Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Evaluations of job training programs for unemployed and underemployed populations have yielded mixed results. The city of New Orleans, funded by a U.S. Department of Labor grant, has implemented a randomized control trial of a job training program primarily executed by a partner community college. The training program innovates by both implementing a prescreening process to select the randomization pool of candidates that are more likely to complete training and by using local firms to develop curriculum and offer potential on the job training. In this paper, as the third-party evaluator we evaluate experience in the training through focus groups and surveys and short term labor market outcomes (6-12 months after completion of training) of the RCT using administrative employment records and do an implementation analysis of the first three years of the program.