Delinquents involved in youth employment programs may b e characterized as dropouts, unemployed high school graduates, underemployed youth ready for skill training, resistant and hard-to-reach, having cultural and communication inadequacies, and having physical and emotional disability. Once trained these youth sometimes refused to accept employment, were poorly prepared for earning money, got into trouble, sometimes quit the low-entry jobs, were sometimes fired after placement, and had to be brought back into the program for further training and remediation. Other factors included discrimination, a shortage of the requisite kinds and numbers of jobs, the obsolescence and inadequacy of existing vocational schools, the refusal of labor unions to support apprenticeship programs, and the lack of program coordination between those who train and those who hire. The school dropout is for the most part trainable and employable, but only with a considerable investment in time and dollars. The strategy of the economics of intervention and return on investment indicate that prevention is cheaper than therapy. Some alternatives to existing youth employment training programs are the armed forces model, the school model, the redefinition model and the industrial model. (DM)