Job Corps National Director
Lays Out Higher Education Agenda
By David Pluviose
Dr. Esther R. Johnson, the national director of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Job Corps program, offered her vision of the future of the organization during a speech kicking off the Corps’ annual leadership summit earlier this month. The Washington-based Job Corps is dedicated to providing educational and career pathways for disadvantaged 16- to 24-year-olds.
In her speech, Johnson, who is the first Black woman to head Job Corps, said she hopes to shift the program’s goals to steer students toward college instead of stopping with a high school diploma. The new higher education emphasis could prove critical for students hoping to compete in the job market of the future. In a survey of 431 human resource professionals, 28 percent anticipated hiring fewer people with only a high school diploma, and 49 percent said they plan to hire more associate degree-holders.
“We continue to turn out many high school diplomas. But we can and will do even better,” Johnson said in the speech.
“Over the longer term, we must be looking beyond the high school diploma. Today, slightly more than 9 percent of our graduates continue their education beyond Job Corps. When we meet here next year, I would like to see that number doubled to 20 percent.”
The Job Corps program has historically been focused on at-risk, disadvantaged youth. However, “when you go around to these Job Corps centers, you see anything but at-risk students,” Johnson said. “They have so much promise, so much potential. They are so intelligent, they just need someone to care about them, to encourage them, to push them and to tell them that they can do it.”
She said her father’s educational experience helped push her towards higher education. He was unable to attend high school because there were no high schools for Blacks where he grew up. “So I think education is the key to get from where you are to where you need to go in the future,” she said. “Not everybody is going to go to a four-year college, and not everyone’s going to get an [associate] degree, but there’s certainly learning opportunities above the high school level that our students will need to participate in to move up their
career ladder.”
