Whether you think the government should spend more on higher education depends on your general view of the effectiveness of government spending on education and training and of domestic government spending in general. Conservatives are less optimistic than liberals about this. The editorial below says that the Job Corps has been ineffective.
The Job Corps Failure: Taxpayers spend billions on a training program that doesn’t deliver. Wall Street Journal
April 22, 2018 5:24 p.m. ET
The U.S. economy is desperately short of skilled workers, and the federal government claims it wants to help. Alas, a new report from the Labor Department’s inspector general shows that the $1.7 billion federal Job Corps training program is a flop.
Launched in 1964, Job Corps works with 16- to 24-year-olds who grew up homeless or poor, passed through foster care, or suffered other hardships. The goal is to equip these young adults with skills for careers in advanced manufacturing, the building trades, health care, information technology, business and more.
Nearly 50,000 people enrolled in 2017, and 87% lived in Job Corps dorms. In addition to training and housing, the Job Corps provides meals, medical care, books, clothing and supplies, as well as an allowance for child care and living expenses. Such comprehensive support doesn’t come cheap—the taxpayer cost per student last year was $33,990—and the IG suggests that the investment often doesn’t pay off.
Job Corps’ record-keeping is a hot mess, but in 27 of 50 cases where full employment data existed, graduates were working the same sort of low-wage, low-skill jobs they held before training. One participant completed 347 days of Job Corps carpentry training but five years later worked as a convenience-store clerk for $11,000 a year. Job Corps called this as a successful outcome, so what do failures look like?
In 2011 the IG found the program matched more than 1,500 students with “jobs that required little or no previous work-related skills, knowledge, or experience, such as fast food cooks and dishwashers that potentially could have been obtained without Job Corps training.” The audit also found Job Corps had placed nearly one in five graduates in jobs that “did not relate or poorly related to the students’ training.”
The new report suggests that Job Corps’ biggest beneficiaries may be government contractors, not rookie job seekers. Job Corps spent more than $100 million between 2010 and 2011 on transition-service specialists to place students in a job after training.
I think the cited report is
JOB CORPS COULD NOT DEMONSTRATE BENEFICIAL JOB TRAINING OUTCOMES.
