<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/eta/eta20250425" target="_blank" rel="noopener">“Transparency Report”</a> last week.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The Daily Wire reported this month that thousands of young people have been the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/multi-billion-dollar-federal-job-corps-breeding-ground-rape-crime" target="_blank" rel="noopener">victims of assault</a> 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.</p>
<p>A decade of oversight by government auditors and news media has found that the program attracts criminals and 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The latest quarter of data showed that 72% of graduates were placed in jobs, though past investigations have found some 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%.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div id="attachment_900761" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-900761" class="size-large wp-image-900761" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/jobcorps1200-1024x573.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="573" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/jobcorps1200-1024x573.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/jobcorps1200-300x168.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/jobcorps1200-768x430.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/jobcorps1200.jpg 1200w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><p id="caption-attachment-900761" class="wp-caption-text">Job Corps participants brawl / Youtube</p></div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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&#8217;s failure to keep the cash coming, and that many participants wind up working in menial jobs they could have done without the expensive training.</p>
<p>“A lot of reasons they allow dangerous behavior to go covered up, as I imagine you may know, has to do with the entire program being a numbers game. The program also fails to complete its actual goal, which is to help at-risk youth find jobs,” he said. &#8220;I can&#8217;t think of a student I knew that has a job in the trade that they trained for. They have jobs in fast food.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;A lot of these kids, their mentality is like middle schoolers. I&#8217;d say it&#8217;s equivalent to an inner city high school but with dorms. Because it&#8217;s with dorms, anything like fights or sexual assaults could happen at any time. Something&#8217;s gonna happen every day. Not everyone is a gangbanger but the vast majority are,&#8221; he added.</p>
<div id="attachment_913287" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-913287" class="size-full wp-image-913287" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/GettyImages-2087316292.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="528" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/GettyImages-2087316292.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/GettyImages-2087316292-300x155.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/GettyImages-2087316292-768x396.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><p id="caption-attachment-913287" class="wp-caption-text">The women&#8217;s dormitory at the Glenmont Job Corps Thursday March 15, 2012. (Photo by John Carl D&#8217;Annibale/Albany Times Union via Getty Images)</p></div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>As part of its Department of Government Efficiency initiatives, the Trump administration may recommend significantly cutting Job Corps’ budget next year, a source familiar with the matter told The Daily Wire.</p>
<p>On April 1, the Labor Department said new enrollees will <a href="https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/dol/dol20250401" target="_blank" rel="noopener">not be accepted</a> at two Maine campuses. The Penobscot campus cost $91,000 per enrollee and had a 41% graduation rate, while the Loring campus cost $42,000 per enrollee, with only 38% completing the program.</p>
<p>“Taxpayers deserve to know the facts and outcomes of their multi-billion-dollar investment,” Labor Department Acting Assistant Secretary for Employment and Training Lori Frazier Bearden said in a statement. “This report underscores the department’s commitment to program transparency and accountability – both of which are essential for effective oversight, informed policymaking, and maintaining public trust.”</p>
<p>As The Daily Wire previously reported, eligibility requirements say that only people on welfare or living in poverty are eligible for the Job Corps, that refugees and non-citizen parolees are eligible, and that “no individual shall be denied enrollment in Job Corps solely on the basis of contact with the criminal justice system, except for the disqualifying felony convictions of murder…child abuse, or a crime involving rape or sexual assault.”</p>
<p>The program requires that applicants <em>not</em> be able to read at higher than an eighth grade level, saying they must be “unable to compute or solve problems… at a level necessary to function on the job, in the individual’s family, or in society,” or he must be homeless, a runaway, a high school dropout, or a victim of sex trafficking.</p>
<p><strong>Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/multi-billion-dollar-federal-job-corps-breeding-ground-rape-crime">Multi-Billion Dollar Federal ‘Job Corps’ Is A Breeding Ground For Rape And Crime, Data Show</a></strong></p>

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Federal ‘Job Corps’ Spends Up To $764K Per Graduate. Participants Go On To Earn $17K Annually.

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— Investigation —

Federal ‘Job Corps’ Spends Up To $764K Per Graduate. Participants Go On To Earn $17K Annually.