The Roosevelt Institution
New Project: Market Driven Retraining
The goal of this project is to determine if a private retraining program based on a graduated payback system is economically viable. You'll find a brief research outline below.
Phase 1:
Public Retraining Programs:
• What has been successful?
• What has failed?
• Is there a Federal one, if so how does it work?
• Which states have retraining programs? How do they work?
• What kind of academic literature exists on this?
Obviously these are simple questions with implied sub-questions and complicated answers. I would suggest 2 people work on this.
Private Retraining Programs:
• How much does a vocational school charge for its services?
• What kind of wage increase does one see as a result of such retraining?
• How do these programs work and what do they specialize in?
• Are costs and benefits different for different programs?
• What kind of job placement if any does a vocational school provide?
• What type of people (economic class, them and parents, age, anything you can get) usually enroll in vocational schools?
This would involve contacting various vocational schools such as ITT and high school substitutes and seeing what information they would be willing to provide. I would expect one person could do this.
Retraining Within Businesses:
• How much does it cost for a firm to train a worker once it has been hired. (time, lost wages etc.)?
• How much more likely are they to hire some one who has already been through a retraining program?
• Would some one be equally as capable of performing a job if they received training from a third party? If not, what kind of difference would it make?
• Would a firm be willing to pay more for a worker who had been retrained by a third party? If so, how much? Would they be more likely to hire some one who had been retrained by a third party?
Look at businesses with retrainable jobs, tech support, factories etc. This would also involve being in contact with such businesses and gleaning what information you could. I would expect one person to be able to do this.
Anyone looking to get involved with this should contact Dave at carls293@msu.edu
We'll make some updates to this once the process has begun.
Group members:
Dave Carlson
Dan Blue
Bryce G Colquitt
Bradley Gershel
Jon Kurian
Jason Leva
Anthony M Mianecki
Daniel K Redford
David T Switzer
Parth A Tikiwala