Today’s Wall Street Journal highlighted the failure of the Job Corp program. The condemnation of the Job Corp confirms my disappointing experience as an Intern for the US Employment Service in the summer of 1967. Both the Job Corp and my job had noble aims—training unskilled workers. The answer is to compensate employers who train unskilled workers and employ them for an extended time period.
Launched in 1964 Job Corps works with 16-24 year olds who grew up homeless or poor in order to get them skills for careers in advanced manufacturing, the building trades, etc.
America spends $33,700 for each enrollee (50,000 in 2017) to train, house, and provide clothing and supplies them. Despite this expenditure the data shows that this investment in people did not pay off. WSJ pointed out that the record keeping is a mess. I fully understand that because we did everything possible to confuse our record. That is, the Employment Service only reported on those people who graduated from our program. Since over half of our trainees never completed the program we never recognized the losses associated with our expenditures for these people. In addition, we reported as a success if our graduate got a job. However, in many cases the graduate did not get a job that we had trained them for and also many of them did not get meaningful increase in wages. Job Corp record is a replica of our failure at the Employment Service.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the biggest beneficiaries are the government contractors, not the rookie job seekers. I will add that we paid $ millions for consultants. These reports were by and large useless. All they did was copy one another and report that if you were poor, you probably had improper medical attention, nutrition, housing etc. In hindsight, these “consultants” were a way to compensate important legislators whose support the Employment Service needed.
The investigation found that of the 324 sampled Job Corp alumni; that contractors only helped 18-find work. I would pay contractors only on the basis of finding Job Corp graduates work.
What is the solution? The solution is repaying businesses for training people and then putting them on the payroll for an extended time period. This will lead to relevant training.
Since the Job Corp and Employment Service have been around for 50 plus years, I am skeptical that Congress will take appropriate action to fix the problem. Sadly, although our need for trained workers is paramount, the government is not the answer.
Originally published in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune
