In the beginning, VFA was an institution beloved by many of its fellows. “It was a wonderful way to leave college and enter the real world because you’re surrounded by a community and there’s support from the organization,” says Jamie Norwood, co-founder of feminine hygiene brand Winx Health. Norwood and her co-founder, Cynthia Plotch, are a VFA success story. They met as fellows in 2015 and VFA eventually helped them launch their company with a grant and advisement. “We always say, Winx Health would not be here without VFA,” Norwood says.
Norwood and Plotch went through the standard VFA admissions protocol, which was rigorous. It required two written applications, a video interview, and in-person interviews at an event called “Selection Day,” many of which were held in New York City and Detroit over the years. By the end of each university term in May, accepted fellows would get access to Connect, VFA’s job portal, and have until November to land a job. For each fellow hired in a full-time job, VFA received a $5,000 placement fee, paid by partner companies. This fee became a crucial revenue stream for the organization—effectively wedding the professional success of its fellows to its bottom line.
Selection Day interviews were conducted by judges who often pitted interviewees against each other. Candidates were told to organize themselves in order of least to most likely to be successful, or according to whose answers had the most value per word. The format felt ruthless. “People cried” during the interview process, Plotch remembers.
The problems with the business bled into the fellows’ experience in 2023 and 2024, leaving them disenchanted, financially struggling, or expelled en masse from the program for reasons they believe were beyond their control. Despite a multitude of financial red flags, VFA leadership still insisted on recruiting for the 2024 class. “The talent team was traveling nonstop, using prepaid Visa cards since the corporate cards didn’t work,” explains a former director who worked closely with fellows.
Onboarding fresh recruits became increasingly crucial if VFA was going to survive. The organization asked companies for placement fees upfront in 2023, according to internal VFA documents and conversations with former employees. The policy change gave companies pause. Fewer companies signed up as partners, meaning fellows weren’t getting jobs and VFA was losing money.
In the spring of 2023, “there were 15 jobs on opening day,” for a class that eventually grew to over 100 fellows, the former director explains. Gabriella Rudnik, a 2023 fellow, estimates that when training camp began in July 2023, less than half of her peers had jobs, “whereas in previous years it would be closer to like 80 percent.”
Fellows were made to pay the price for the shortage of companies partnering with VFA in 2023. “We weren’t getting more jobs on Connect, and that’s what led to so many fellows being off-boarded,” explains a former director who worked closely with fellows.
Traditionally, VFA gave fellows a deadline of November of their class year to find a job, which typically meant a few stragglers were given extra help to find a position if they were late. In those rare cases during earlier years, fellows were offboarded by the organization, a former director says.
In previous years, expulsion was a much more serious and infrequent occurrence. “Removal from the fellowship was not something done lightly. During my tenure, we instituted an internal investigation process, similar to an HR investigation,” says the former executive who worked at VFA from 2017-20.
In total, at least 40 fellows from the 2023 class were expelled for failing to get jobs that weren’t available, according to research by former VFA fellows who tracked the number of fellows purged from a Slack channel. Records of their participation were removed from the VFA website, the fellows say.
Many fellows had made sacrifices to be part of the highly selective and prestigious VFA, which cited acceptance rates of around 10 percent of applicants. “There were fellows who turned down six-figure jobs to be a part of this program, and were told that the program that Andrew Yang started would live up to its reputation,” says Paul Ford, a 2024 fellow.
Though internal documents show that VFA was slowly imploding for months, in all external communications with fellows, the nonprofit still maintained that 2024 training camp would take place in Detroit.
“From an ethical perspective, it does reek of being problematic,” says Thad Calabrese, a professor of nonprofit management at New York University. “You entered into an arrangement with people who don’t have a lot of money, who believed that you were going to make them whole. Then you’re going to turn around and not make them whole.”