Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Job Corps is the nation’s largest and most comprehensive career technical training and education program for at-risk youth ages 16 to 24. The program provides vocational, academic, health, and supportive services, primarily in a residential setting at Job Corps centers. Each year, Job Corps serves more than 60,000 youth, at a cost of about $1.7 billion.

Between 1993 and 2004, DOL sponsored the National Job Corps Study to examine the effectiveness of the program as it operated in the mid-1990s (Schochet et al. 2008). The impact evaluation was a randomized controlled trial (RCT), in which all eligible program applicants nationwide between late 1994 and early 1996 (about 100,000) were randomly assigned to a program group who could enroll in Job Corps or to a smaller control group (7 percent of youth) who could not.

The National Job Corps Study found that Job Corps made a difference (Schochet et al. 2008). The impact study found that, relative to a control group, program participation led to an extra year of schooling, increased the attainment of GED and vocational certificates by more than 20 percentage points each, and reduced arrest and conviction rates by about 15 percent each. Job Corps led to survey-based earnings gains of about 14 percent two years after program exit (roughly year 4 after random assignment), with similar gains found across a wide range of student subgroups. Based on the tax data, longer-term earnings gains in years 5 to 9 were experienced for the older students (ages 20 to 24), but not for those younger or overall.

This paper presents findings from a longer-term follow up study to examine employment-related impacts using IRS tax records through 2015, about 20 years after random assignment. In 2015, study participants were between ages 36 and 44. The data are much richer than the tax data used in previous analyses.

We find beneficial long-term impacts for the older students, who experienced employment gains of 4.2 percentage points and earnings gains of 7.3 percent in 2015, with associated 10 percent increases in tax filing rates and 40 percent reductions in the receipt of disability benefits. For these students, program benefits exceeded program costs from the social perspective. Although short-term earnings gains were observed for the youngest students, they did not persist. This study is the first to establish that a national program for hard-to-serve disconnected youth can produce labor market gains over the long term, and can be a positive investment to society.

While it is difficult to identify the program components that were most effective, study results suggest that intensive, comprehensive services are key for improving labor market prospects for this population, and should focus not only on high school credential preparation and job skills training, but also on developing non-cognitive skills designed to promote health, life, and workplace success; previous evaluations of less intensive programs focusing on cognitive skills development only have shown scant evidence of success.