Bounding the return on investment and projecting the costs of expanding PROMISE services and activities: Initial insights from PROMISE for policymakers

BACKGROUND: Promoting Readiness of Minors in SSI (PROMISE) is a uniquely large initiative, with over $229 million awarded to sites across the country, by the U.S. Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human services to improve the education and employment outcomes for youth who receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and their families. OBJECTIVE: Policy makers need a clear understanding of the impact of the PROMISE intervention and the cost to roll out policy changes to the broader population; however, a comprehensive return on investment (ROI) analysis of PROMISE will not be available for many years, as it will require long-run information on the employment patterns of the participants. Although a full ROI analysis will be an essential tool to evaluate the policy implications of PROMISE, there is also a current need to understand the range of the ROI. To that end, this study aims to frame the bounds of the ROI for PROMISE and highlight the costs of expanding the availability of select services. CONCLUSION: The bounds of the ROI are determined by estimating the range of lifetime cost savings over levels of employment for SSI youth, accounting for benefit receipt and tax revenue. Using administrative data from the PROMISE sites, the study additionally estimates the cost to expanding select PROMISE services or activities within each state or site.