In 2013, President Obama signed into law what would be known as Workforce and Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). The WIOA replaced its predecessor, the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (WIA). The purpose of WIOA is to strengthen the U.S. workforce so more U.S. citizens have access to high-quality jobs, as well as help ensure that employers can retain these employees. Making sure people have jobs is important. After all, a job or a career is a path to providing for one's family. For some, it is more than a livelihood: it is a status symbol. Plus, look at alternative of long-term unemployment. It is generally accepted that having citizens employed, as well as make sure that skill sets are matched to market demand, is an important value for society and workforce development policy. I have to wonder if the WIOA and its predecessor, the WIA, have succeeded in such a task.
The inspiration for this blog entry came from the Heritage Foundation and their Blueprint for Balance project that was released a couple of months ago. Essentially, the Heritage Foundation looked at the federal budget to see what could be reformed. The Heritage Foundation came up with 181 recommendations, one of which was to eliminate WIOA. For one, Heritage Foundation put a price tag on WIOA: $3.3 billion. That is how much we spend on this Department of Labor program. A price tag unto itself is not justification to eliminate the program because perhaps the program generates net benefit. However, I have reason to doubt such an assertion.
My largest basis for doubting WIOA's efficacy is a 2016 evaluation from Mathematica Policy Center that was commissioned by the Department of Labor (DOL). The evaluation primarily looks at WIOA's predecessor, the WIA. Mathematica emphasizes that the report still has practical implications for WIOA because the basic set of services has not changed, nor have the eligible recipients (p. xv). What did the evaluation conclude? Although the findings are preliminary (a final evaluation is to be released later this year), those who received full-WIA services (e.g., skills assessments, workshops, job-search assistance) did not have earnings that were statistically significant from the core group (p. xxiii-xxv). Even in spite of having training and other one-on-one assistance, it does not seem to affect salary, which is the single most important metric for something such as WIOA. What is even more significant is that only 32 percent of full-WIA participants found jobs in their field, which sadly was not much higher than the core group (p. 87).
While the Mathematica study is not the only study showing a lack of positive outcomes, it is the most recent one. The Government Accountability Office wrote reports on issues with collecting WIA data (see 2013 and 2014 reports). A University of Massachusetts-Boston study showed how the WIA had issues acclimating to the labor market (Fesko et al., 2003). An economist from Georgetown University argues that the Earned Income Tax Credit [EITC] would be more effective than the WIA (Holzer, 2009). One study goes as far as saying that "most employment and training programs have either no impact or modest positive impact" (Barnow and Smith, 2009).
Even so, job-training programs on the whole have mixed results (e.g., Heinrich et al., 2008). What we have to keep in mind when analyzing such programs is that with all government programs, benefits need to exceed costs before one could even begin to justify the existence of that program. I'm not anticipating the WIOA going away anytime soon, even with President Trump wanting to cut WIOA funding, but I do hope that WIOA's future justification can be based on evidence-based analysis.
No comments:
Post a Comment