Out of the Barrio: Do Young Hispanics Benefit from Residential Job Training Programs

Abstract

A four-year longitudinal study, the National Job Corps Study (NJCS) was a randomized experiment in which over fifteen thousand Job Corps eligible applicants were randomized into treatment and control groups. Job Corps was found to have positive impacts in the weekly earnings of whites and others forty-eight months after randomization, but not for Hispanics. We argue that one reason for this finding is that the NJCS did not create comparable treatment and control groups for Hispanics. Given the failure of randomization for Hispanics, we employ non-experimental estimators to examine the programmatic outcome of Hispanics. Our findings suggest that the lack of programmatic gain is due to the large and unusual earnings by Hispanic controls.