This volume is one of the products of the knowledge development effort implemented under the mandate of the Youth Employment and Demonstration Projects Act of 1977. The report focuses on the young school drop-out portion only of the supported work experiment, which also included offenders, ex-addicts, and welfare recipients. The goal of supported work is to aid groups of people with well-established employment difficulties to obtain and keep a regular job; in addition, it aims to reduce welfare dependence, drug use, and criminal activity. Between April 1975 and July 1977, five of the demonstration sites--Atlanta, Hartford, Jersey City, New York, and Philadelphia--participated in the supported work evaluation sample. They enrolled 1,244 unemployed 17- to 20-year-old high school dropouts, offering a randomly selected subset of the enrollees employment in a supportive environment for up to 12 or 18 months, and assistance in finding other employment as their program eligibility ended. Data were gathered for 18 months for 861 youths, although only 153 youths who enrolled in the sample prior to April 1976 completed an interview at 36 months. Thus, longer-term impacts of supported work are uncertain. The general conclusions from this study are that the availability of a supported work job had short-run impacts on employment and, consequently, on dependence on public assistance, but that the program does not appear to have mitigated the long-run employment problems of these youths. Furthermore, the project had no impact on youths' drug use or their participation in crime. Therefore, supported work does not appear to be well-suited to ameliorating the employment problems of young dropouts; and the net cost of the program is high. (KC)