A reporter’s best arsenal includes verifiable facts and validated testimonies from people therefore, I believe the purpose of this site would best be served to include verifiable facts without commentary.  Changing the site in way is keeping it more true to its original goal of being an agent of change.

A thank you to all the readers who have left insightful comments or dialogue.  Please check back as there will be continued factual updates about Job Corps performance ratings and news reports that are not widely carried by the press.

Andrea for Job Corps Fraud

I recently stumbled upon this site, just a few weeks ago, and have been trying to read all the various posts and comments. I retired a couple years ago from an organization that is very involved in the Job Corps Program. In my opinion, there are to many program and contractor related inaccuracies on this site for it to be considered credible, or taken seriously.

-from Job Corps Fraud

Thanks for your comment.  We rely heavily on Office of the Attorney General Reports (OIG) that are printed in semi-annual Reports to Congress, statements from former and present Congressmen/women, Senators during Legislative Hearings, and official published statistical analyses that prove Job Corps success rates were inflated in the past and are continuing in the present and, in fact these reports also assert Job Corps students are little or no better off after completing the program.  Washington D.C. economists have also published reports in journals that state the same information. Without these published reports, this site would not exist. You may access most of the these reports on this site. (The audit reports from the Office of the Inspector General kowever, only go back a few years instead of all the way back to 1978).  It appears that the organization you were involved with did not have access to ”behind the scenes, actual goings-on” in Job Corps as many of the students and staff commenting here.  You, as an outsider looking in, are obviously not in the position to to give any first-hand, eye-witness accounts as many of us are able to.  We actually experienced the “trickle-down” effects of contractor’s greed and were unwilling parties to false reporting to the DOL. I encourage you to carefully read more of the website and especially look at OIG Reports, Legislative Reports, Research Reports and Books.  After you read the factual, statistical information thoroughly on this site, please write back.  It’s so important to know the facts before sharing hasty opinions. You may also access the OIG Reports going back to 1979 here: After clicking on any year, type the words “Job Corps” in the “Find” box.  Some of us are the employees who made those complaints. Hope this helps.

-from Howard

Specifically, which comments were inaccurate? If you have not actually worked at a Job Corps, then you don’t have a very good reference point from which to speak. I agree with Andrea on that point.

I know that my posts are accurate. I have worked in the Job Corps system for many yrs, at five different centers for four different contractors. I have visited many centers and know a lot of staff, present and past. I know the workings of a center and what goes on behind the scenes, at the center, corporate and government levels – I have written contract proposals and Job Corps curricula and have held responsible positions.

What, in your opinion, are inaccuracies on this site?

Read the news article here:

Back in 2008 former employees, students, others and an attorney picketed outside the Iroquois Job Corps Center in Medina, New York.  The center is managed by ETR (Education and Training Resources).  Some of the complaints involved mismanagement by high level staff, discrimination and unfair discharge policies.

Six former employees and one student  from Iroquois had filed charges in the past against the center with the New York State Office of Human Rights and the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission). Attorney Michael O’Keefe, representing the former plaintiffs was present at the protest. All cases were allegedly investigated” and discharged with a ruling of no probable cause. Attorney Michael O’ Keefe said:

“In my opinion Division of Human Rights did not investigate properly.”

Rhett Dallas, with corporate support from the Boston Regional Office of the Department of Labor said:

“Since ETR — Educational and Training Resources — took over the center on Jan. 1, 2005, the Iroquois Job Corps has climbed from the 117th ranked position to 40th. “When the numbers come out next week, we’re going to be higher,” Dallas said, attributing the center’s success to good management”.

In my opinion, such a meteoric rise in three short years can also be attributed to high pressure on employees to produce more, and new ways to manipulate numbers on the part of the contractors.  If we are to believe all the published newspaper reports and Office of the Inspector General’s Audit Report findings of number manipulation and fraud posted on this website and the internet it appears that something seriously has gone awry here. Shouldn’t someone have questioned what methods the center used to rise above the ranks so quickly?

Job Corps is in the business of protecting it’s image at all costs, and it is a well known fact that many Job Corps Centers have incestuous relationships with their local press and DOL authorities.  It is our hope that someday, all of Job Corps’ wrongdoing will be brought to light to the American public.  For me, having seven claimants hire an attorney and having all seven cases dismissed is a cause for suspicion and great concern.  When will someone wake up and investigate the investigators?

During C-Prep, Vocational Trade, & Education
1. 6:00 AM: “Six O’Clock fellows, time to wake up” – Six is the wake up & MAC sheet time. Everyone is expected to wake up as soon as possible and move along with their morning routines-including hygiene, details (if assigned), & breakfast. You are pretty much forced to be awake by 7:00 AM. Breakfast could be served as early as 6:30, despite the majority of students arriving during the last 20-30 minutes. Morning Details start by 7:00 AM, and you must be off the dorm floors by 7:30.

2. 8:00 AM ”The typical training day routine” – Our training day is from 8:00am – 3:20pm. There are seven class periods (including lunch), all of which are sixty minute long. You are granted 5 minute breaks every hour if you are in C-prep/Education and will have second lunch, and, if you’re in vocational trades, you take 15 minute breaks every three hours and will have first lunch. Students enrolled in GED/HSD classes are rotated every week from education classes to vocation training and vice versa. Pre-Co is different, as the students and I traveled to a college’s center away from Job Corps and the travel subtracted a little bit of time. Our center has two cafeterias, one for hot food (the traditional Job corps hot food served similar in every center) and the cold side (sandwiches, which is better because the line is twice as small) & seriously, kitchen staff aren’t literally cooking the sandwiches, nothing is cooked which makes the wait longer. Ever since August, one lunch issue has changed-they now have guys in military uniform guarding the lunch line.

3. 3:30 pm - After the training day, there is pretty much nothing preventing the students from hanging out in their dorm-or throughout the city, once the weather grows warmer. Leaving the center on your own is allowed and you won’t need security/RA’s permission unless it’s a curfew issue (which, that’s what a weekend pass or personal day is for) but you have to arrange how to leave center (get someone’s bus pass, call in a ride to drive up to center). There is a weekly dorm meeting every Wednesday at 3:30pm. A “Wal-Mart Shuttle” takes up to 11 students in a van to the Waterworks shopping center, mainly noted with Wal-Mart every Wednesday & Friday. This trip was added in April when students actually got caught walking through train tracks approximately ten miles to get to the shopping center by foot.  Students were getting arrested after getting caught trespassing  on the tracks. Supper/Dinner is always at 4:30-6:00pm. Getting there fifteen minutes early is your best bet to avoid the long line being and dealing with all the “cutting in” from other students.

4. 9:30PM – End of Day – 9:30 is the time night details are to be done. Not doing details will have you marked as a zero, and if you fail to have enough points, you’ll be doing the same detail the following week. Details both Morning & Night are done by rotation. Breaking other center rules doesn’t not confine you to a detail for the following week, you literally get nothing but a write up that “gets added” to the data in the RA’s record. The curfew is 11:00pm. There is no set time you’re supposed to be asleep, but you won’t get to leave the dorm floors past curfew.

If one is involved with the Pittsburgh’s Job Corps College Program
1. 6:00-7:00 AM: ”Six O’Clock fellows, wake yourselves up”! At the college student dorm you wake yourself up, just like college life. All 90-100 college students are placed in the dorms called Evans Hall. Evans Hall is formerly known as what most centers call the “Honor Dorm”. The dorm was named after a student who was robbed/murdered making his way back to center from studying. The honor dorm houses all of the college students and the model students from vocations who moved out when the college program was to expand.

2. 7:00 am to Late at Night: Once you can wake yourself at the time necessary to make your way to class in time, you just go to class and when you’re not in class, you can do just about anything else, including hanging out through town, getting involved in college activities, study/do homework any which way, and arrive back on center when possible. If you have a night detail (9:00pm) you just make sure to do that. Dorm meetings are on Wednesday’s at 8:00pm.

This is just the typical planned activity for the general Pittsburgh Job Corps student body, not just my particular schedule. This is a typical planned day, give or take any unplanned incidents or planned events on the student’s behalf or the center’s behalf. This is minus the daily issues of dorm life, class issues, cafeteria issues, student/staff incidents & conflicts that just happen anyway at any time.

The student is very articulate and describes his experience at Joliet Job Corps as a “nightmare, discrimination and abuse”.    This student’s observations remind me of some of the things I saw as a a staff person at Shriver Job Corps managed by Adams and Associates…

Some of the high points of this student’s observations:

“As a punishment in the building/trades department, students (including minors) were made to carry lumber from one side of the football field to the other for 6 hours of classroom time”.
“At one point, I caught the records manager on center over a weekend (two days before a major review). He was toting out boxloads of documents to the garbage dumpster…. So much for protecting privacy”!

“ During the month of April, my dormitory had no toilet paper, handsoap, or paper towels to which we could dry our hands. My dormitory had no drinking water… which means on weekends, no drinks before 11am and no drinks after 10pm!  Most of the toilets were constantly backed up and overflowing. On one occasion, a fight occurred in the lower (academic) hallways and a student bled all over the wall.  11 days later, the blood was STILL all over the wall – Neither the medical staff nor safety staff wanted to take responsibility for cleaning it and students were forced to do it. It was only washed off – The area was not sanitized”.
“Despite regulations against those with felonies attending the program, MANY were being sentenced there by family judges.  Several students urinated in an empty drink bottle and then poured it on the face/down the throat of a student as he was asleep. Those guilty were punished, but not removed from the center”.

“Some electrical outlets hung from the walls by the wiring in the dormitories”.

Make sure to read the Ripoff Report here:

Read the full report here:

THE NATIONAL JOB CORPS STUDY

Wilmington Job Corps Center is operated by Management and Training Corporation

Make sure to watch this video about burglaries in Wilmington, DE…

Job Corps refuses to cooperate with the police…

-from Trevor

I have an idea:

Start teaching really young kids to stay in school, stay out of trouble, learn how to find resources to get a JOB they’d WANT. Do this with some kind of private educational institutions and/or Awareness Campaign to make sure kids don’t end up getting themselves in something that could hurt them and them not know. If there was another alternate for kids other than Job Corps, and if we had a non-gov’t program telling kids to better themselves before they end up like Job Corps kids. If kids don’t have a reason to make a last resort to Job Corps, the program will suffer and the plug will be pulled.

This would take years to do so, but with the right people starting this, it all has possibilities to work. I plan on seeing this some day.

-from Howard

Why does this need to be privatized? Why can’t this be part of the public school curriculum?

-from Howard

While there is redundancy in the Job Corps program, for instance, one can earn a GED through BOCES, a community college, public school systems, as well as do work on-line and by watching TV programs, the selling point of Job Corps is that it provides room, board and health services free and the student also earns a stipend when enrolled as a trainee. For homeless youth or those in other negative life situations, this program can be life-saving.

-from Shirley

Bob Confer is a total joke. And this article is a bunch of bull. The government has been bought and paid for by the wealthy, and the big corporations. They and the government are one in the same. I can name on one hand the government representatives who appear to be honest and fighting for their constituents. “The government that has created poverty” is in fact the wealthy classes who want the masses to be poor – how else can they exploit them so they, the rich, can become more wealthy?

Confer and his ilk just don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes, so they attack Job Corps and health programs by saying that these programs are ruining the country and using jingoism to scare people. Sound familiar? Sound like Fascism, well it is. Why doesn’t he talk about his cronies who run the system and have become millionaires by playing the game?

Does this Bob Confer, a writer for the New American, a right wing John Birch Society publication, think we are all so stupid as he would hope? Does he think at least some of us don’t see through his distortions and lies? Using Job Corps, Medicare and Medicaid as examples of government waste in his right wing diatribe is despicable, as the right wing is the recipient of most tax handouts. Check the statistics – see which states receive the most tax dollars back from Washington as compared to the tax dollars they contribute to Washington.

The people in this country are fed a bunch of lies just to keep them stupid and exploitable and they actually believe those lies.

New American is a magazine published by the John Birch Society and the information on Job Corps Fraud is taken from a larger article that also criticizes Medicare and Medicaid.

The companies who abuse and make the profit from the “entitlements” this author mentions are the very same right wing nut jobs who read his magazine.

Read the whole article. These programs and the government are not ruining our country – it’s the right wing contractors who are stealing our tax payer dollars and who have to be monitored every step of the way because they are a bunch of thieves who can’t be trusted.

I wouldn’t cite anything from a John Birch Society rag publication as having any credibility because while they claim to be fighting for freedom, the only freedom they are concerned with is their own and to hell with the middle and lower classes. Read about the Koch brothers whose father co-founded the John Birch Society. Do you think they care about anyone but themselves and their own pockets?

Bob Confer’s post in the New American talks about how the US Government has created poverty instead of alleviating its presence.   He briefly mentions Job Corps as one of the wasteful programs that deserves a discerning look.  Confer mentions the “redundancy” of Job Corps and the fact that its programs are duplicated elsewhere  in the private sector and schools.  Redundancy is apparently another rationale for saying that Job Corps is expensive and should be eliminated.

I think why Job Corps has survived the “redundancy” accusation is because it’s highly touted as being the program of last resort for those who have been kicked out of high school, for the juvenile delinquents and misfits and for those who can’t read.  It’s a place to gather all “these” kids together and present Job Corps as a “one of a kind” program that isn’t duplicated anywhere else. It’s not the program Job Corps is selling, it’s the attendees.  And the message is: “Look how we take these inner city delinquents and cure them of their gang affiliations”, or, “Everyone else has given up on certain students, just give us six months and we’ll turn them around and give them a new attitude, a high school diploma and a trade on top of it all”.  Unfortunately, if it sounds too good to be true, most of the time it’s a lie.

Job Corps also has other kinds of attendees, the student who, for some reason or another wasn’t able to complete high school, or, the student from a broken family who is looking for an education and some stability.  Sometimes, kids without any behavioral problems at all enroll because they think it’s a place where they’ll get a quality, free, education and they believe what the glossy brochures and smooth talking recruiters tell them. I’ve spoken to those “other” kinds of students and heard the stories about the gangs, beat downs and blanket parties.  I’ve heard about the prevalence of drugs in the dorms and on campus. As a staff, I’ve also seen known drug-dealer students kept on the attendance rolls because we needed “the numbers”. Last, I’ve seen the stars slowly fade from student’s eyes when they suspect that they aren’t getting the dream of the education they deserve or when they notice that the overworked and underpaid teachers or staff don’t have the time to spend with them.

Sure, there are a few Job Corps students who do a complete turn-around, but unfortunately, they are the minority.  The vast majority are proved, through corrected statistics and scientific evidence that they are no better off than before they enrolled.  What gives? Why are we paying for this program? I believe that we too have stars in our eyes and want to believe that there is a magic bullet “out there” that will, once and for all, cure the troubled youth of our century and for now, Job Corps fulfills the fairly tale. We need the “dream” as much as the kids do…