Employment

Going After the Scammers

/ The Old Crank

(Updated Below)

The New York Times story yesterday on the Workforce Investment Act is related to the post I published yesterday. I realize there are political and strategic challenges associated with calling out public officials when they make possibly disingenuous calls for more job training. But calling out scammers like those described in the Times should be much easier. They should not only be called out for what they are, but workforce development advocates should consider aggressive, proactive initiatives aimed at taking them down. It’s the best way to distance the good stuff from the scammers. Defensive responses—sure-these-guys-are-bad-but-look-at-all-the-good-things-that-WIA-does-and-it’s-not-my job-anyway-its’-the-states-and-being accountable-is-hard etc.—is probably not going to be good enough to stem the erosion in confidence that the presence of these outfits have on the whole system.

UPDATE 8/19/14 11:15 AM: By the way, I largely agree with my colleague Mary Alice McCarthy’s criticism of the Times article, (and would be foolish not too, as her knowledge of this subject is about as good as there is), and recommend anyone interested in the subject go read it. In particular, I think she’s right that the Times does not do nearly enough to make it clear that the student indebtedness problem has to do with problems in our higher education system, rather than WIA. And since that is the entire point of the article suggested in the headline and subheading—that WIA is leaving people in debt—that’s a pretty glaring mistake.

But I don’t think that this takes anything away from my point above. I don’t think the people scammed by Daymar College and their ilk really distinguish between our higher education system and our workforce development system, and I imagine that they would find debates about who is at fault to be something between irrelevant and irritating. They were out of work and needed help, and got screwed. In such cases the WIA system may not be at fault, but the entry point for these folks may have been WIA. I think workforce development advocates can do more than just say, ‘this is a higher education problem, not ours.’

Under both the old WIA and the new WIOA, one of the success measures for a program includes transitioning participants to postsecondary education and training. Clearly for the people profiled in the Times, that transition to postsecondary hasn’t worked out too well. So OK, not WIA’s fault. My point is that it might be a helpful for workforce proponents in general to do more to identify and do something about these terrible programs, whatever legislative authority it falls under. Of course, how to do so, I have no idea. (McCarthy suggests higher ed reformers look to the recently passed WIOA legislation as a model for higher education reform.) What do others think?

UPDATE 8/25/14: Bob Lanter, Executive Director of the California Workforce Association raises similar objections to the Times piece in this press release.

Funding Still an Issue

/ The Old Crank

Lauren Eyster, writing for the Urban Institute’s MetroTrends Blog, makes an important point about the WIOA bill that was passed by the House last night:

What WIOA does not do is return overall workforce development funding to pre-sequestration levels immediately. Funding would be increased annually until 2020, but states and local areas will continue to be asked to do more with less.

Gloomy as that sounds, this assessment is actually a bit on the optimistic side. The problem is not that the bill won’t restore workforce funding to pre-sequestration levels immediately, it’s that the WIOA bill itself will not restore funding to pre-sequestration levels at all (let alone increase funding significantly), despite those increases authorized in the bill, unless Congressional appropriators actually appropriate funding at those authorized amounts. And unless Congress raises the existing budget caps and eliminates the mandatory cuts under sequestration (which otherwise, don’t forget, will return in 2016) there isn’t much chance they will. If you’re a glutton for punishment, I wrote an excruciatingly long and tedious post about this a month ago.

I do think WIOA better positions advocates to make the case for increased federal funding, but prospects for increased funding for the programs covered under this bill will continue to be at the mercy of a Republican-dominated Congress for the foreseeable future—a Congress that, if anything, will press for further cuts to non-defense discretionary programs next year. (And remember also that there is a significant possibility that Republicans will control both chambers next year.)

The reason I’m being such a party pooper is because I think it’s important that folks on the ground who depend on the programs covered under WIOA are clear on this point. While the bill includes what many people feel are welcome policy changes to the federal workforce investment system, WIOA’s passage last night isn’t going to solve their biggest problem, which is the lack of adequate funding. I can’t speak for every program in WIOA, but for those of us in adult education, in particular, that remains our biggest challenge.

As Employment Numbers Improve, Part-time and Community College Enrollment Goes Down

/ The Old Crank

Ben Cassleman, writing for FiveThirtyEight, notes the drop in college enrollment among recent high-school graduates and argues that the decline is driven by the improving job market:

The drop in college attendance among recent high school graduates appears concentrated among groups most likely to be deciding between going to school and joining the labor force: Part-time and community college enrollments saw the sharpest decline.

UPDATE: 4/25/14: I took a look at the actual BLS report this morning, and I think it’s worth noting that the new data actually reverses the trend: the college enrollment rate for recent high school graduates in October 2013 (65.9%) was actually only very slightly down from October 2012 (66.2%). Cassleman acknowledges this in his article, but doesn’t think it’s that important since “enrollment rates remain above their pre-recession levels by most measures.” But it seems to me one could argue that the story in the most recent data is that the college enrollment decline over the last few years actually appears to have leveled off in 2013, even as employment prospects improved (at least a little bit) during the same period.

Manufacturing Job Growth: Nothing to Get Excited About

/ The Old Crank

A month or two ago I was talking to some people who work in the community college/workforce development field, and they were rather insistent that U.S. manufacturing jobs were roaring back. I still don’t know what they are talking about. As Jared Bernstein notes in this post about today’s jobs report, manufacturing accounts for about 9% of total employment in this country, and less than 4% of our job growth over the past year. While obviously some new jobs are being created at some companies in some parts of the country, it’s actually the only industry in this slowly recovering economy that, on the whole, appears not to be growing.