Full Citation
Title: Hispanics in Job Corps: How Much Do They Benefit from Program Participation and Completion?
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2003
ISBN:
ISSN:
DOI:
NSFID:
PMCID:
PMID:
Abstract: Each year, Job Corps receives about $1 billion to serve over 70,000 new participants, mostly in a residential environment. Although the purpose of the Job Corps is to help disadvantaged youth become more responsible, employable, and productive citizens, its high costs prompted policy makers to ask whether the program has discernible, positive impacts on program participants. To this end, the National Job Corps Study (NJCS) was commissioned to assess the benefits to program participants. A four-year longitudinal study, the NJCS was a randomized experiment in which over 15,000 Job Corps eligible applicants were randomized into two groups: those that could receive Job Corps services and those that would not be eligible for three years. The final report found that Job Corps had positive impacts in the weekly earnings of whites and others 48 months after randomization. However, no statistically significant increase was found for Hispanics. Since Hispanics represent a significant and growing proportion of the population, and disproportionately have disadvantaged characteristics, it is important to understand the reasons behind the lack of positive impact of Job Corps. This paper investigates several possible explanations for this result. Since the initial randomization was over the whole sample, we argue that it did not create comparable treatment and control groups for Hispanics. Given the failure of randomization for Hispanics, we employ non experimental estimators to examine the programmatic outcome of Hispanics. In addition, we examine various unique characteristics of Hispanics that could affect their benefits from a program such as Job Corps.
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Neumann, Todd; Gonzalez, Arturo; Flores-Lagunes, Alfonso
Publisher: University of Arizona
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure
Countries: