Federal ‘Job Corps’ Spends Up To $764K Per Graduate. Participants Go On To Earn $17K Annually.
The $1.8 billion job training program for impoverished youth could be DOGE's next target after dismal stats are revealed. (Long article with failure after failure to scam the government for people who cannot learn, and many other problems)
By Luke Rosiak Apr 29, 2025 DailyWire.com
A Labor Department program designed to train 16- to 24-year-olds to join the workforce spends more per person annually than Ivy League colleges, but participants wind up making minimum wage on average — raising questions about whether it should continue to exist.
The Job Corps pays teenage runaways, high school dropouts, and twentysomething ex-cons to live in dormitories and receive their GEDs and vocational training. The national cost per graduate was $188,000, with the average graduate staying 13.5 months. Of more than 110 campuses, the 10 least efficient averaged a cost of $385,000 per graduate. Job Corps participants earn $16,695 per year on average after leaving the program, according to new government data.
Nearly $2 billion in federal taxpayer money is spent annually on residential Job Corps campuses, a boon for the for-profit contractors who run them. But the dismal statistics about the program’s efficacy have never been fully public until the Trump administration released a “Transparency Report” last week.
The Job Corps has only a 32% graduation rate, though statistics have typically been calculated using a misleading definition of “graduate,” which bumped the number up slightly to 39%. Of about 30,000 enrollees in the 2023-24 school year, roughly 10,000 were expelled for misconduct, 5,000 were booted for absconding, and 5,000 dropped out for other reasons. The average cost per enrollee, including those who dropped out or were expelled, was $50,000, with an average stay of 7.5 months, working out to $80,000 per year.
The Old Dominion Job Corps campus in Monroe, Virginia, had 95 enrollees in 2023, at a cost of $137,000 each.Only 17 successfully completed the program, amounting to a cost of $764,000 per graduate. Old Dominion is operated by ODLE Management Group LLC, which runs several campuses.
The Daily Wire reported this month that thousands of young people have been the victims of assault and other crimes at Job Corps campuses, including a transgender-identifying girl who was assigned to live with a 23-year-old man who was charged with raping her.
A decade of oversight by government auditors and news media has found that the program attracts criminalsand that some staff look the other way to avoid expelling members, which would lead to lost revenue — or negative attention — which could jeopardize the program.
At the Old Dominion campus with 95 enrollees, the campus officially reported 46 disciplinary infractions. At the Gary campus in San Marcos, Texas, there were 633 disciplinary incidents among 1,191 enrollees. The Oconaluftee campus in Cherokee, North Carolina, had 205 infractions over 162 enrollees, amounting to more than one per person.
The latest quarter of data showed that 72% of graduates were placed in jobs, though past investigations have foundsome Job Corps centers cooking the books on those numbers. The Gadsden campus in Alabama reported a 40% job placement rate, while the Gulfport campus in Mississippi claimed 100%.
Job Corps participants were typically not capable of remaining employed for long. After exiting the program, fewer than half had a job a few months out and were still working that job at the one-year mark.
YouTube is full of videos of Job Corps “students” viciously fighting each other, and participants interviewed by The Daily Wire described a culture that is racially charged, where dysfunction dominates, and “snitches” are physically assaulted. Democrats have moved to lower behavioral standards even further by introducing a bill making it harder to expel students.
Contractors pay recruiting bonuses for finding prospects, and participants are paid to take part in the program in addition to covering their room, board, and medical. One recent graduate told The Daily Wire that contractors conceal the program’s failure to keep the cash coming, and thatmany participants wind up working in menial jobs they could have done without the expensive training.
GEDs are already available at no cost to young adults from most school districts, and unions often offer free training in the trades, making Job Corps’ value proposition dubious — though the nearly $2 billion a year spent on the program means that contractors will lobby hard to preserve their cash cow…
https://www.dailywire.com/news/job-corps-spends-764k-per-graduate