Job Corps is the nation's largest and most comprehensive residential education and job training program for at-risk youth, ages 16 through 24. Job Corps combines classroom, practical, and work-based learning experiences to prepare youths become “more responsible, employable and productive citizens.”

The National Job Corps Study was funded by the U.S. Department of Labor and is based on a national random sample of all eligible applicants to Job Corps in late 1994 and 1995. The sampled youths were assigned randomly to either a program group or a control group. Program group members could enroll in Job Corps while control group members could not (although they could enroll in all other programs available to them in their communities).

The study was conducted by Mathematica Policy Research and its subcontractors, Battelle Human Affairs Research Centers and Decision Information Resources. The impacts of Job Corps were estimated by comparing the experiences of the program and control groups using data from periodic interviews. Interviews were conducted at baseline (shortly after random assignment) and at 12, 30, and 48 months after random assignment.

The interview data contain information on education, employment and earnings, marital status and household composition, fertility, welfare receipt and other income, health, drug use and drug treatment, arrest behavior and criminal incidents conducted against or by the respondent. In addition, the 30-month follow-up interview contains data on literacy skills. Separate datasets were created for each interview.

Besides the interview datasets, there are several datasets containing constructed variables used in various reports--such as the benefit-cost analysis, resulting in a total of 20 datasets. For a detailed description of each dataset, see Volume 1 of the data documentation.

The research sample consists of approximately 9,400 program group members and 6,000 control group members.

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