New Report Exposes Why Jobs Corps Should Be Next on Doge Chopping Block

A new report leaves no doubt that the Federal Jobs Corps program is the next that should be on the Donald Trump/Elon Musk chopping block.

The Jobs Corps pays teen runaways, high school dropouts, and ex-cons to live in dorms and receive GEDs and vocational training to help prepare them for the workforce. The average cost of this program per graduate is that of a small home in middle America, and goes as high as “new Lamborghini" territory depending on the program. 

According to the Trump administration’s Transparency Report, as covered by the Daily Wire: 

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.

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.

Only government could produce hours this bad. $16,695 per year is equal to $8.34 per hour, barely above the federal minimum wage. And that’s just the federal minimum - most states (30 + DC) have minimum wages above the federal minimum, some of them double the federal minimum. Every major city has a minimum wage above the federal minimum, with a handful having one nearly triple it. 

Presumably these jobs must not be full time (which I calculated at 2,000 hours per year), but that again is a testament to their low quality. The average starting pay at McDonalds is $13.33 according to reported salaries from employees on Indeed.com, nearly 60% higher than what the Jobs Corps is producing (assuming full time work). McDonald’s wage would still come out higher even if a Jobs Corps graduate was working only 26 hours a week. 

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.

Only 72% of graduates were placed in jobs, and past investigations have found that the books have been cooked to inflate this number. “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.”

The best job one can find related to the Jobs Corps is working for the agency itself.