Across the country, as technology continues to advance rapidly, the labor market exhibits a growing need for workers who receive frequent and ongoing skill development. Employers in many fields struggle to find adequately trained workers to meet their needs. Community college noncredit career and technical education (CTE) programs are an important…

Job Corps is the largest and most comprehensive education and job training program in the United States for young people ages 16 to 24 who are not in school and are not working. To deepen the Job Corps program's ability to generate and use evidence to improve the labor market trajectories of eligible young people, this report discusses ways Job…

Job Corps is the largest and most comprehensive education and job training program in the United States for young people ages 16 to 24 who are not in school or working. Most students live at and take classes at its approximately 120 residential centers. To explore ways to improve student outcomes and reduce per-student costs, Job Corps pilot…

This brief highlights lessons from the City Colleges of Chicago (CCC) Centers of Excellence model, which has redesigned each of the system's seven campuses as a "college-to-career center" and consolidated academic programs in high-demand industries at particular campuses. The model incorporates features of sectoral training programs,…

In many rural areas, the local college is the center of the community: It is the primary source of education and job training for residents; a cultural hub offering arts and sporting events; a hotspot for broadband internet access; and, sometimes, the area's largest employer. When a rural region has few other large institutions, the local college…

The past decade has seen a resurgence of interest in career and technical education (CTE) as a way to engage students, help people build the skills necessary to succeed in a technologically advanced economy, and meet employer demand for workers. MDRC--which has a three-decade history of developing and evaluating CTE programs, including a landmark…

Family Rewards was an innovative approach to poverty reduction in the United States that was modelled on the conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs common in lower- and middle-income countries. The program offered cash assistance to poor families to reduce immediate hardship, provided they met certain criteria related to family health care,…

Despite progress on many fronts, young men of color still face many obstacles to success in American society and suffer disproportionately from economic and social disadvantage. In recent years, foundations and state and local governments have launched major initiatives to address this pressing issue. For example, in 2011, the City of New York…