Eager to give a young person a shot at his profession and bring in some badly-needed talent, Dave Abbott reached out last year to the Hubert H. Humphrey Job Corps Center in St. Paul in hopes of launching a “work-based learning” internship program. As a lead carpenter for a group of contractors, Abbott figured his company could train three or four young corps members per year, and hopefully hire some. A year of planning followed.

The first recruit recently “did two weeks with us, helped frame a garage up, and she absolutely crushed it,” said Abbott, a vice president with Terra Firma, a St. Paul-based contracting cooperative.

Then came word last week that the U.S. Department of Labor pulled funding for more than 100 Job Corps centers across the country. As a result, the Hubert H. Humphrey Job Corps Center — which has operated from the former Bethel College campus across from the State Fairgrounds on Snelling Avenue since 1981 — will close on Tuesday, letting go 100 staff members and releasing more than 170 young people.

“I’m so upset about this, I can’t even tell you,” said Kaila Broad, business engagement specialist with the St. Paul site, on Monday. “Haven’t slept, haven’t eaten.”

U.S. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said last week that a “phased pause in operations” is to take place by June 30, but the closures are rolling out in St. Paul and other locations virtually overnight.

“The Department of Labor press release says it’s ‘on pause,’ but our contracts have been terminated,” said center director Katie Kapaun, who has served with the center for 22 years.

Training in career paths

Each year St. Paul’s Job Corps Center offered up to 264 young people ages 16 to 24 roughly two years of workforce training in any one of eight career paths as they worked toward their GED and vocational certificates. It also provided free housing for the low-income recruits, many of whom had landed there through diversion programs or were enrolled by their families.

Some members had previously been homeless.

“Some of them don’t know where they’re going to go, what they’re going to do,” Kapaun said. “Telling them on Friday morning was probably the hardest thing in my career that I’ve had to do.”

About a third of students with local families or other contacts departed almost immediately. Others who enrolled in the St. Paul center from other states or were previously homeless are scrambling for residences. Andrea Hobbs, 20, said her dreams of becoming a traveling nurse were dealt a major setback. She has no local family and was homeless before Job Corps.

“For me, I don’t really know,” said Hobbs on Monday. “They’re giving us some extra time until the 12th. This would have been my third month.”

Abdel Sallm, 19, hoped to become certified in sign and display installation and find a job through a trade union. An entry-level job would have started at $26 per hour, he said. Whether he’ll be able to continue working toward his certification, at least in the short term, is unclear.

For now, he needs housing. He’s hoping to avoid moving back to New York City, where he’d likely be sleeping on his sister’s couch.

The decision to pull funding has drawn bipartisan pushback in Congress, given the program’s long history in putting young people to work.

The Job Corps centers launched as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “great society” and “war on poverty” efforts in 1964, and many a young person has obtained a medical assistant certificate or entered the construction trades while receiving free room and board.

“We had just added a Certified Nursing Assistant certification through St. Paul College,” Broad said.

Graduation rates, earnings disputed

In announcing cuts to workforce training programs last Thursday, Chavez-Deremer said the Job Corps centers proved too costly to operate and fell short of intended outcomes.

In 2024, the program operated at a $140 million deficit nationally, requiring the Biden administration to implement a pause in center operations to complete the year. The deficit this year is projected to reach $213 million, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Labor.

Nationally, about 39% of enrollees graduate, according to what the department described as the first-ever “Job Corps Transparency Report,” released April 25, which analyzed metrics from 2023.

Critics of the report say pre-pandemic graduation rates were notably higher, and the averages are artificially weighed down by the many young people who often quit the two-year program in the first month, taken aback by rules around wake-up times, making their bed and other requirements.

“Students who can’t handle that strict culture don’t make it past 30 days,” said Christopher Kuhn, executive director of center operations and support, who has been with the Job Corps for 41 years. “That’s just the culture. They don’t have four years to play.”

Other students drop out of the program early because they have a lead on employment.

“They leave for jobs, and that was the goal,” Kapaun said.

The National Job Corps Association maintains that historically, graduation rates were closer to 60%. A previous study of graduation rates, earnings and other metrics was published in sections from 1998 through 2001, though it was unavailable Monday morning from the U.S. Department of Labor website.

Citing the most recent report, the Labor Department said earnings for recent Job Corps graduates average about $16,000. The National Job Corps Association has also disputed those numbers, claiming earnings are closer to $31,000.

Also troubling, according to the secretary, were nearly 15,000 “serious incident reports,” chronicling everything from sex assaults and other acts of violence to drug use and hospitalizations. The National Job Corps Association has said those reports include power outages, storm damage, athletic injuries and adults leaving campus without authorization.

‘Tax cuts for billionaires’

In response, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services, issued a statement last week saying the loss of Job Corps will exacerbate her state’s workforce shortage, hurting the economy while locking students out of good-paying jobs.

“Congress appropriated funding for Job Corps, and the Trump Administration can’t just decide to not spend it because they want to make room for tax cuts for billionaires,” Baldwin wrote. “At a time when Wisconsin businesses are demanding more skilled workers, the Trump Administration is cutting vital resources that put Wisconsinites on a fast-track to good-paying jobs in nursing, manufacturing, and the trades.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service operates more than 20% of the centers on federal land, steering recruits toward forestry work. Those centers will continue to operate, but other Job Corps sites are not allowed to transfer their young people to them, Kuhn said.

Abbott said he sees the loss of federal funding as short-sighted decision-making.

Construction trades are notoriously understaffed and desperate for labor, which raises prices for clients. Creating a pipeline of young talent would be a boon to workers, contractors and property owners alike, he said.

“I was hoping to have it be a long-term tradition, that we could just (work with) three or four every year,” said Abbott on Sunday. “Usually, it’s pretty busy in the summer, and there’s good work for pre-apprentice level carpenters.”

Sallm, the 19-year-old recruit, said one of the most frustrating aspects of losing Job Corps is seeing how misinformation has been used against it.

“They want to portray the image that it’s a failed program, when it’s not,” he said.