Program designed for ex-prisoners and high school drop outs spends more money per student than Ivy League colleges
The federally funded “Job Corps” spends a lot of money with few positive results, according to an investigation by The Daily Wire.
Due to these low results, the program is reportedly on the chopping block for cuts by the Department of Governmental Efficiency, the news outlet reported.
The Department of Labor already announced a freeze on new enrollees at two centers in Maine.
“In the coming weeks, the department will continue to carefully evaluate these and other Job Corps facilities,” the April 1 statement noted.
The Daily Wire reported:
The Job Corps pays teenage runaways, high school dropouts, and twentysomething ex-cons to live in dormitories and receive their GEDs and vocational training. The national cost per graduate was $188,000, with the average graduate staying 13.5 months. Of more than 110 campuses, the 10 least efficient averaged a cost of $385,000 per graduate. Job Corps participants earn $16,695 per year on average after leaving the program, according to new government data.
However, the “cost per graduate” is in itself misleading, since the national graduation rate is around 32 to 39 percent, according to The Daily Wire.
“Of about 30,000 enrollees in the 2023-24 school year, roughly 10,000 were expelled for misconduct, 5,000 were booted for absconding, and 5,000 dropped out for other reasons,” the news outlet reported.
Criminal problems run rampant, as might be expected for a program that explicitly caters to ex-prisoners.
The Daily Wire reported:
At the Old Dominion campus with 95 enrollees, the campus officially reported 46 disciplinary infractions. At the Gary campus in San Marcos, Texas, there were 633 disciplinary incidents among 1,191 enrollees. The Oconaluftee campus in Cherokee, North Carolina, had 205 infractions over 162 enrollees, amounting to more than one per person.
The program has faced scrutiny for years, with the Wall Street Journal calling the program a “flop” in a 2018 editorial. The New York Times similarly reported on the failures of the program.
A 2018 audit concluded the Job Corps could not prove it was doing its one main job:
Job Corps could not demonstrate the extent to which its training programs helped participants enter meaningful jobs appropriate to their training. This occurred because Job Corps’ contractors did not adhere to program policy regarding the collection of information related to participants’ prior employment history upon entry into the program, and did not provide participants with effective transition services.
In 2020, the Trump administration sought to cut the program’s $2 billion in funding by 40 percent.
“The Job Corps is an ineffective federal job-training program that should be eliminated,” the Heritage Foundation concluded in its recommendations for the fiscal year 2023 budget.
The group noted the low return on investment. “If the Job Corps truly improved the skills of its participants, it should have raised their hourly wages substantially,” the conservative think tank found. “A $0.22 increase in hourly wages suggests that Job Corps actually does little to boost the job skills of participants.”
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: A group of Job Corps students; Job Corps/Facebook