The Dropouts With The $3 Trillion ROI
By Gabriel Heilig
14 May, 2015
Countercurrents.org
Events in Baltimore remind us: our dropout-to-prison pipeline costs us all. Yet most of us don’t realize just how much it costs. It’s costing us Trillions. In uncollected taxes. In unearned wages that never enter our economy. In the cost of incarcerating these dropouts—20% of whom soon wind up in prison. A 2010 study by Northeastern University estimates the loss in unpaid taxes over a single dropout’s lifetime at $250,000.
Right now America loses 1.3 million dropouts a year. That’s a $325 Billion lifetime cost for just one year of dropouts. A decade of dropouts quickly adds up to $3.25 Trillion, in taxes America never receives.
That’s a lot of revenue—lost. And a lot of Americans—also, lost.
Yet we don’t notice this, because these dark-skinned adolescents are largely invisible to us. We see their hoodies. We don’t see them. So we wind up stereotyping them, our police chasing them down city streets—shooting to kill, not halt, them. Dropouts who survive the streets often wind up in prison. Nearly 80% of our prison inmates are dropouts. It’s a monstrous waste of human capital.
Since 1964, Job Corps has trained young people aged 16-24 who are poor, have done poorly in school, but are not yet in trouble with the legal system. Job Corps gives them the tools, the mentoring—and the time—to transform their lives. Trainees spend 10-12 months living in Job Corps centers, long enough to build a self-expectation of success and a work ethic to get themselves there. Job Corps has graduated over 2 million Americans—almost 1% of the US population. After 51 years, Job Corps has proven its effectiveness. It works.
Let’s expand Job Corps, significantly. If we expand Job Corps by a factor of 20x, we could reach nearly all the dropouts from our school. We would offer a road to adulthood for kids who now don’t see any road to a future that isn’t about drugs, prison, or dying in the street. Job Corps has an 80-90% success rate: graduates who immediately get a job, go to college, or join the US Military. Not many colleges boast an 80-90% graduation rate.
Job Corps alone can’t solve urban poverty, but it can open part of a solution path for millions of dropouts; and their number easily can rise, given a wobbly economy and under-resourced schools. One reason Job Corps succeeds is that it uses embodied learning. Trainees use their hands and their minds, instead of memorizing facts about history and geometry. They build things, and they build skills. And as they do, they can feel themselves improving.
If instead of 60,000 a year, if Job Corps reached 1.2 million trainees, it could reach nearly all dropouts nationwide. Many of the facilities needed to grow Job Corps already exist. The old Walter Reed Army Medical Center could become a National Service Academy. Other Job Corps Centers can be constructed, creating both adult jobs and trainee apprenticeships.
It costs about $2 Billion a year to run Job Corps. Expanded by 20x, it would cost $40 Billion a year. Over 10 years its cost would be $400 Billion. That’s a lot of investment. Yet its ROI would be far larger. Almost $3 Trillion larger.
There’s more. The cost of keeping one inmate in prison for a year is roughly $40,000. Multiply that by the 20% of dropouts who wind up in prison—2.6 million over a decade—and we’re approaching $104 Billion in cost for jailing our dropouts. In 2009, the average prison stay was 2.9 years. Over a decade of dropouts spending 2.9 years in prison, we will save $300 Billion of the $400 Billion cost of growing Job Corps over a 10-year period.
Seen this way, its cost drops to $100 Billion to grow and run it for 10 years, all while putting a $2.85 Trillion profit into our treasury of taxes paid and money spent in our economy. All in all, not a bad return for helping Americans at risk to become contributing citizens.
Across America, adolescents are waiting. America’s adults need to step up. Because there’s this thing about ROI. To get a return, we’ve got to make an investment.
Gabriel Heilig has been keynote speechwriter for a White House Conference on Youth Policy and wrote a pair of scripts for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the business benefits of hiring Job Corps graduates. He initiated an 11-college project in Massachusetts sponsored by The Carnegie Foundation and is founder of the only resume and executive career coaching firm ever granted a lease to do business in the Pentagon. Email: [email protected]
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