On May 29, the Labor Department announced “a phased pause” of three-quarters of a $2 billion job training program that has been a failure since its beginning in 1964. The Daily Wire reports:
The Job Corps houses a mix of runaway teens and 20-something ex-cons in residential campuses, where 16- to 24-year-olds are paid to receive their GED diplomas and training in several trades. For decades, there has been evidence that monetary incentives have led to fraud, with contractors — who get paid bonuses for recruiting students and for having positive job-placement statistics — cooking the books to misrepresent post-graduation job outcomes, and tolerating criminal behavior on campus to avoid the loss of federal dollars that would come from expulsions. Contractors, including large for-profit companies, operate 99 of the Job Corps’ 131 facilities, which collectively house 25,000 students.
Those contracts were “terminated for convenience” on May 29. But campuses operated by government agencies, such as the Agriculture Department, continue to operate Job Corp programs.
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said, “Job Corps was created to help young adults build a pathway to a better life through education, training, and community. However, a startling number of serious incident reports and our in-depth fiscal analysis reveal the program is no longer achieving the intended outcomes that students deserve. We remain committed to ensuring all participants are supported through this transition and connected with the resources they need to succeed as we evaluate the program’s possibilities.”
The Daily Wire reported in April that the Job Corps spends up to $764,000 per graduate, while participants go on to earn $17,000 annually. One-third of students typically simply disappear, one-third are expelled for serious misconduct, and the remaining third graduate.
The Labor Department said it is not eliminating the Job Corps, which only Congress can do, but that finances dictated ending the contracts. It said the program was operating at a $140 million deficit in 2024, and that the Biden administration paused operations at two campuses as a result. The deficit was projected to grow to $213 million in 2025.
The Labor Department laments that Job Corps is “failing students”: its participants’ wages after graduation are so low they are just barely above the poverty level, even though Job Corps spends more per student than Harvard. “Considering only two out of every five participants actually graduate from the program, this is a massive amount of money being spent with little results,” the Labor Department says.
As the Daily Wire notes, “Job Corps critics have long pointed out that GEDs and vocational training are available for free in most locations through public school systems and unions, and that many people who signed up for Job Corps were simply looking for a $1,200 stipend and free room and board.”
The job-corps “program is a cesspool of crime where 500 people were raped and teens are brutalized but contractors profit,” reported Luke Rosiak of the Daily Wire. He added:
The Department of Labor’s Job Corps operates 131 facilities…gathering people from the margins of society and housing them in cinderblock dormitories where they fight, rape, and sell drugs to each other…More than 500 sexual assaults have been reported at Job Corps facilities in the last three years…There were 4,600 reported violent assaults over the past three years…those numbers likely significantly understate the reality, since a tolerance for criminal behavior is endemic to the culture and only the most severe incidents are recorded
Jobs Corps’ failures have persisted for years, and other federal job training programs are just as useless. 14 years ago, James Bovard explained how federal job “training” is so dismally ineffective that it causes “significant earnings losses” for young people who participate in it, and results in participants ending up on food stamps at higher rates. As he observed in the Wall Street Journal,
The federal government has experimented with [job-training] programs for almost a half century. The record is one of failure and scandal.
In 1962, Congress passed the Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA) . . . A decade after MDTA’s inception, GAO reported that it was failing to teach valuable job skills or place trainees in private jobs and was marred by an “overriding concern with filling available slots for a particular program,” regardless of what trainees actually needed…Between 1961 and 1980, the feds spent tens of billions on federal job-training and employment programs. To what effect?… An Urban Institute study of the mid-1980s concluded that participation in CETA programs resulted in “significant earnings losses for young men of all races and no significant effects for young women.”
After CETA became a laughingstock, Congress replaced it in 1982 with the Job Training Partnership Act. JTPA spent lavishly…For years the Labor Department scorned the mandate in the 1982 legislation to speedily and thoroughly evaluate whether the programs actually benefited trainees. Finally, in 1993, it released a study that showed participation in JTPA “actually reduced the earnings of male out-of-school youths.” Young males enrolled in JTPA programs had 10% lower earnings than a control group that never participated. . .The GAO warned in 1969 that many teens in federal summer jobs programs “regressed in their conception of what should reasonably be required in return for wages paid.” A decade later, it reported that most urban teens “were exposed to a worksite where good work habits were not learned or reinforced.” And in 1985, a National Academy of Science study found that government jobs and training programs isolated disadvantaged youth, thus making it harder for them to fit into the real job market.
