 | |
| Agency overview | |
|---|---|
| Formed | 1964 |
| Type | Vocational Education |
| Jurisdiction | United States |
| Headquarters | Washington, D.C. |
| Agency executive |
|
| Parent department | Department of Labor |
| Website | www |
Job Corps is a program administered by the United States Department of Labor that offers free education and vocational training to young people ages 16 to 24. [1] [2] [3]
Job Corps' mission is to help young people ages 16 through 24 improve the quality of their lives through vocational and academic training aimed at gainful employment and career pathways. [4]
The Job Corps was originally designed by a task force established by Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz reporting to his Manpower Administrator Sam Merrick. [5] In 1962, the youth unemployment rate was twice the non-youth unemployment rate and the purpose of the initiative was to create a program whereby Youth members of the program could spend half of their time improving national parks and forests and the other half of their time improving their basic education skills which were severely limiting their occupational accomplishments. The Job Corps Task Force initially recommended that Job Corps programs be limited to Federal National Parks, National Forests, and other Federal Lands.[ citation needed ]
By the time of the Kennedy assassination in 1963, the Job Corps' operational plans, costs, and budgets had been well developed, including coordination with the U. S. Forest Service and the National Park Service, and Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) executed among the agencies. Initiating legislation and budgetary authorizations were drafted by the Kennedy Administration and introduced in both houses of Congress. [6]
In 1964, President Johnson, facing military manpower shortages for the Vietnam War, suggested that the Job Corps could be useful in preparing young men to meet the mental and physical requirements for military enlistment. [2]
When President Johnson and his planning staff decided on the War on Poverty, most of the proposed programs would take more than a year to even start. However the Job Corps idea was well along in the planning stage and could be deployed rapidly, so the Labor Department Job Corps Task Force was appointed to the Task force for the War on Poverty, [7] and the Job Corps was slated to be the initial operational program.[ citation needed ]
Job Corps was therefore initiated as the central program of the Johnson Administration's War on Poverty, part of his domestic agenda known as the Great Society. Sargent Shriver, the first Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, modeled the program on the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Established in the 1930s as an emergency relief program, the CCC provided room, board, and employment to thousands of unemployed young people. Though the CCC was discontinued after World War II, Job Corps built on many of its methods and strategies.[ citation needed ]
The first National Director of the Job Corps program was Dr. S. Stephen Uslan, who was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson and reported directly to Sargent Shriver. The current national director of the Office of Job Corps is Rachel Torres. [8] The Job Corps program is currently authorized under Title I of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. [9]
President Richard Nixon sought to shrink the program, and President Ronald Reagan sought to eliminate it, but the program continued with bipartisan Congressional support. [2]
A series of audits, studies and investigations -- public and private -- starting in the late 1990s, and extending through to the early 2020s, cast doubt on the safety and cost-effectiveness of the program, and have brought calls for the program's end. But bipartisan Congressional support has kept the program alive. [2] [3] [10]
With a $1.7 billion annual budget (in 2014 and 2018), it is the U.S. Department of Labor's largest-budget training program, providing about 37,000 training slots for young people annually. [2] [3]
Starting in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered the closure of Job Corps physical sites, and the organization attempted to shift to online education. Enrollment dropped by about 75 percent. [11]
Since its inception in 1964 under the Economic Opportunity Act, Job Corps has served more than 2 million young people. [12] As of 2019, Job Corps serves over 60,000 youths annually at Job Corps centers throughout the country. [13]
People are eligible for Job Corps by meeting the following criteria: [14]
°Unless waived due to disability.
Applicants to the Job Corps program are identified and screened for eligibility by organizations contracted by the U.S. Department of Labor. [15] Each student in the Job Corps goes through three stages of the program: [16]
Career Preparation: This period focuses on the assimilation of the student to Job Corps academic assessment, health screening, career exploration, and instruction on career planning. This phase lasts for up to the first 60 days of enrollment.
Career Development: This period is where the student receives all vocational training, academic instruction, employability and social skills development, and driver's education.
Career Transition: The period is preceded by a focus on transition readiness, and is the phase of services that immediately follows a student after they leave Job Corps. Career Transition Specialists assist with job placement or searches, and provide support and referrals for housing, transportation, and other essential components of living needed by the former student to obtain and retain employment.
Career Technical Training programs (often called vocational programs) offered by Job Corps vary by campus location. Example careers include machinist, auto mechanic, electrician, 911 dispatcher, dental assistant, corrections officer, cook, computer technician, landscaper, and truck driver. [17]
There are a total of 121 Job Corps centers, including one in Washington, D.C., and two in Puerto Rico. [18]
There are six Regional Offices of Job Corps: [19]
In Program Year 2012, approximately 75 percent of Job Corps’ graduates were reportedly placed. Slightly more than 60 percent joined the workforce or enlisted in the military, while 13.5 percent of Job Corps’ graduates enrolled in education programs. [20] [10] [21] [22] However, analysts have suggested that the data fails to reflect that many of the job placements were in low-skill, low-wage jobs that they could have gotten without Job Corps participation, such as fast-food work or the military. [3] [23]
From 1993 to 2008, Princeton University affiliate research organization Mathematica produced a series of evaluations and reports on the Job Corps for the agency's parent, the U.S. Department of Labor, and for independent academic journals. [24] Their long-term study involved repeated nationwide surveys of over 6,800 Job Corps participants, and a "control group" of over 4,400 comparable non-participants, over a four-year period -- and, in some reports, used the government-held, employer-reported tax records of individual workers for analysis of the survey subjects' economic outcomes. [24] [25] [23]
Their researchers ultimately concluded that "the Job Corps model" shows "promise" -- adding that the program's effect on participating youth "increases [their] educational attainment, reduces [their] criminal activity, and increases [their] earnings for several postprogram years." However, they noted that "tax data" indicated that -- except for "the oldest participants" (young adults in their early 20s) -- most participants' "earnings gains were not sustained" beyond four years after leaving the program. [25] [2]
That said, Mathematica concluded that the Job Corps is "the only federal training program... shown to increase earnings for this [disadvantaged youth] population." [25] [2]
However, the cost of the program, they concluded, exceeds the overall positive economic impact on society (from slightly improved social outcomes, like reduced crime and reduced welfare expenditures). [25] [2] One of the study's leaders, Mathematica senior fellow Peter Schochet, asserted that the program is "a good deal for... enrollees themselves," but acknowledged that -- "from society's perspective" -- "the [Job Corps] program... does not pay for itself." [2]
In 2009, during the Obama administration, the conservative Heritage Foundation political think-tank described the program's 40-year history as a "record of failure" -- citing specific findings from that Mathematica journal article, including that Job Corps participants were less likely than non-participants to "earn a high school diploma"; not any more likely to complete, or even attend, college; and earnings of Job Corps participants were essentially the same as a "control group" of similar non-participants. [23]
In their 2009 critique, additionally citing a 2001 Mathematica study, the Heritage Foundation noted that income gains for participants (vs. comparable non-participants) was "never more than $25.20" per week, [23] while they cited a 2003 Mathematica study (withheld from the public by the government until 2006) as indicating negative impacts on childless female participants' incomes from 1998 through 2001. [23]
Complaining that Job Corps fails to "substantially raise the wages of participants" -- at a cost of "$25,000 per participant" for an eight-month "average participation period" -- the Heritage Foundation described the agency as "a waste of taxpayers' dollars," and "an ideal candidate" to be on "the budget chopping block." [23]
A report from the Government Accountability Office cited over 13,500 safety incidents at Job Corps centers from 2016 to 2017 -- most of them drug-related or assaults. [11]
In April 2017, the Trump administration's Labor Department inspector general concluded that the agency could not show "beneficial training outcomes." [26] [3] [27]
While the Job Corps has remained popular with politicians in both parties [2] (and with private contractors who operate and service Job Corps centers [2] [28] ), there have been many critics of the program, from liberal and conservative sources, alike, and questions raised about the program's safety and effectiveness. [3] [29]
Anecdotal evidence against the program, at specific sites, multiplied in the 2010s.
In October 2014, CBS News reported on its investigation of a Job Corps training center in North Texas, quoting a student as experiencing "constant fights" (though one attacker strangled him, the attacker was allowed to continue in the program). They quoted a fired security guard, a former police sergeant, as witnessing drug use ("marijuana, cocaine, heroin") but being pressured by management to keep quiet about it, despite the official Job Corps "zero tolerance" for drug use. (CBS obtained video of a student cutting a white powder on his desk). Student expulsions reportedly hurt contractor and agency standing. [10]
CBS interviewed a former Albuquerque center teacher who alleged that welding students who failed to attend training were given welding-competence certificates, anyway, to take into the workforce. A former career counselor in Texas reported that management pressure to get "job placements" resulted in "85 percent" of reported placements being "fake." CBS noted that 3 years earlier, the Labor Department's inspector general determined that Job Corps had "overstated 42 percent" of job placements at five sites -- and that many of the reported jobs were simply in fast food work. [10]
A CBS affiliate in Milwaukee checked records on their local Job Corps center, and found 11 police reports between 2012-2014, including a knife attack and a student shot. [30]
In 2015, the Washington Post noted "violence and even murders" had occurred "at some Job Corps sites," and -- "despite [an official] zero-tolerance policy [forbidding] violence and illegal drugs" -- [various] "local job corps centers... failed to report and investigate [incidents of] serious misconduct, [such as] drug abuse and assaults," including "sexual assault." Further, the Post reported, some centers have reportedly understated these offenses, in their official record, to keep student offenders enrolled. [29]
However, progressive philanthropy advocate and watchdog Rick Cohen, writing in Nonprofit Quarterly, expressed skepticism of complaints, suggesting that many of these problems were not abnormal for that demographic, whether in Job Corps or not -- and suggested that racial bias may have played a role in suspicions and reporting of perceived problems. [29]
In 2017, Labor Department deputy inspector general Larry D. Turner, testifying before a Congressional committee, reported that Job Corps officials and contractors often failed to report "potentially serious criminal misconduct" to local, state or federal law enforcement -- noting that, of the 12 centers inspectors visited (out of 129), all but one failed to report to law enforcement various "potentially serious criminal misconduct incidents," leaving 40 percent of 348 such incidents unreported at those 11 sites. He also noted that Job Corps sites typically had "Physical security weaknesses" (such as "inadequate [or] unmonitored closed circuit television systems," inadequate security staff, and "compromised perimeters," and failed to properly screen center employees." [31]
Job Corps defenders argued that critics were overreacting to these shortcomings, which were not atypical of conditions in innercity and rural settings that Job Corps participants were fleeing. [31]
In 2017, with per-student costs ranging from $15,000 to $45,000, President Trump's Labor Secretary, Alexander Acosta, stated that the $1.7 billion annually budgeted program "requires fundamental reform" -- not just "changes at the margins," but "large-scale changes." [3] [27] [31]
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a voluntary government work relief program that ran from 1933 to 1942 in the United States for unemployed, unmarried men ages 18–25 and eventually expanded to ages 17–28. The CCC was a major part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal that supplied manual labor jobs related to the conservation and development of natural resources in rural lands owned by federal, state, and local governments. The CCC was designed to supply jobs for young men and to relieve families who had difficulty finding jobs during the Great Depression in the United States. There was eventually a smaller counterpart program for unemployed women called the She-She-She Camps, which were championed by Eleanor Roosevelt.
An internship is a period of work experience offered by an organization for a limited period of time. Once confined to medical graduates, internship is used to practice for a wide range of placements in businesses, non-profit organizations and government agencies. They are typically undertaken by students and graduates looking to gain relevant skills and experience in a particular field. Employers benefit from these placements because they often recruit employees from their best interns, who have known capabilities, thus saving time and money in the long run. Internships are usually arranged by third-party organizations that recruit interns on behalf of industry groups. Rules vary from country to country about when interns should be regarded as employees. The system can be open to exploitation by unscrupulous employers.
The Job Training Partnership Act of 1982 was a United States federal law passed October 13, 1982, by Congress with regulations promulgated by the United States Department of Labor during the Ronald Reagan administration. The law was the successor to the previous federal job training legislation, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). It was repealed by the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 during the administration of President Bill Clinton.
The Workforce Investment Act of 1998 was a United States federal law that was repealed and replaced by the 2014 Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act.
Teach For America (TFA) is a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is to "enlist, develop, and mobilize as many as possible of our nation's most promising future leaders to grow and strengthen the movement for educational equity and excellence."
The Employment and Training Administration (ETA) is part of the U.S. Department of Labor. Its mission is to provide training, employment, labor market information, and income maintenance services. ETA administers federal government job training and worker dislocation programs, federal grants to states for public employment service programs, and unemployment insurance benefits. These services are primarily provided through state and local workforce development systems.
Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) is a federal program of the United States government to act as a way to reduce the damaging impact of imports felt by certain sectors of the U.S. economy. The current structure features four components of Trade Adjustment Assistance: for workers, firms, farmers, and communities. Each cabinet-level department was tasked with a different sector of the overall Trade Adjustment Assistance program. The program for workers is the largest, and is administered by the U.S. Department of Labor. The program for farmers is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the firms and communities programs are administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Allynwood Academy, formerly the Family Foundation School, was a private, co-educational, college preparatory, therapeutic boarding school located in Hancock, New York. The school was in operation from 1984 through 2014, when it closed due to declining enrollment amid a raft of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse allegations made by alumni in a grassroots "truth campaign." At least ten lawsuits have been brought by former students since 2019, in which plaintiffs claimed that strip searches, hard labor, isolation rooms, physical restraint, and sexual assault were rampant at the school in the 1990s and 2000s. Three of the lawsuits were settled in October 2021 for undisclosed sums. A front-page New York Times article in 2018 reported a pattern of at least one hundred deaths by overdose and suicide among alumni, the vast majority before age 40.
Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow (OBT) is a non-profit with locations in Brooklyn and Queens in New York City. In 2013, OBT partnered with the YMCA of Greater New York in the creation of Y Roads Centers.
Career Pathways is a workforce development strategy used in the United States to support students' transition from education into the workforce. This strategy has been adopted at the federal, state and local levels in order to increase education, training and learning opportunities for America’s current and emerging workforce.
The United States Social Security Administration's Ticket to Work and Self-Sufficiency Program is the centerpiece of the Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Improvement Act of 1999.
The Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP) is a program of the United States Department of Labor, its Employment and Training Administration, to help more senior citizens get back into or remain active in the labor workforce. It is a community service and work-based training program. It does this through job skill training and employment assistance with an emphasis on getting a ready job with a suitable and cooperating company or organisation. In such a setting, the worker is paid the United States minimum wage, or the highest of Federal, State or local minimum wage, or the prevailing wage, for an average of 20 hours per week, and experiences on-the-job learning and newly acquired skills use. The intention is that through these community jobs, the older worker will gain a permanent job, not subsidized by federal government funds.
Public/Private Ventures (P/PV) was a nonprofit, nonpartisan, social research and policy organization; it disbanded on July 31, 2012. Its mission was to improve the effectiveness of policies, programs and community initiatives, especially as they affect vulnerable communities. The organization developed new models and performed evaluations of existing initiatives; it also assisted programs seeking to replicate and expand.
Vocational education in the United States varies from state to state. Vocational schools or tech schools are post-secondary schools that teach the skills necessary to help students acquire jobs in specific industries. The majority of postsecondary career education is provided by proprietary (privately-owned) career institutions. About 30 percent of all credentials in teaching are provided by two-year community colleges, which also offer courses transferable to four-year universities. Other programs are offered through military teaching or government-operated adult education centers.
The Peace Corps is an independent agency and program of the United States government that trains and deploys volunteers to provide international development assistance. It was established in March 1961 by an executive order (10924) of President John F. Kennedy and authorized by Congress the following September by the Peace Corps Act.
Red Rock Job Corps Center is a Job Corps training center in Colley Township, Sullivan County, Pennsylvania, USA. Like all Job Corps centers, it provides vocational training and education at no cost to participants, who are 16 to 24 years old. The center opened in 1978 and uses the buildings of the former Benton Air Force Station, a Cold War radar facility which operated from 1951 to 1975. Red Rock is on Pennsylvania Route 487 within Ricketts Glen State Park, and is still the site of a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) radar used for Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport. The Red Rock Job Corps Center has been recognized as one of the top Job Corps centers in the nation.
Pathways Out of Poverty (POP) is an American workforce development program that was established on August 14, 2009 by the Obama administration and funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. The Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration announced POP grantees on January 13, 2010. POP targets individuals living below or near the poverty level to provide them with skills needed to enter the green job market, focusing on the energy efficiency and renewable energy industries. The training programs focus on teaching basic literacy and job readiness skills. Some of the programs also provide supportive assistance with childcare and transportation to overcome barriers to employment.
Chemonics International, Inc. is a private international development firm based in Washington, D.C. It was established in 1975 by Thurston F. (Tony) Teele as a subsidiary of Erly Industries. The employee-owned company offers a variety of services globally and with more than $1.5 billion in USAID contracts in 2019 is the largest for-profit recipient of U.S. government foreign aid. As of 2019 the company has approximately 5,000 employees in 100 countries.
The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) is a United States public law that replaced the previous Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (WIA) as the primary federal workforce development legislation to bring about increased coordination among federal workforce development and related programs.
Apprenticeship programs in the United States are regulated by the Smith–Hughes Act (1917), The National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), and National Apprenticeship Act, also known as the "Fitzgerald Act."
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
