Analysis of Associations between Contemporaneous Job Corps Performance Measures and Impact Estimates from the National Job Corps Study

摘要

Job Corps is the nations largest vocationally focused education and training program for disadvantaged young people. It serves young men and women between the ages of 16 and 24 at 124 center campuses nationwide, primarily in residential settings. The programs goal is to prepare young people for successful careers. Each year, Job Corps serves more than 60,000 students at a cost of about $1.5 billion, which is more than 60 percent of all funds spent by the U.S. Department of Labor on youth training and employment services. To examine the effectiveness of Job Corps, the Departments Employment and Training Administration sponsored the National Job Corps Study (NJCS) in 1993. The NJCS used survey and administrative earnings records data to estimate the Job Corps programs average impacts on students employment and related outcomes. From late 1994 to early 1996, nearly 81,000 young people nationwide were randomly assigned to either a treatment group, who were allowed to enroll in Job Corps, or a control group, who were not allowed to enroll for a period of three years. NJCS findings are based on comparisons of the outcomes of about 9,500 treatment group members in the research sample and 6,000 control group members. The main impact analysis found that Job Corps improved education and training outcomes (such as the receipt of General Educational Development and vocational certificates and time spent in school), significantly reduced criminal activity, and improved earnings and employment outcomes in the two years after program exit, although the longer-term analysis did not demonstrate that impacts were sustained beyond the two-year period (Schochet et al. 2008). The NJCS also examined the extent to which impacts (average treatment-control differences) on key outcomes were associated with the aggregate overall center performance measure used by Job Corps. The NJCS found that impacts on key outcomes were not associated with the overall aggregate measure of center performance (Schochet and Burghardt 2008). Students in higher-performing centers had better outcomes; however, the same pattern was observed for the control group members who would have been assigned to those centers.