.75 / 0.25). 75% allows replacement of existing funding or another placement. No current unfunded cohort or private-gift allocation has been verified. Explicit analyst assumption.
- Discounted QALYs per death prevented
- 15 (range: 25 / 15 / 8). 15 is a rounded judgment, not measured youth life expectancy. An illustrative 40-year horizon with utility 0.85, annual hazard 0.01, 3% discount and five-year delay gives about 14.7 QALYs. Mortality timing and long-run persistence remain unverified. Explicit analyst assumption.
Illustrative $100,000: 19.6 funded slots and 0.0403 additional QALYs
- Optimistic positive: $2.92M per 10 QALYs. 0.3422 additional QALYs per $100,000; positive scenario, not verified funding room
- Central analyst estimate: $24.84M per 10 QALYs. 0.0403 additional QALYs per $100,000; positive scenario, not verified funding room
- Pessimistic positive: $958.9M per 10 QALYs. 0.0010 additional QALYs per $100,000; positive scenario, not verified funding room
Uncertainty. No additional slots, no transferred mortality effect, or no lasting survival gain means zero additional QALYs and no finite price. Positive scenarios are not confidence intervals; adverse effects are not ruled out.
Why this does not currently pass the $100K test
At $5,100 per slot, reaching $100K per 10 QALYs requires 0.51 QALY per slot. The central mortality pathway supplies only 0.00205. Even retaining the entire external mortality effect and crediting 25 QALYs yields 0.01825 per slot, before funding displacement.
REQUIRED VS CENTRAL BENEFIT: $5,100 ÷ $10,000 per QALY
0.51 QALY needed per slot versus 0.00205 modeled
QALY conversion assumptions
This is not a total social-benefit comparison. Income, nonfatal safety and incarceration pathways need separate defensible models rather than being assumed to close the gap.
5. Funding and previous grants
We have no current summer-specific marginal budget or causal local outcome estimate.
Cost includes an assumed donor wage bill and delivery allowance. No public-payer savings or earnings offsets are subtracted. A general JCYC gift is not automatically an additional MYEEP summer slot. We did not directly retrieve the later FY2024–25 grantee report, and do not use its indexed expenditure figures in this model.
This review does not establish a verified marginal funding offer or a complete history of grants.
We have not verified a suitable donation route for this reviewed activity. Confirm the legal recipient and intended allocation before donating.
6. Sources
- MYEEP program and posted wage. JCYC Workhub. Program identity and wage; not a current summer funding offer. Published: Undated, current page includes school-year content; retrieved: 2026-09-07.
- Board of Supervisors presentation, page 3. San Francisco DCYF. Summer design dosage and annual allocation, not completed hours or summer-only spending. Published: 2024-06-20; retrieved: 2026-09-07.
- The Effects of Youth Employment: Evidence from New York City Lotteries. Gelber, Isen and Kessler, Quarterly Journal of Economics. Randomized lottery instrumental-variable evaluation; Table VII cumulative mortality. Published: 2016; advance publication 2015; retrieved: 2026-09-07.
Annual expenses: years and sources
Average annual expenses (three consecutive fiscal years): $21,319,198. Organization size is separate from the modeled cost-effectiveness of a donation.
Japanese Community Youth Council
Whole legal entity Form 990 Part IX total functional expenses; latest original reconstructed filings checked, fiscal-end year from printed reporting dates. Older fallback rows from IRS extracted API.
Latest original filings checked; ProPublica extracted API lags these original returns.