Job Corps

The Job Corps--one of the few remaining federal training programs--serves 68,000 disadvantaged youths annually at a cost of about $1 billion but loses a quarter of its participants shortly after enrollment. One reason may be the ambiguous eligibility requirements, which lead recruitment contractors to enroll youths who are ill-suited for what the program has to offer. GAO concludes that the Jobs Corps needs to identify participants who have the commitment, the attitude, and the motivation to complete the training and benefit from Job Corps' comprehensive and intensive services. Furthermore, although the Labor Department uses performance measures to make decisions about renewing placement contractors, GAO found that two of the four measures that Labor uses do not provide information meaningful to assess the performance of placement contractors. In addition, related measures on overall program performance are flawed. Although the Job Corps has reported that about 65 percent of its participants are placed in jobs and that about 46 percent of these placements are linked to Job Corps training, GAO questions the accuracy and the relevancy of both of these figures. GAO summarized this report in testimony before Congress; see: Job Corps: Participant Selection and Performance Measurement Need to Be Improved, by Cornelia M. Blanchette, Associate Director for Education and Employment Issues, before the Subcommittee on Human Resources, House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. GAO/T-HEHS-98-37, Oct. 23 (16 pages).

GAO noted that: (1) Job Corps' policy guidance for 2 of the 11 eligibility criteria was ambiguous and incomplete, which has led to an eligibility determination process that fails to follow the requirements of the law and program regulations; (2) in GAO's visits to several outreach and admissions contractors, GAO found that those with higher retention rates follow procedures aimed at identifying applicants with the commitment and motivation to remain in and benefit from the program; (3) in GAO's analysis of participant characteristics, GAO identified certain characteristics significantly related to the likelihood of remaining in the program for at least 60 days; (4) the Department of Labor (DOL) could use some of these characteristics to design outreach efforts or to establish priorities among eligible applicants; (5) although Job Corps is a performance-driven program and DOL uses performance measures to make decisions on placement contractor renewal, two of the measures DOL used were not meaningful and, thus, DOL did not have the information it needed to accurately assess the performance of placement contractors; (6) placement measures held contractors responsible for placing individuals who may have received little or no benefit from the program or who demonstrated behavior that normally would be unacceptable to most employers; (7) the job-training match measure did not accurately portray the extent to which participants obtained jobs related to their vocational training because of the wide latitude placement contractors have in deciding whether a job is related to the training received and the creativity contractors used in recording the occupational titles of the jobs obtained; (8) one aspect of placement contractors' operations associated with better performance was having staff solely responsible for placing Job Corps participants; (9) seven contractors visited by GAO with high placement rates had staff solely responsible for placing Job Corps participants; (10) in contrast, four of the five contractors having lower placement rates had the same staff responsible for performing outreach and assessment as well as placement; and (11) as a result of its concern about performance, DOL has not renewed 12 of the 18 contracts with state agencies.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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