Job Corps

The Job Corps, a national employment training program run by the Labor Department, serves about 66,000 participants at 112 centers in 46 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. GAO found that the Job Corps has the capacity to serve 81 percent of program participants in their home states--52,000 of 64,000 participants from states with Job Corps centers could have been assigned to a center in their state of residence. About 59 percent of participants were assigned to centers in their home state; the remaining participants were sent to centers outside their home state and traveled an average of more than four times as far as they would have had they been assigned to the closest center in their state of residence. Regardless of where they were trained, however, about 83 percent of those participants who got jobs were employed in their home state.

GAO found that: (1) Job Corps program capacity differs among states because the number of centers in each state differs and the size of individual centers within each state differs; (2) in 1994, 41 percent of the 64,000 participants who lived in states with Job Corps centers were assigned to centers outside their home state; (3) the extent of out-of-state assignments varied among states; (4) participants assigned to centers outside their home state were sent to centers that were, on average, over 4 times as distant as the closest in-state center; (5) in many states, Job Corps residents were sent to out-of-state centers, while nonresidents were enrolled at in-state centers; (6) the number of nonresidents varied among individual Job Corps centers during 1994; (7) regardless of where participants were assigned, those who found jobs usually did so in their home state; (8) participants were assigned to centers outside their home state to fully utilize centers or to satisfy particular vocational preferences; (9) the recent trend has been to assign program residents to in-state centers; (10) in 1994, most in-state Job Corps centers had sufficient capacity to accommodate almost all in-state Job Corps participants; and (11) the nine new centers will provide some needed additional capacity in some states and increase capacity in three states to about twice the in-state demand.