Students, instructors, and staff at Job Corps programs across the country are in limbo: The Trump administration announced it would “pause” operations at contractor-operated Job Corps centers, but then a federal judge temporarily blocked that decision.
Job Corps is a federal program that provides free residential career training and education to low-income 16 to 24-year-olds. At nearly 120 locations, students live on campus while they earn their high school diploma or GED and receive training in fields like construction, automotive services, culinary arts, and office administration.
Tandy Sturgeon, field coordinator for the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) Job Corps programs in the Northwest, said instructors are working overtime to help students who are close to graduation cross the finish line before the programs are shuttered.
“We promised these young men and women a future. We promised them that they could come and earn an opportunity to be hardworking Americans. And we just cut the plug. Where do they go? What do they do?” Sturgeon said.
Tongue Point Job Corps Center in Astoria is one of a number of Job Corps centers that offer pre-apprenticeship programs operated by unions. The center typically has around 330 students, with trade programs taking one to two years to complete. More than 150 students have graduated from Tongue Point after completing IUPAT’s glazing or painting pre-apprentice programs since 2019.
Tongue Point also has pre-apprenticeship partnerships with the Inlandboatmen’s Union of the Pacific (the marine division of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union) and with plasterers, masons, and carpenters unions. Since 2019, 836 students have graduated from the construction trade programs and 487 have graduated from the maritime and seamanship programs. Pre-apprenticeship graduates typically get preferred entry into union apprenticeship programs. Tongue Point also offers programs for medical assistants, dental assistants, and computer technicians. Seamanship is Tongue Point’s largest program.
Travis McKinney, business agent for the Columbia River region of the Inlandboatmen’s Union, said the industry is already short on workers and has an aging workforce.
“By closing Job Corps, we’re just ensuring that those jobs will eventually go away or have to be automated,” McKinney said.
The Department of Labor (DOL) announced May 29 that all centers managed by outside contractors would close down by June 30, saying the program wasn’t achieving its intended outcomes. Nationwide, the closures include six non-residential centers and 93 residential centers. The 24 residential Civilian Conservation Centers operated by the U.S. Forest Service were spared.
The National Job Corps Association and program operators filed a lawsuit to block the DOL’s plans to close contractor-operated Job Corps programs on June 3. A judge issued a temporary block on the closures on June 4 and extended the block after a hearing on June 25.
If the closures go forward, they will mean layoffs of instructors and other staff at the contractor-operated Job Corps centers, some of whom live on campus and will lose both their jobs and their housing. Tongue Point would lay off 168 workers; Springdale, located in Troutdale, Oregon, would lay off 77; and PIVOT, a non-residential center, would lay off 12.
Local outcry
Astoria City Council organized a June 4 special meeting with one agenda item: discuss the closure of Tongue Point. At the meeting, Tongue Point director Mac McGoldrick said centers had been instructed to send students home by June 6 — just a week after the DOL announced the “phased pause” of operations. At the time the legal block was issued, the center had been preparing to send 110 students home the following day.
McGoldrick said some of the students had crammed and finished their high school graduation and trade program requirements over that week, but after the closure was blocked, students who hadn’t graduated or didn’t have a safe place to go were asked to stay.
Residents of Astoria and elsewhere in Clatsop County crowded the June 4 meeting, expressing concern about the impact of the closure and testifying to the importance of the program.
“I’ve lost sleep trying to figure out how we absorb 170 job losses in this community and where we’re going to house the people that are currently housed out at Tongue Point,” Astoria Mayor Sean Fitzpatrick said.
Job Corps contractors react
On June 5, a bipartisan group of 199 members of Congress sent a letter to Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer, calling on her to continue Job Corps operations.
When the DOL announced the closure of Job Corps programs, it cited metrics for the 2023-24 program year that said the average graduation rate was 38.6%, the average total cost per graduate was $155,601, and the total number of “serious incident” reports for the year was 14,913.
Job Corps operators around the country pushed back on the characterizations made by the DOL and media.
“Despite the misleading claims in a recent DOL report, the facts tell a different story,” said Management and Training Corporation (MTC) in a press release. MTC, a for-profit corporation headquartered in Utah, has government contracts to operate 16 Job Corps centers around the country, including Tongue Point and Centennial Job Corps Center, Idaho’s sole Job Corps center. It also runs five immigrant detention centers and over a dozen state correctional facilities. When you account for the wraparound services Job Corps provides, MTC said, the true cost per student is comparable to community college.
The National Job Corps Association attributed low graduation rates and high per-student costs to the COVID-19 pandemic, which limited class sizes and reduced graduation rates in other educational settings. A previous DOL report found the average total cost per graduate for the 2017-18 year was $57,312 — close to a third of the cost the DOL reported six years later.
The serious incident reports in the DOL report included 372 incidents of inappropriate sexual behavior or sexual assault and 1,764 acts of violence. But serious incident reports are also filed for failed drug tests, car crashes, electrical outages that disrupt classes, serious illnesses, or hospital visits. MTC said students in Job Corps are safer than peers in similar settings and ages.
Job Corps is aimed at low-income youth, and many students have experienced homelessness, abuse or neglect before coming to the program.
“Home is not always a safe or stable place. Many of our students … will face immediate housing and food insecurity if Tongue Point Job Corps were to close,” McGoldrick said at the June 4 meeting at Astoria City Council.
Sturgeon said many students had few options for their futures and would likely have ended up subsidized by the government in one way or another if they hadn’t found Job Corps.
“We gave them the opportunity to be what they are: successful and paying back into society,” Sturgeon said.
Job Corps programs provide more than just classroom lessons; they offer supportive services like mental health and substance use prevention, and they continue assisting students for a year after graduation.
Sturgeon said the effects of the COVID pandemic are still being felt in Job Corps programs.
“I know nobody wants to hear about COVID right now, in 2025, but when you take a program that has 30,000 young adults and you, in 2020, cut that down to zero (and) send everybody home, it takes a lot of years to rebuild,” Sturgeon said.
“It’s almost back to business as usual — except for we just got sucker punched right in the face,” Sturgeon said.
