Posted on 04/29/2025 1:41:10 PM PDT by DFG
A Labor Department program designed to train 16- to 24-year-olds to join the workforce spends more per person annually than Ivy League colleges, but participants wind up making minimum wage on average — raising questions about whether it should continue to exist.
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.
Nearly $2 billion in federal taxpayer money is spent annually on residential Job Corps campuses, a boon for the for-profit contractors who run them. But the dismal statistics about the program’s efficacy have never been fully public until the Trump administration released a “Transparency Report” last week.
The Job Corps has only a 32% graduation rate, though statistics have typically been calculated using a misleading definition of “graduate,” which bumped the number up slightly to 39%. 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 average cost per enrollee, including those who dropped out or were expelled, was $50,000, with an average stay of 7.5 months, working out to $80,000 per year.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailywire.com ...
Just when you think you might be reaching the outer limits of government stupidity and waste...
You must not judge a federal program on its results.
You must judge it on the number of well-paid bureaucrats it employs.
PAGING ELON MUSK
Government at work!
This is money-laundering. Political friends get rich “training” poor people who are useful pawns to be discarded.
Since these programs are for “minorities”
for the most part, what is the cost of jailing them when they act out their “culture” versus
them working and maybe, just, maybe, them getting
the idea that a job and some freedom, might be better than jail.
the Labor Dept itself shouldn’t exist.
Patience.
Let’s wait 3-4 generations before we judge the result.
“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
Milton Friedman
LOL! Perfect!
Another example of a “successful” federal program.
This is just another liberal program that was created on how it makes politicians “feel” like they are “doing something”. But as with most government programs, the results are never critically evaluated and like most government programs, it continues even though it is an utter failure.
Ain’t Communism wonderful.
Low info voters will not see this as stopping something that isn’t working but as something essential being taken away by greedy Conservatives. This is the desired result of public education run by marxists.
**Another example of a “successful” federal program.** U mean feral?
Anyone remember CETA? Comprehensive Employment and Training-something. Reagan dumped it. Guys showed up to class drunk at 8:30 am.
“Head Start doesn’t work”
Dick Cheney.
Then there’s Americorp. As useful as the Peace Corps.
This is an amazing article. Do gooders do so much harm & cause so much waste.
Job training is good but it has to be targeted. What a shame to aim so low in terms of suitable jobs, and what kind of vetting is there with a ~30% completion rate.
This looks like a call for Doge to make. The Government needs to do better or get out of the way. Let the private sector take over. Many factories & companies consider job training a good investment and the jobs they train for pay a lot better.
Cheaper to just give the kids a yearly stipend and fire all the bureaucrats.
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