This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/taxpayers-getting-jobbed-northern-wisconsin-job-corps/
Northern Wisconsin Job Corps center spent $290,000 per graduate on ineffective training
A federal judge’s injunction Wednesday is blocking the Trump Administration from saving $1.7 billion annually and closing down Job Corps centers — including two in Wisconsin — that have an expensive and dismal record ostensibly training the young and disadvantaged for work.
Among the more than 120 centers around the country are two in Milwaukee and Laona that, according to a recent Labor Department Transparency Report, graduate few people at exorbitant cost.
The Milwaukee center on N. 60th St. had a 2023 budget of $9.2 million and more than 100 employees who served 224 Corps members at a cost of $40,969 for each enrollee.
There were only 63 graduates of the program that year, a 28 percent graduation rate, at a cost per graduate of $145,668. Far more enrollees — 130 — were dismissed from the program for disciplinary reasons or unauthorized absences, according to the report.
The numbers for the Blackwell Job Corps Civilian Conservation Center in Laona, which is in Forest County, are even worse.
Blackwell’s budget of more than $9.5 million was bigger than Milwaukee’s, but the northern Wisconsin center enrolled only 133 people at a cost of $71,928 for each enrollee. Just 33 enrollees graduated, a 25 percent graduation rate, while the same number and percentage were drummed out for disciplinary reasons.
The cost for each graduate from Blackwell, according to the report: $289,891.
Training programs in the Job Corps, which is fully funded by the federal government, can take anywhere between eight months and three years.
Blackwell, despite the expense and abysmal performance, has long been protected by Wisconsin politicians. In 2019, the Badger Institute reported on a proposal by President Trump in his first term to close just nine of the Civilian Conservation Centers, including Blackwell, for low performance.
Not unlike the current Labor Department report, the agency’s inspector general highlighted the lack of success from enrollees who could finish the program in as little as eight months but usually took two years to complete.
The study found 54 percent of the graduates did not improve their employment status despite the training.
There was the story of the cashier who spent nearly a year learning to lay bricks, not finding a job and ending up as a stock clerk at the same store. And the carpentry class graduate making $11,000 at a convenience store five years later.
In both cases, the Job Corps counted both graduations and placements as successes in its records, according to the Badger Institute story at the time.
The Badger Institute contacted Nolyn Fueller, president of Horizons Youth Services, a contractor based in Rockingham, Virginia, that runs the Milwaukee center and three others in Kentucky and Virginia. Fueller forwarded the inquiry to the Labor Department in Washington, D.C.
The Badger Institute attempted to contact officials at Blackwell, but its website lists the names of no one locally.
There are some other centers across the country that are even worse than Blackwell.
The Transparency Report found that the 10 least efficient centers in the country spent $512,800 dollars per graduate.
The report also analyzed incident reports filed by Job Corps centers throughout the country and found 14,913 infractions in 2023, including 1,764 acts of violence, 2,702 instances of drug use and 372 sexual assaults and inappropriate sexual behavior.
The Job Corps was originally part of President Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 War on Poverty, a war critics say was lost at a cost of as much as $30 trillion. The government’s own accountability experts have questioned the cost and the value of the Job Corps, nearly from the beginning.
“On the basis of studies by our contractor and ourselves relating to post-Job Corps experience, it is questionable whether Job Corps training has resulted in substantial economic benefit thus far for those youths who participated in the program,” Comptroller General Elmer Staats, wrote to a Senate subcommittee way back in 1969. “We have doubt, however, that, in light of our findings and the cost of this type of training, the resources now being applied to the Job Corps program can be fully justified.”
In 2003, the Labor Department’s national Job Corps study produced results so grim the report wasn’t released until 2006. An academic assessment in 2008 found that enrollees were not acquiring job skills to get ahead in the job market, were less likely to get a high school diploma and were no more likely to get a college degree than the average person in the 16-24 year-old age group.
Since then, at intervals of six to 10 years, politicians have taken occasional shots at the Job Corps, shrugged their shoulders and done nothing.
U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin, who earlier this month issued a statement decrying President Trump’s latest Job Corps salvo, was just as adamant six years ago that the country could not do without the job training program.
The surprise came from former U.S. Representative Sean Duffy, who had a reputation as a fiscal hawk but also nearly five dozen Blackwell employees in his district. Now Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, he asked back then that Blackwell remain open so as not to hurt Wisconsin’s “blue-collar recovery.”
Carolyn Heinrich, former director of the LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin, in a 2014 news story questioned whether the Job Corps was the right tool to fix what was then a soft labor market for people with limited job skills.
Eleven years later, Heinrich, a professor of Public Policy and Education at Vanderbilt University, told the Badger Institute she remained a Job Corps supporter, but lamented that the Labor Department ignored a 2018 study calling for reform.
“The program was cost-effective primarily for young adults aged 20-24 years,” Heinrich said. “Therefore, rather than eliminating the program, it would be more appropriate to shift the targeting of the program to primarily serve this particular group.”
On May 29, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer ordered a “pause” to all Job Corps operations. “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,” she wrote.
Despite a mountain of damning evidence, Baldwin said, “The sudden pause in Job Corps contracts, which serves as a functional cancellation of our investment in job training will upend the lives of students currently participating in the program and disrupt a vital link in the workforce system in place in Milwaukee.”
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Andrew Carter Jr. granted the National Job Corps Association — essentially a trade organization of people who run Job Corps centers around the country — an injunction to keep all of the centers open while its lawsuit to block the Labor Department’s move plays out.
Mark Lisheron is the Managing Editor of the Badger Institute.
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Patrick McIlheran