In an editorial in the Washington Post on July 5, 2017 entitled, “Listen Up, Millennials. There’s Sequence to Success,” George Will wrote,

“Of the several causes of descent, there and elsewhere, into the intergenerational transmission of poverty, one was paramount: family disintegration. Some causes of this remain unclear, but something now seems indisputable: Among today’s young adults, the “success sequence” is insurance against poverty. The evidence is in “The Millennial Success Sequence” published by the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies and written by Wendy Wang of the IFS and W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia and AEI.

The success sequence, previously suggested in research by, among others, Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, is this: First get at least a high school diploma, then get a job, then get married, and only then have children. Wang and Wilcox, focusing on millennials ages 28 to 34, the oldest members of the nation’s largest generation, have found that only 3?percent who follow this sequence are poor.”

The SCV EV-ROI methodology looks at a study like the “Millennial Success Sequence” and derives the expected value of programs that help students get the sequence “right” by looking at differentials in probabilities and differentials in income for getting the sequence “wrong.” We are in no way passing a moral judgment on anyone’s personal choice, nor are we saying that getting the sequence wrong necessarily condemns a family to poverty. We are saying that, at a population level, there is a very positive taxpayers’ ROI for programs that are successful in helping students graduate high school, get a job, and delay child-bearing until after marriage. That taxpayer ROI is primarily derived from increased income tax revenue, decreased public assistance, and decreased involvement with the criminal justice system.