In 2008 and 2009, the U.S. economy shed more than 8 million jobs;
since 2009, the economy has created only about 2 million. Most
economists expect the labor market to continue to recover slowly from
the Great Recession over the next several years. But the quantity of
jobs is not the only concern. The nation also needs to focus on creating
more high-quality jobs and providing workers with the skills necessary
to perform those jobs.
Too many U.S. workers lack the education necessary to thrive in a
modern economy and the specific skills required to compete for
high-paying jobs. In today's more competitive product and labor
markets, employers will create such jobs only if the productivity of
their workers can potentially match their higher levels of compensation.
Doubtful about the productive potential of their workers, employers
often choose to compete based only on low costs rather than on better
worker performance.
Instead, the United States should make it easier for employers to
create and fill good jobs with highly productive workers. To do so, it
needs to create and fund more-coherent and more-effective education and
workforce-development systems. These systems should place their primary
emphasis on providing more assistance to at-risk youth, both in school
and out and also to adult workers who are disadvantaged. Furthermore,
these programs should take advantage of the latest evidence on effective
training to maximize their impact.
Rigorous economic research has arrived at a consensus that
education and training programs that are clearly targeted toward firms
and sectors providing well-paying jobs tend to be successful in raising
participant earnings. Studies using randomized controlled trial (RCT)
evaluation techniques, the gold standard of empirical evidence, have
highlighted the importance of linking training programs with employer
and labor market needs. Now is the time to apply this insight to public
programs.
To raise the employment and productivity of U.S. workers, I propose
a new federal competitive grant program that funds evidence-supported
training programs at the state level. At a cost of roughly $2 billion
per year, the program would underwrite a range of efforts aimed at
educating workers for jobs in firms that pay well and in growing
industries. Rather than reinventing the wheel, this program would build
on the efforts already made in many states to integrate those
states' education and workforce systems and to target key sectors
on the demand side of the labor market more effectively.
Grants would be awarded to partnerships between secondary and
postsecondary institutions, employers from key industry sectors,
workforce agencies, and intermediaries. The grants would fund a range of
evidence-based educational and training activities for workers that have
low incomes or limited education. The grants also could help students by
funding support systems such as career counseling activities or child
care and could be used to provide technical assistance or tax credits to
firms that create well-paying jobs and fill them through appropriate
workforce strategies.
These activities would not only help generate education and
workforce systems that are more effective, but also encourage states to
integrate these systems with their economic development activities.
These funds would be used to leverage existing and potentially new
private and public sources of funding, and would encourage the efficient
use of funds in a sustained manner over time. Evidence from rigorous
evaluations suggests that such investment could potentially generate
benefits several times as high as the investment itself. Although the
program is designed primarily to create better-skilled workers and more
well-paying jobs over the longer term, it could also help reduce the
nation's current high unemployment rate in the next few years.
Lagging skills
The education and training of the U.S. workforce have not kept pace
with the growing demand for skills in the labor market, leading to
earnings stagnation and growing inequality. Nearly 25% of today's
young people fail to finish high school, much less obtain a
postsecondary credential of some kind. Given the very high return to
education in the U.S. labor market, the groups that lag behind in
educational attainment suffer low earnings over their entire working
lives. Better skills will pay off only if companies create well-paid
positions for highly productive workers. But firms might not choose to
create a socially optimal number of high-quality jobs on their own
because of a variety of market failures. For one thing, many employers
have very limited knowledge of different compensation and human resource
options that might generate highly productive workers who are well
compensated. Furthermore, the ability of employers to choose the
"high road" might be constrained by the quality of workers
whom they perceive to be available for hiring, in terms of basic and
occupational skills. And employers might be reluctant to invest their
own resources in training workers for a variety of reasons, beginning
with the reality that the newly trained worker could move to a different
company.
Furthermore, the locus of the "good jobs" is changing,
with many fewer available in manufacturing and more appearing in
professional and financial services, health care, construction, and even
the high end of retail trade. Furthermore, the decline in good job
availability in manufacturing is concentrated among the least-skilled
workers, whose employment there declined dramatically; in contrast,
employment in manufacturing for workers in the highest-skilled quintiles
has declined only slightly.
Fortunately, the data show that good jobs are not disappearing in
general. If anything, the number of jobs in the highest quintile of
quality actually grew during the period from 1992 to 2003, but most of
the high-paying jobs require a strong set of basic cognitive or
communication skills, or both. Except in the professional and financial
services sectors, many of these jobs do not require a four-year college
diploma, but they generally do require some kind of postsec-onciary
training and certification.
Positions in health care often include a variety of nursing
categories as well as technicians. In construction, positions usually
include the skilled crafts (electricians, plumbers, carpenters) that can
be filled through apprenticeships or other training models. In
manufacturing, positions often include not only engineers but also
machinists, precision welders, and other highly skilled workers; and in
a variety of other sectors, workers with some college or an associates
degree enjoy relatively high earnings. These positions include
managerial and professional jobs, jobs in the STEM fields (science,
technology, engineering, and math), health care, sales, and office
support jobs, and even jobs in blue-collar fields. Research by Anthony
Carnevale and colleagues shows that a significant share of workers with
occupational licenses or certificates as well as those with
associate's degrees earn more than the median worker with a
bachelor's degree in key fields.
Despite the value of the skills required for these jobs, certain
well-documented problems in the education and workforce systems mean
that too few workers make investments that would allow them to fill
these well-paying jobs. For example, many students currently attend
two-year or four-year institutions but achieve too little there to
improve their labor market outcomes. Dropout rates are extremely high,
especially in community colleges, where many youth and
adults--especially those from minority or low-income communities--are
stuck in remedial classes from which they never emerge and are
completely separated from the classes that could provide relevant
occupational training. As a result, most community college students
never earn even an occupational certificate, much less an
associate's degree. Data from the American Association of Community
Colleges indicate that 12.4 million students attended community college
in the fall of 2008, about 7.4 million for credit, yet fewer than a
million associate's degrees or certificates were awarded in the
2007-2008 school year.
In Germany and elsewhere in Europe, training that helps workers
prepare for good labor market opportunities is delivered through
high-quality career and technical education (CTE). Such systems have not
developed in the United States, at least partly because of historical
controversies over "tracking" minority students away from
college. But at its best, CTE would not deter students from attending
postsecondary institutions and might indeed be structured to better
prepare and encourage more students to do so.
Little career guidance, especially guidance based on local or state
labor market data, is provided to high-school or community college
students. Indeed, it is often not until after entering the labor market
and then becoming unemployed that many disadvantaged workers are
provided their first valuable career guidance. Such guidance is provided
quite cost-effectively to workers at more than 3,000 One-Stop offices
around the country, funded through the U.S. Department of Labor's
Workforce Investment Act (WIA) in the form of "core" and
"intensive" services plus limited training. However, local
workforce boards, which disperse funds provided through WIA, do not
always effectively represent the employers with the best-paid jobs and
with strong demand in growing industries, and are not always integrated
with state and local economic development efforts.
Even when college students know that earnings and labor market
demand are strong in certain fields, such as nursing or health
technology, they often find only limited instructional capacity in these
areas in many colleges. This might be because there are few incentives
for institutions to meet labor market demand, or because their
per-student subsidies from state governments do not depend on degree or
certificate completion rates or on what kinds of credentials students
earn.
As a result, not only do too few workers obtain certificates and
degrees, but those obtained are often not well matched to labor market
demand in key sectors. Under these circumstances, when employers create
high-paying jobs at the middle and high ends of the skill spectrum, they
often have some difficulty filling them with skilled workers. Indeed,
the job vacancy rate has averaged 2.2 to 2.3% over the past year, which
is relatively high, given an unemployment rate of more than 9%. Even in
sectors such as manufacturing, where vacancy rates are not high overall,
the ratio of vacancies to new hires is striking, suggesting that
employers have some difficulty filling vacant positions.
All of this suggests that programs designed to improve the skills
and productivity of U.S. workers, if they work carefully with targeted
employers and industries, could fill some vacant jobs that currently
exist and perhaps encourage employers to create more jobs over time. The
programs should thus help reduce unemployment and job vacancies in the
short term while also raising worker earnings in the longer term.
Evidence of effectiveness
One path to creating good jobs for disadvantaged workers involves
raising their skills and productivity to make them more attractive to
potential employers. A rigorous body of evidence suggests that certain
education and training efforts can be cost-effective for addressing
these issues, even when brought to substantial scale. Whereas the
overall evidence on the cost-effectiveness of job training for
disadvantaged workers in WIA and elsewhere is at least modestly
positive, there are some particularly strong examples that demonstrate
the effectiveness of education and training that target well-paying jobs
on the demand side of the labor market and that are coordinated with
employers there. The best studies have demonstrated results from these
programs using experimental methods from RCTs, and some fairly
persuasive nonexperimental evidence also exists. RCT studies are
important because they allow researchers to compare the labor market
outcomes of those who receive training to the outcomes of those who do
not, to demonstrate the benefits and costs of each intervention.
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The most important recent study is the Sectoral Employment Impact
Study of three major programs in Boston, New York City, and Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, conducted by Public/Private Ventures. The evaluation used
random assignment methods to test for program impacts on workers'
subsequent earnings, and it found that three to six months of
well-targeted training generated large impacts on earnings in all three
programs in the second full year after random assignment. Net impacts on
earnings were about $4,500 per participant over the 24-month period
after random assignment, with about $4,000 in the second year, once
training was completed. Direct costs of the program were estimated to be
about $6,000 per worker. Assuming that the large earnings gains persist
into the third year, the program is clearly cost-effective.
The study's authors have attributed the programs' success
to the close relationships between employers, training providers (which
are sometimes but not always community colleges), and the intermediaries
who coordinate their efforts. Improved earnings were the results of
higher employment rates and higher wages for training participants.
Because the three programs evaluated are moderately large, the
evaluation demonstrates that effective programs can potentially be
brought to scale.
A random assignment study of Year Up, a sectoral training program
for out-of-school youth, found that it achieved similar results. The
program trained youth from 18 to 24 years old from low-income urban
neighborhoods for jobs in the information technology sector in New
England, New York City, and elsewhere. The year after the program took
place, the treatment group reported earnings that were on average $3,461
higher than the control group due to higher hourly wages.
Several other efforts that provide occupational training plus work
experience to students in key sectors have generated impressive
estimated results. Regarding a successful example of CTE in high school,
a random assignment evaluation of the Career Academies found large
increases in the earnings of young men, especially those deemed at risk
of dropping out of school, even eight years after random assignment. The
Academies focus on particular sectors of the economy, combine
high-quality general academic instruction with occupational training,
and provide critical work experience in those sectors to students. The
Academies did not "track" students away from postsecondary
education; the postsecondary enrollment rates of these students were no
lower than those of students in the control group.
Thus, we now have rigorous experimental evidence on highly
cost-effective programs for in-school youth, out-of-school youth, and
disadvantaged adults. All of these programs provide education or
training that closely targets well-paying employers or economic sectors,
where outreach to and active engagement of employers is a major part of
the training process. This evidence supports nonexperimental evidence on
effective training programs that suggests, for instance, that
apprenticeships have also increased earnings in some evaluation studies,
as have various state-level pro-grams providing incumbent worker
training.
It is important to note that all of these relatively successful
programs have been in operation for many years and have developed strong
curricula and links to the business community that might not be easily
replicated in a short time period. Furthermore, they focus on workers
who are disadvantaged and who have strong enough basic skills and
education credentials to successfully handle moderately technical
training. These successes probably can be replicated in other settings
over time, but only with appropriate screening of candidates and careful
development of their occupational training curricula and ties to
employers.
A few other education or employment programs in community colleges
and low-income neighborhoods that have undergone evaluation (with
varying degrees of rigor) also deserve mention. The strongest evidence,
based on RCT research designs, shows positive effects on educational
outcomes from the Opening Doors community college interventions, which
include merit-based financial aid; the structuring of "learning
communities" of students; and certain kinds of mandatory counseling
on educational outcomes. A study of community colleges, using
nonexperimental evidence from a program in Washington state that
integrates developmental (or remedial) education with occupational
training, known as Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training
(I-BEST), shows positive effects on educational outcomes. And the Youth
Opportunities program at the U.S. Department of Labor, which provided
grants to 36 low-income communities to develop and coordinate local
educational and employment services for youth, generates some positive
effects on both educational and employment outcomes in these sites.
Thus, a range of studies has demonstrated the potential to improve
educational outcomes at community colleges and to build systemic efforts
to provide employment services.
From research to practice
Given the strong recent evidence on the efficacy of job training
that carefully involves employers and considers labor demand for
disadvantaged populations, there is clearly some strong potential to
raise the skills of workers. Raising those skills would allow some
currently low-skilled workers to fill existing jobs and also would help
create new employment opportunities if employers respond to a more
productive set of workers by creating more well-paying jobs for them.
The goal is to encourage the creation of more-effective education
and workforce systems that include evidence-based training models and
are more responsive to employers who create good jobs. Given current and
future budget constraints, any new public expenditure should be designed
primarily to improve the efficiency of resources already in the system,
but some important categories of services would also benefit from
greater support. These expenditures should build on encouraging efforts
that have been developed in several states and leverage other existing
sources of funding.
Accordingly, I propose that the federal government create and fund
a new competitive grants program to support the building of education
and workforce development systems aimed at filling well-paying jobs in
key economic sectors. Grants would go primarily to the state-level
partnerships, though some small number would also be provided at the
federal level to partnerships in some key sectors, such as health care,
which would support state-level efforts around the country in these
sectors. Some might also go directly to regional efforts at the substate
level, although the states would decide how to incorporate regions into
their efforts.
The idea for such competitive grants is not new. In fact, a
somewhat similar idea has been embodied in legislation that has already
passed the U.S. House of Representatives as a potential amendment to WIA
and has also been proposed in the Senate. The Strengthening Employment
Clusters to Organize Regional Success (SECTORS) Act of 2008, passed by
voice vote in the House that year, calls for grants of $4 million to $5
million to be made to industry or sector partnerships, although no new
funding for services was provided. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) has
recently proposed the Promoting Innovations to Twenty-First Century
Careers Act, which embodies somewhat similar ideas for state and
regional partnerships.
The proposal described here, however, would be much broader in
scope, would target the states, and would provide new funding for
services as well as the organizational infrastructure of
"partnerships" In that way, it might be more like President
Obama's originally proposed American Graduation Initiative for
grants to states and community colleges, which now receives a little
funding under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and
Career Training (TAACCCT) program.
The grants, which would be administered jointly by the U.S.
Departments of Education and Labor, would begin in the first several
months as planning grants but then would evolve into grants that fund
both services and system building within two years of the program's
launch. Overall, the programs should be funded at the level of roughly
$2 billion per year for at least five years. Renewal of these grants
would be allowed only if the grantee could provide evidence of strong
results.
Grants would generally be awarded on the basis of the following
mandatory criteria designed to model successful training programs:
* The inclusion of key partners, including community colleges and
other education or training providers, industries or large employers
with strong labor demand and good jobs, local workforce development
agencies, and intermediary organizations with strong links to employers
or industries
* The targeting of disadvantaged workers
* Responsiveness to labor market and employer needs
* Funding of key direct supports and services to students, workers,
and employers, as identified below
* The extent to which other sources of public or private funding
are leveraged, as part of efforts that will be sustainable over time
* The strength of the evidence on which the training and
educational models are based
* The strength and rigor of evaluation plans
Industry and employer partnerships. To begin, states would need to
create new or strengthen existing partnerships among postsecondary
education institutions (as well as high schools providing high-quality
CTE), employers or their associations in key economic sectors, workforce
agencies (such as state and local workforce investment boards), and
perhaps other nonprofit institutions at the state or local levels that
serve as intermediaries in these efforts. The evidence reviewed above
suggests that the involvement of employers is critical and that the more
successful programs use intermediaries that have long-term relationships
with employers.
Key employer and industry partners would be drawn from sectors
where jobs generate good pay and benefits per average level of education
and where employment growth is projected to be strong over time, using
newly available administrative labor market data at the state and local
levels. Industry associations would be particularly important partners,
because it is hard to build systemic efforts with individual employers.
But impressive models in which particular employers have reached out to
education providers to build "career pathways" for high-school
and college students could be replicated and brought to greater scale.
For instance, IBM has recently helped build the Pathways in Technology
Early College High School (P-TECH) program in Brooklyn, and Pacific Gas
and Electric (PG&E) has started the PowerPathways skill development
program in conjunction with local community colleges in California.
Targeted trainees and sectors. During the planning process, states
would be required to systematically identify underemployed groups of
workers, including but not limited to disadvantaged youth and adults,
who might benefit from new sectoral or career pathway models at
different levels of skill. States also must identify the sectors where
demand is likely to remain strong and likely to generate well-paying
firms and jobs. Intermediaries with strong ties to those employment
sectors should also be included in the planning stage. These could
include community-based nonprofits, associations of employers, and
workforce development organizations, among others.
Of course, demand projections often have some degree of error,
especially since labor demand can shift in directions that are not
easily predicted from recent trends. Therefore, state plans should also
indicate the extent to which the education and training provided are
general and likely to be portable across sectors if such unanticipated
demand shifts occur. The best plans will also include funding or
technical assistance for employers who might need modest retraining
either for newly hired or incumbent workers who do not exactly fit their
current skill needs. Thus, state plans should provide for occupation-
and industry-specific training, as well as for mechanisms that generate
flexible responses to unanticipated demand shifts.
Broader measures to support employtment-based training. The grants
would be used to stimulate responsiveness to the labor market at two- or
four-year colleges. For instance, the grants could be used to expand
high-quality CTE programs in high school and career counseling at
colleges, and to encourage educational institutions to expand
instructional capacity in high-demand areas, based on labor market data.
Indeed, states could be rewarded for tying their subsidies for community
colleges to rates of certificate or degree completion, especially in
sectors of strong demand. The integration of developmental or remedial
education with occupational training could be encouraged, along with
other proven efforts to reduce dropout rates.
Some funds would be available to pay for tax credits or technical
assistance to well-paying employers that participate in sectoral
training programs and other efforts to upgrade their incumbent workers.
A model for this technical assistance might be the Manufacturing
Extension Partnership program, which helps manufacturers upgrade
workplace performance and productivity. More broadly, states should
indicate that their education and workforce systems are also part of
broader economic development plans to assist industry development and
employment growth, especially in geographic areas that are currently
underserved.
Funding direct services for trainees. Grants to states would then
pay for some direct service provision that is not already available to
Pell grantees and other lower- or middle-income postsecondary students.
These services could include tuition payments for coursework leading to
certification in the relevant fields by both prospective and incumbent
employees who are not eligible for Pell Grants; stipends for paid work
experience under apprenticeships, internships, and other forms of
college work-study in these fields; and supportive services, such as
child care for low-income parents. Small federal programs that already
provide such funding, such as the Child Care Access Means Parents in
School program or the Job Location and Development Program, which
provides off-campus paid work to students under the Federal Work Study
program, could be effectively expanded and perhaps even incorporated
into such efforts.
Promoting sustainability through leveraging of other existing
funding sources. States would receive grant money only if they provide
better services to students and better incentives to institutions as
part of lasting systemic plans to improve the matching of less-educated
or disadvantaged workers with good jobs over time. To encourage plans
that will be more lasting, states would have to generate plans to
sustain their efforts over time, using other public and private sources
of funds.
The new program should leverage other recent and current funding
efforts, especially if the states can indicate how they are building on
the progress generated from those other efforts. For instance, in
addition to the TAACCCT program, the proposed fund could complement
activities funded by the U.S. Department of Labor through recent
competitive grant programs such as the High Growth and Emerging
Industries Job Training Initiative and the Workforce Innovations for
Regional Economic Development grants to regions. It could also
complement the efforts of several national foundations, such as the
National Fund for Workforce Solutions, and others aimed at community
colleges and states to improve degree completion rates as well as career
pathways to local labor markets. Examples of these initiatives include
Achieving the Dream, Shifting Gears, and Breaking Through. It would
build on activities already begun in many states to more closely link
their education and workforce activities (including those funded by WIA)
to economic development, and also build on major new workforce
initiatives such as the No Worker Left Behind program recently
implemented in Michigan. That program provides training funds to
displaced workers who are being trained in community colleges for jobs
in industries where high future growth is expected.
Most important, the grants could encourage much better use of the
enormous sums of federal money that the Obama administration recently
invested in the Pell Grant program. They also could promote better use
of very large state subsidies to public colleges by raising certificate
or degree completion rates among grant recipients that are well matched
to good jobs in the labor market. Thus, this program would not duplicate
other efforts but build on them. The grants would encourage states to
combine currently disparate and uncoordinated funding efforts into more
effective education and workforce systems that are better matched to
state and local labor market demand.
Proposed plans for grant applications should leverage private
funding sources. Indeed, since employers would benefit to some extent
from these programs, they should be willing to contribute some modest
funding, perhaps through their industry associations or through
dedicated funds from state payroll taxes.
Implemented in this fashion, the program could generate the kinds
of lasting systemic changes at the state level that apparently have been
induced by other federal grant programs recently, such as the Race to
the Top fund in K-12 education or the expansions of unemployment
insurance eligibility under the Unemployment Insurance Modernization Act
provisions in the recent federal stimulus bill.
Evidence base and evaluation. The criteria provided above are in
part based on the evidence about what creates a successful training
program, but the state plans should explicitly indicate the extent to
which their proposals reflect evidence of cost-effectiveness based on
rigorous research emaly-sis, such as the best studies cited above.
The capacity7 to conduct rigorous evaluations of their own programs
at both the institutional and state levels would be required for grant
applicants to receive funding. Where specific programs are being set up
or expanded, experimental evaluations based on RCT would be considered
most appropriate. Alternatively, states could also generate
nonexperimental evaluations using appropriate methods, either for
specific programs and policies or for their overall efforts more
broadly. The ability of grant applicants to conduct evaluations should
be evaluated by contractors selected by the Departments of Labor and
Education. Renewal of these grants would at least partly depend on the
extent to which evaluation evidence indicates success in expanding
employment opportunities and earnings for the targeted groups.
Caveats
It must be emphasized that any new grant program should not be used
to reduce formula funding right now for WIA. Given the extent to which
WIA funds have already been drastically cut over the past years and
decades and how tight those resources are for the cost-effective local
employment services and training that they now fund, it is important
that these new grants constitute a net addition of resources and not
further cannibalize important existing programs.
Another concern is whether the current fiscal environment will
allow for even the modest new expenditures that I propose above. On the
one hand, with proposals for large cuts in federal discretionary
nondefense spending, and in particular for job training, now7 being
advanced, it might not be an auspicious time to propose increases. On
the other hand, recent evidence suggests that expenditures in education
are not quite as vulnerable to cuts at the federal level as are other
discretionary expenditures, and those tied to job creation and employer
needs might be less vulnerable to cuts if they enjoy some bipartisan
support, especially from major employers and industry associations.
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It might be possible to reallocate some of these funds from other
employment and training funds. One possible source of funding for new
competitive grants is revenues from H-1B visa fees. H-1B visas are
granted to immigrant workers with high skills. The federal government
through the Department of Labor uses the revenues from these visas for
training U.S. workers. If alternative funding is not available, the cost
of the program might be scaled back initially and ramped up slowly as
successes become more apparent and political support grows over time.
Finally, one cannot ignore the short- and long-term weakness of the
U.S. job market. Insufficient aggregate demand and uncertainty seem to
be limiting overall job creation and the country's recovery from
the Great Recession, and new technologies and global forces might slow
job creation over the longer term. This proposal is not designed to
address a broader set of problems that seem to be deterring employers
from creating large numbers of jobs, as they did in the 1980s and 1990s.
The need for enhancements of worker skills and of the quality of
jobs created remains, however, and perhaps becomes even stronger in a
tepid labor market. And the ability of those markets to absorb workers
with higher skill levels and higher pay over the longer term should not
be doubted, even when aggregate employment outcomes are disappointing.
Recommended reading
Eileen Appelbaum, Annette Bernhardt, and Richard Mur-nane, Low-Wage
America: How Employers Are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace (New
York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003).
Thomas Bailey, Timothy Leinbach, and Davis Jenkins,
"Graduation Rates, Student Goals and Measuring Community College
Effectiveness," Brief No. 28, Community College Research Center,
Columbia University, New York, 2005.
Anthony Carnevale, Nicole Smith, and Jeff Strohl, Help Wanted:
Projections of Jobs and Education Requirements Through 2018 (Washington,
DC: Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, 2010).
Harry Holzer, Julia Lane, David Rosenblum, and Fredrik Andersson,
Where Are All the Good Jobs Going? What National and Local Job Quality
and Dynamics Mean for U.S. Workers (New York: Russell Sage Foundation,
2011).
Louis Jacobson, and Christine Mokher, Pathways to Boosting the
Earnings of Low-Income Students by Increasing their Educational
Attainment (Arlington, VA: CNA, 2009).
James Kemple, Career Academies: Long-Term Impacts on Earnings,
Educational Attainment and the Transition to Adulthood (New York: iMDRC,
2008).
Sheila Maguire, Joshua Freely, Carol Clymer, Maureen Conway, and
Deena Schwartz, Tuning in to Local Labor Markets: Findings from the
Sectoral Employment Impact Study (Philadelphia, PA: Public/Private
Ventures, 2010).
LaShawn Richburg-Hayes, Helping Low-Wage Workers Persist in
Community College (New York: MDRC, 2008).
Ann Roder, and Mark Elliott, A Promising Start: Year Up's
Initial Impacts on. Low-Income Young Adults Careers (NewYork: Economic
Mobility Corporation, 2011).
Harry J. Holzer (hjh4@georgetown.edu) is professor of public policy
at Georgetown University senior fellow at the American Institutes for
Research, affiliated scholar at the Urban Institute, and a former chief
economist at the Department of Labor. This article is derived from
"Raising Job Quality and Skills for American Workers: Creating
More-Effective Education and Workforce Development Systems in the
States" a discussion paper prepared for the Hamiltion Project at
the Brook-ings Institution.