Are Job-Training Programs Worth the Cost to Taxpayers and “Beneficiairies”? NY Times Isn’t Sure

Via
Ed Morrissey of the invaluable site Hot Air comes word of
this New York Times analysis of the Workplace Investment
Act (WIA), a job-training program jointly administered by the feds
and the states. It is supposed to help displaced workers retool
their skills and get new jobs but the main outcome seems to be
wasting taxpayer dollars while plunging unemployed folks into debt
for useless associates-degree level courses. The Times introduces
us to Joe DeGrella, whose contracting company went belly up:

He took each step in line with the advice of the federal
government: He met with an unemployment counselor who provided him
with a list of job titles the Labor Department determined to be in
high demand, he picked from among colleges that offered
government-certified job-training courses, and he received a
federal retraining grant.

In 2009, Mr. DeGrella, began a course at Daymar
College — a for-profit vocational institute in Louisville
— to become a cardiology technician. Daymar officials told him he
would have a well-paying job within weeks of graduation.

But after about two years of studying cardiovascular physiology
and the mechanics of electrocardiograms, Mr. DeGrella, now 57,
found himself jobless and $20,000 in debt. He moved into his
sister’s basement and now works at an AutoZone.

Since 2009, taxpayers have spent over $3 billion on the program.
Congress just reauthorized it, too, despite a spotty record and no
clear evidence that it works particularly well. Indeed, the Times
notes:

…data and academic studies have suggested that a vast majority
of the unemployed may have found work without the help of the
Workforce Investment Act.

In South Carolina, for example, 75 percent of dislocated workers
found jobs without training, compared with 77 percent who found
jobs after entering the program, according to state figures.

Read the whole thing here.

Hot Air’s Morrissey wraps up his comments
with this:

There are a couple of problems with the job-retraining approach.
First, the government turns out to be a terrible prophet for labor
needs down the road. Second, the issue for the last several years
has not been a glut of jobs without qualified applicants, but a
glut of applicants for a paucity of open positions. Even if the WIA
had overall merit, it would only have sufficient value in the
former context, when businesses needed applicants for jobs
open now. The WIA would be better aimed at
subsidizing employer-based training for jobs that need filling now
or in the near future, as a kind of partnership in apprentice work.
That would at least ensure that the funding went to real jobs, and
not to training centers for jobs that are selected by darts on a
dartboard, even if there would be a real danger that taxpayers
would just end up subsidizing hiring that would have occurred
anyway.

The best solution is to create an economic
environment of true growth, which would tighten the labor market
and give much more leverage to job seekers. That would mean scaling
back regulation and reforming the tax code, neither of which this
administration wants to do. Instead, we’re seeing more and more of
the chronically unemployed owe their souls to the vocational
school.

It’s really important, I think, to tally the costs not just for
taxpayers in the abstract but individuals in the particular. What
could be worse, really, than going through this process and ending
up with no usable new skills, a couple of more years out of work,
and thousands of dollars in debt? Not
much. I’ve looked around for cost-effective
job-retraining programs at various times in the past and have
generally come up empty-handed, for most of the reasons outlined by
Morrissey. There’s no question that his best
solution is key, but to the extent that it reduces the
apparent ability of elected officials to immediately remedy
specific situations (and thus buy votes), it will always come last
in politics.