* Job training
Topics: Education, Welfare, Programs
18 Oct 1994
From: ervan
In Sunday's Chronicle there was a piece on "Project Quest", a job training
program that Ann Richards has been pushing. The details are:
1) It cost $7.3M (apparently for two years)
2) It enrolled 678 people ($11K/person)
3) It 'graduated' 76 to $7.50/hour jobs ($96K/job)
4) Less than half the participants received any kind of welfare
5) The program offers day care, counseling, & money for utility bills
6) As anecdotal evidence, one person dropped out of school to get on the program
which additionally qualified her for AFDC & food stamps which she previously
was not receiving.
As bad as it sounds, it's not nearly that good. The people who 'graduated'
from the program are not the usual welfare cases but rather were chosen in
the first place precisely because they are people who could otherwise get
jobs. They were careful not to breakdown the graduation rate by the initial
circumstance of the enrollee. Thus, they did not really give 76 more people
jobs. They simply delayed for two years the time when those 76 people got
jobs. Even if they had given those people jobs, it would have been, to a
large extent, at the expense of other people competing for those same jobs.
The number of real jobs created here is approaching 0.
Actually, it's below 0 because the $7.3M was taken away from people who
would have spent it purchasing things that would have created real jobs.
And, like other welfare programs, it pays people to not work. In this, it
succeeds by having an unusually generous 'benefit'. When the AFDC runs out,
just sit in "Project Quest" for another two years.
Paul Osterman, a professor of human resource and management at MIT, said "If
the goal is to get people off welfare, Quest is as good as anything I've
seen." If this is success, I don't want to see failure!
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