DOL Pay for Success

Roca - the Massachusetts project - is a 4-year program for young male parolees & probationers. It seeks to foster strong relationships with program staff to change destructive thinking patterns, & provides transitional employment & workforce training.
Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), the NY project, is a 4-6 month program for high-risk adult parolees just released from prison. It provides training in life skills & work readiness, paid transitional employment, job placement assistance, & post-employment follow-up.

Under the Pay for Success (PFS) funding model, private investors (e.g., Goldman Sachs, philanthropic foundations) pay for program delivery, & get repaid by gov't - possibly with a return - only if the program achieves specific, pre-specified results as verified thru evaluation.

DOL to its credit required rigorous evaluations - resulting in sizable RCTs of both programs. The Roca RCT recruited a sample of 991 young men in 2014-15; the CEO RCT recruited a sample of 2,357 adult parolees from late 2013-2015.

Unfortunately, interim findings of both RCTs (avg of 1.5-2 yrs after study entry for Roca, and >1y for CEO) show near-zero impact on the targeted outcomes: days individuals were sentenced to incarceration, & employment rate. So, per the PFS model, investors weren't repaid.

But both projects & RCTs are continuing, in hope that impacts will materialize with larger samples & longer follow-up.

Frustratingly, DOL's report only provides high-level details on the RCTs, not enough to gauge study quality; hopefully DOL or other parties will release a full report in the future.

Disclosure: my former employer, the Laura & John Arnold Foundation, invested in both PFS projects & is helping fund the Roca RCT.