States were given additional authority by JTPA, the successor to CETA, enacted in 1983. State governments now designate local service delivery areas (SDAs), and they can establish priorities for SDA use of a portion of the federal grant. However, JTPA still remains a federal rather than a state program: Nearly all funding comes from the federal government, federal regulations apply to all programs nationwide, and many states have made no effort to assert a role in policy-making beyond that required by federal regulation.
The development of job training programs did more than simply add new funding sources for work-related training; it also dramatically changed the types of institutions that provide training. Job training programs since the 1960s have been characterized by their use of CBOs, unions, private firms, and other institutions--private alternatives to conventional high schools, community colleges, and technical colleges--to provide training and related services. This aspect of job training has given the education and training system greater variety and fluidity and has helped erode the boundary between public and private programs.
Job training also marked a turn toward private sector participation in public programs, not only with the funding of private organizations such as CBOs, but also with the establishment of Private Industry Councils (PICs), at least 51 percent of whose members must represent the private sector. The PICs are responsible for policy guidance and program oversight, and they must approve SDA training plans. They also have the option to administer JTPA programs directly, although fewer than 20 percent do. It is important to note that "private sector representation" refers to employers, and not representatives of labor like unions. Overall, the participation of unions in the job training system is relatively weak, partly because unions now represent only 11 percent of employees in the United States.
JTPA also differs from earlier programs in the nature of the mandates it imposes. While its predecessors focused on the types of services that local agencies could deliver, JTPA emphasizes outcomes by requiring that SDAs meet specific performance standards. The federal government has identified twelve standards[6] from which states select eight that SDAs must meet; states may add standards of their own and may use either a federal adjustment model or one of their own design to take into account the demographic and labor market characteristics of individual SDAs. In theory, the imposition of performance standards is a way of making JTPA more effective. In practice, however, performance standards can be manipulated by local programs, and they prove to be uncorrelated with the effects measured by more sophisticated evaluation techniques (Doolittle et al., 1993, p. 10); they have made local programs concerned with the details of performance measures, but not with effectiveness in a broader sense.
A second strand of development has concentrated on welfare recipients. Historically, welfare in this country -- principally, the program known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)[7] -- was provided only to mothers with children so they could stay at home and care for their young. However, as working has become increasingly common for all women in the United States, including mothers of young children, there has been increasing pressure to get welfare mothers (and fathers[8]) into employment and off the welfare rolls. The first efforts were established in 1962 in the Community Work and Training Program. Like MDTA, it provided funds from the Department of Labor, which could be used by welfare programs at the local level, bypassing the vocational education system. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 included yet another program designed to encourage work, the Work Experience and Training Program. In 1967, as part of the far-reaching Amendments to the Social Security Act, the Work Incentive (WIN) program was established as a voluntary work program. Although WIN was made mandatory for welfare recipients in 1971, it was not funded at a level that made widespread participation enforceable, and therefore it remained a limited and voluntary program.
Another strand of the Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty was the "services strategy" developed as an antidote to poverty. This strategy provided a variety of support services (such as child care and transportation) to enable welfare recipients to work their way off welfare. As embodied in the 1967 Amendments to the Social Security Act, it included funding for short-term training. The support services, which were then consolidated in the Title XX Amendment of 1973, provided funds for social services to states and gave states greater authority to decide which services should be provided. Title XX emerged largely intact (though with considerably reduced funding) in the Social Services Block Grant, enacted in 1981. However, in practice, work-related services (including training) were rarely provided under Title XX, which focused instead on rehabilitating families on welfare and preventing abuse, rather than facilitating employment (Dickinson, 1986).
In 1981, the Reagan administration, building on a history of "welfare-to-work" programs that forced welfare recipients to work in exchange for grants, allowed states to develop their own programs for getting welfare recipients back to work. The state programs that developed were, not surprisingly, enormously varied. Most relied heavily on job search (i.e., short-term assistance in applying for work, but no other training or support services) and work experience or OJT, both accomplished through short-term job placements. A few developed Community Work Experience Programs (CWEPs), in which welfare recipients provide community service in amounts related to the size of their grants--equivalent to the traditional conception of "workfare." Although 84 percent of the programs offered vocational skills training and 72 percent provided post-high school education, in practice only 2.3 percent of the welfare recipients participating in these programs received any skill training, and only 1.6 percent enrolled in postsecondary education (most of these were in Massachusetts, Michigan, and California). In fact, only 3.2 percent received remedial education; even the most basic forms of education and training were quite rare.[9] In practice, then, experimentation with various kinds of services and "welfare-to-work"[10] strategies led to an emphasis on job search, rather than education, training, or other services.
The most recent development in this area is the Family Support Act of 1988, which requires all states to establish JOBS programs to increase the employment of welfare recipients. The legislation provides federal matching funds--ranging from 50 percent to 72 percent of total costs--for a variety of work-related services, including job search, work experience, counseling, child care, and other support services, and all forms of remedial education, vocational education, and training. This new legislation combines the services strategy of the 1960s with the work-related emphasis of WIN (including the use of education and training).
With JOBS, Congress crafted a program that combines a mandate (participation is mandatory for all AFDC recipients who are single heads-of-household and who have no children under three years of age[11]), inducements in the form of services (e.g., one year of health care after participants obtain a job, and transitional child care) to reduce the cost of moving from welfare to employment, and capacity-building through longer-term investments in education and training (typically up to two years). As it has done with vocational education and JTPA, the federal government has attempted to target JOBS service recipients. To avoid a situation in which states primarily serve those most likely to get off welfare even without additional assistance, the federal government requires that 55 percent of states' JOBS funds be spent on those most at risk of long-term welfare dependency (e.g., young mothers who are also high school dropouts).
To some extent, the federal government has specified the services that can be provided by designating which ones are reimbursable. It has also been fairly specific in defining service levels. For example, the proposed JOBS regulations specified that only people who were spending at least 20 hours a week in authorized activities could be counted by states as JOBS participants. The states protested vigorously, arguing that some effective education and training programs require fewer than 20 hours a week (e.g., a full community college courseload typically includes 12 to 15 hours of classroom work per week). The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) subsequently changed the regulations to make the 20-hour requirement the average for groups of participants (Kosterlitz, 1989).
Despite clear federal specifications for some aspects of service delivery, the federal government has given the states considerable flexibility in deciding which types of services will be provided, who will provide those services, and the scope of the programs. Even though the JOBS program represents a major new source of federal funding for education, job training, and related services, it requires a substantial matching of funds (between 37 and 50 percent, depending on the services) from the states. It appears that although most states will eventually increase their total spending for welfare recipients, the level will vary greatly--thus perpetuating the differences in welfare benefits and services among states. Many state legislatures will appropriate insufficient funds to match the maximum federal funding.
The question of what program outcomes the federal government expects is still open to argument. HHS will not establish performance standards until later in 1995. In the meantime, debate will continue over what many have called the "hamburger flipper" question: Is it better to move welfare clients quickly into jobs, even if those jobs do not pay enough to lift them out of poverty, or is it better to spend more time and money to increase the clients' chances for longer-term, higher-paying employment that may keep them from falling back onto welfare in the future? (Kosterlitz, 1989). The way the answer to this question is articulated in the federal performance standards will largely shape the amount and type of work-related education and training available to welfare recipients.
Still other job training programs have been developed in response to other more specific problems. For example, a number of programs provide assistance specifically for veterans, since disabled veterans in particular often have a difficult time entering the labor force; dislocated worker programs have expanded because of the special need for experienced workers laid off through no fault of their own (e.g., because of the decline of the timber industry in some states, the decline of defense and aerospace in other states, the possibility of unemployment because of NAFTA, particularly for border states) to be retrained for other kinds of employment; and vocational rehabilitation programs have focused on the special employment problems of disabled individuals. There has been a strong tendency for Congress to respond to specific new problems with a specific new program, rather than to incorporate new purposes into old programs; this in turn has generated a proliferation of job training programs with roughly the same goals -- the enhancement of employment -- but for different groups with different kinds of barriers to employment.
A particular concern has been the development of programs for youth. The problem of high school dropouts is an old one, dating almost to the turn of the century, but it has become increasingly serious as the employment prospects of dropouts have become worse relative to high school graduates. In addition, programs for youth have the special aura of prevention: if they can steer individuals away from unemployment, and away from crime, drugs, and (for girls) early pregnancy, then they can prevent social costly problems in the future. In response, a large number of programs focused on the employment of youth -- both those who have dropped out of high school, and those still in school but considered likely to drop out -- have been developed, particularly within CETA and then JTPA, and their effectiveness is a subject of special concern. Some of these programs are properly considered job training programs -- that is, they offer education and training to equip young people with new skills -- while others are really work experience programs, particularly the summer youth programs that employ some young people during the summer. A positive view is that work experience itself will teach young people the personal attributes necessary for stable employment; a more general perspective is that such efforts are palliatives to keep troublesome youth off the streets. In this monograph I consider the programs targeted for youth in JTPA (Section III.1) and in experimental programs (Section III.3), and in evaluating the effects on particular populations (Section III.4). I then interpret the especially dismal results for youth in Section IV.9.
The results of these many strands of development is that a bewildering array of job training programs exist. Indeed, when the General Accounting Office (GAO) examined federally-funded employment and training programs, they counted 163 programs spending $20.4 billion in 1995 (U.S. G.A.O. 1994).[12] These counts are somewhat misleading, since they disaggregate different titles of certain programs (for example, JTPA is counted as 20 different programs because of its different sections), they include education programs (like literacy efforts and student grants and loans) that are only distantly related to job preparation, and they include other programs (like Community Development Block Grants) that fund a variety of services other than job training. Still, the count is instructive because it illustrates nicely the proliferation of purposes and the widespread perception of how incoherent and fragmented the education and training "system" has become. For purposes of understanding the rough magnitudes of different programs, Table 1 summarizes the GAO figures about education and job training programs. Clearly the major job training programs are JTPA and JOBS, and they are larger than any other federal programs with the exception of students grants and loans for postsecondary education.[13]
Finally, there have been a large number of experimental programs, often started by private foundations in order to test particular approaches to enhancing employment. Some of these efforts have been particularly intensive, and others have concentrated on providing services of particularly high quality. They therefore might provide information about what excellent job training programs -- well-designed, independent of political manipulation, and freed of having to operate under normal pressures -- might accomplish. Several of these experimental programs have been carefully evaluated, and I present their results in Section III-3 -- though with the caveat that such programs may be quite different than those operated with public funding.[14]
There are several reasons for examining the evaluations of a variety of job training programs, rather than confining a review like this to the main job programs of JTPA. One is that there is considerable overlap among these programs because of the ways they have been established. JOBS programs for welfare recipients often send their clients to local JTPA programs -- sometimes on their own initiative, and sometimes at state directive -- and so the two programs use the same services and providers. Both JTPA and JOBS may send their clients to vocational education in community colleges, areas vocational schools, and technical institutes -- particularly when clients are able to find their own education and training arrangements (known as "individual referral") or when there is a fiscal incentive to do so.[15] Secondly, the kinds of services various job training programs provide overlap considerably, so that information from one program is useful in judging the effectiveness of others. Finally, the discussions of job training programs in the United States generally commingle information about different types of programs, and so it is necessary to understand the evaluations of all these programs.
[5]On the history of manpower policy, see National Academy of Sciences (1975).
[6]For program years 1988 and 1989, the adult standards included percent of participants placed in jobs (68 percent); average hourly wage at job placement ($4.95); average cost of placement ($4,500); percent of welfare recipients placed (56 percent); percent of participants employed at 13-week follow-up (50 percent); number of weeks worked at follow-up (8); and weekly earnings at follow-up ($177). The youth standards included a positive termination rate, cost per positive termination, entered employment rate, and employability enhancement rate.
[7] There are many other forms of aid to low-income families that also constitute welfare, including food stamps, housing subsidies, child care and other social services; and many other programs for individuals with low earnings should also be considered welfare, including Social Security for the elderly. However, the political concern with "welfare" and efforts to reduce welfare costs almost always concentrate on AFDC first and foremost.
[8] AFDC was extended to two-parents families in 1967, because of the understanding that confining welfare only to mothers with young children would cause some fathers to abandon their families.
[9]These figures refer to participation in WIN demonstration programs (U.S. GAO, 1987).
[10]Applying the term "workfare" to the experimental welfare programs of the 1980s is somewhat misleading because few of them included CWEP, and the mandatory elements that were historically part of workfare--e.g., the threat that welfare recipients would lose their grants if they failed to comply with work requirements--have not been frequently used. Enrollments in these new programs have been kept relatively low, partly for reasons of cost, so there has been greater emphasis on voluntary than on coerced participation.
[11]In a departure from past welfare policy, JOBS also allows families in which both parents are present in the home and the primary wage-earner is unemployed to qualify for benefits and services, and it requires that one parent participate in training. However, like WIN, funding limits mean that JOBS will not function as an enforceable mandate. The federal government is requiring that states enroll 7 percent of their total welfare caseload in 1990 and that the proportion increase to 20 percent by 1995.
[12] See also the massive review of federal programs compiled by the National Commission for Employment Policy (1995).
[13] Although about one quarter of student aid goes to proprietary schools, most of the remainder goes to students in four-year colleges and universities, not to students in occupationally-specific programs in public community colleges and technical institutes. Student aid therefore provides only limited support for job training.
[14] See also the distinction made by Gueron and Pauly (1991) between "broad coverage" programs, which include all the elements of a complete job training program and are designed to reach a broad range of individuals (and where participation is often mandated for welfare recipients), and "selective-voluntary" programs, for which program administrators can select who can enroll or individuals can volunteer to participate or not. The experimental programs examined in Section III.3 are examples of "selective-voluntary" programs.
[15] In many places, states provide funding per student to individuals in community colleges and technical institutes, so that if JTPA or JOBS sends an individual to a community college state aid to the college -- and not JTPA or JOBS funds -- pays most of the costs of the programs, making this kind of referral cheaper than paying the full costs of the program in a CBO. This kind of "cost-shifting" leads to individuals being funded out of several public sources simultaneously: an individual in a community college could receive subsidy through state aid to the college, federal grants and loans through student aid, and subsidy through JTPA or JOBS. See Grubb and McDonnell (1991).
