The process of consolidating federal funds for vocational education, job training, and adult education has become incredibly murky. Instead of earmarking funds for separate programs, as has been done in the past, Congress is likely to approve some version of block grants that will give states increased control over how funds are spent. The exact details of the final legislation are still to be resolved. In the current debate, bizarre challenges from anti-government forces, debates over vouchers, election-year politics, and the normal difficulties of reconciling different legislation passed by the House and Senate are all colliding. The outcome is far from clear--though that has not stopped states from tinkering with their governance mechanisms, in anticipation of some version of consolidation.
States need their own visions to guide such coherent systems. They need to develop their vision with all the relevant programs participating--occupational programs in community colleges and adult education as well as job training and welfare-to-work programs, for example.
One vision for a coherent system would be to link short-term job training efforts--whose economic benefits are small, and generally decline after four or five years--to longer-term occupational education in community colleges and technical institutes, which have more substantial and sustained economic benefits. The role of adult education would be to provide the remedial or academic instruction necessary--remediation at the lower levels, and higher-order "academic" competencies as individuals moved up these "ladders" of training opportunities. Then individuals could enter the "system" at any level, complete a program, and return to employment as necessary--but be able to continue with their education as their circumstances permit. This kind of coherent system would enable individuals over time to move into the middle-skilled occupations that would allow them to move off welfare or escape poverty.
But the conditions necessary for vouchers to work well are missing. Most obviously, the "consumers" are not well informed. When my colleagues and I interviewed community college students, the majority of them had no idea what they wanted to do. Many were in community colleges because they provided a low-cost method of finding out more about options, not because these students had made a rational choice among alternative providers. And those in job training, welfare-to-work, and adult education programs are often in similar positions: with the exception of a few individuals (like dislocated workers, with considerable labor market experience), they have little information about the alternatives open to them and find themselves in programs almost haphazardly.
Furthermore, better information necessary for informed consumers--about the completion and placement rates of local programs, for example, or about long-term employment prospects -- is generally not available. Vocational education and job training are not like normal commodities--bread or pants, for example. Their effects are uncertain, and often depend on the state of the labor market or the characteristics of students. The one case where vouchers have been tried to fund vocational education--the use of student aid for proprietary schools--has been a dismal failure, with many students defrauded by low-quality schools and forced into high default rates. Until we know a great deal more about the effects of local programs, vouchers would be a poor mechanism for states to adopt.
This article draws in part on Grubb's book about job training programs, Learning to Work: The Case for Reintegrating Job Training and Education (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, May 1996)