Job Corps 2.0

About 5 million Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 are neither in employed nor enrolled in school. The majority of these ‘opportunity youth’ were born into poverty in urban or rural communities and their disconnection from the labor market all but guarantees the perpetuation of intergenerational poverty within their families.

This is not a partisan crisis. Congressional districts with the highest rates of youth disconnection are equally distributed across the partisan map. In fact, disconnection rates are on average slightly higher in Republican districts than in Democratic ones.

In conjunction with U.S. Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh, bipartisan leaders in Congress, and the National Job Corps Association, we are helping to lead an effort to revamp and strengthen Job Corps, the largest national program working to connect opportunity youth with employment. Drawing from Job Corps students, the professionals who have dedicated their careers to helping them, and national research on educational best practices, we are rethinking the delivery of services from admissions to career and technical education to post-employment support services to make sure that we’re creating pathways for every opportunity youth into a family-supporting career.