DOL FUBAR: The One-Stop Mirage in Job Assistance

American Job Centers—once branded as One-Stop Career Centers—are touted as comprehensive solutions for job seekers. Yet in reality, they often fail to deliver. Procedural checkboxes have replaced meaningful employment outcomes, especially amid growing privatization, budgetary erosion, and ideological attacks on government itself.

The Illusion of Effectiveness

For decades, One-Stops have been propped up as a silver-bullet answer to unemployment. Gordon Lafer’s The Job Training Charade lays bare how misguided this is: “For twenty years, every jobs crisis—whether inner-city poverty, jobs lost due to the North American Free Trade Agreement, or loggers put out of work by the spotted owl—has been met with calls for retraining. … The only trouble is, it doesn’t work, and the government knows it.” Lafer makes it clear that the real issues are structural—job shortages, wage stagnation—not worker deficits. Training programs serve as “phantom policies” that manage public frustration without changing economic realities.

Reinvention Without Impact

The Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW) proposed bold reforms in 2012 and 2013, suggesting One-Stop centers evolve into dynamic hubs where “work and learning intersect,” and where job seekers and employers co-create career paths. These ideals, however, remain largely aspirational: fragmented implementation, siloed service delivery, and inflexible reporting requirements continue to dominate.

Benchmarking studies dating back to the 2000s distilled “critical success factors” for One-Stops—from employer outreach to data systems—yet local variations and a lack of integrated data have stymied widespread adoption.

Privatization and Erosion

The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) formalized the shift toward privatization. One-Stops—now often rebranded as American Job Centers—are now commonly run under competitive contracts via workforce boards, often fragmented in execution and skewed toward short-term metrics rather than long-term, holistic support.

Death by a Thousand Cuts—and a Bathtub

Underpinning these failures is a deliberate strategy of attrition and disinvestment. The Trump administration’s FY 2026 “skinny” budget proposed a staggering 35% cut to DOL funding—roughly $4.6 billion taken in one sweep—eliminating the Job Corps entirely and consolidating myriad workforce programs into a single “Make America Skilled Again” (MASA) grant framework with minimal oversight or protections. This proposal has drawn sharp criticism: the National Association of Workforce Boards (NAWB) warned it would devastate the backbone of workforce systems, and Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer confirmed the deep cuts and program eliminations—including Adult Education and Job Corps—during Senate testimony.

Within the department, attrition has compounded the crisis. Roughly 20% of DOL staff—around 2,700 employees—have departed through buyouts, retirements, and resignations in the wake of a reorganization push, leaving core functions like wage enforcement, safety, and civil rights enforcement dangerously understaffed. Meanwhile, $577 million in international labor grants were cut, and an additional $455 million in cost-saving measures implemented through Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) further gut the agency’s operational capacity. 

Grover Norquist’s infamous bathtub image—“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub”—is no longer hyperbole. It’s become strategy: shrink the DOL to dysfunction, then use the failure to justify privatization and further austerity.

A System Hack, Not a Fix

The DOL’s One-Stop approach has turned into what we might call “FUBAR”: F—ed Up Beyond All Recognition. Understaffed and underfunded, the system still struggles to offer basic services—counseling, referrals, workshops—let alone structural support. Meanwhile, contractors may round up placements, but the quality of employment remains low and unstable.

Reboot, Not Reinvention

Restoring DOL means more than reinvention—it demands a full reboot. That means reversing staffing attrition, reestablishing specialized programs like Job Corps and Adult Education, and rebuilding robust, public-sector-run infrastructure—not contracting out to private operators. We need integrated data systems that track meaningful outcomes (wages, retention, mobility) rather than just outputs. And services must be co-designed with local labor markets, job seekers, and employers, not imposed top-down or under narrow political logic

From Bathtub Backdraft to Real Accountability

“Lafer concludes that job training functions less as an economic prescription aimed at solving poverty than as a political strategy aimed at managing the popular response to economic distress.” One-Stops crystallize that danger—well-intentioned conceptually, but defunded, privatized, and bureaucratically crippled. Unless DOL breaks free of the bathtub logic and reaffirms its public mandate, it will remain an empty promise to vulnerable workers, not a ladder to economic mobility.

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Sources

• Lafer, Gordon. The Job Training Charade. Cornell University Press, 2002.

• Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW). One-Stop Career Centers Must Be Reinvented to Meet Today’s Labor Market Realities, 2012.

• CSW. Reinventing One-Stop Career Centers (Version 2), 2013.

• CSW. One-Stop Center Reinvention Paper, 2014.

• CSW. Benchmarking One-Stop Centers, 2000.

• U.S. Department of Labor. Study of the Implementation of the WIOA American Job Center Systems, 2020.

• Bloomberg Law: DOL to see 35% funding cut under Trump budget plan.

• NAWB report on FY 26 budget cuts to DOL.

• Testimony by Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer, May 2025.

• Guardian: Mass resignations at DOL amid looming cuts.

• AP News: International labor grants axed under DOGE.

• NPR 2001 quote by Grover Norquist.

• ‘Starve the beast’ strategy and Norquist quote.

Trump's Jobs Plan: Soldiers, ICE Agents, and Detention Camp Guards

Former President Donald Trump has long marketed himself as a job creator, promising economic revival and prosperity for working Americans. Yet, his latest “Jobs Plan” reveals a far narrower and more troubling vision of employment growth — one rooted not in manufacturing, infrastructure, or green energy, but in expanding militarized enforcement and immigration control. The new jobs Trump champions are overwhelmingly those of soldiers, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, and detention camp guards.

Militarizing the Workforce

At the core of Trump’s employment proposal is a dramatic expansion of the armed forces. This includes increased recruitment and funding to build a larger, more heavily equipped military. While proponents argue this enhances national security and deterrence, the plan’s emphasis on military jobs underscores a troubling prioritization of conflict readiness over social investment.

The creation of more soldier positions aligns with Trump’s broader geopolitical posture, which has often leaned toward aggressive military stances and expanded overseas engagement. These jobs are often physically demanding and high risk, and critics note they primarily serve the interests of defense contractors and political ambitions rather than domestic economic health.

Expanding ICE and Border Enforcement

Equally central to the plan is a push to enlarge Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s workforce. Trump calls for more ICE agents tasked with enforcing immigration laws through raids, deportations, and border patrols. This expansion comes at a time when ICE is already deeply controversial for its role in separating families, conducting workplace raids, and detaining undocumented immigrants under often harsh conditions.

The jobs Trump promotes in this sector are part of a broader immigration enforcement regime that critics have labeled as cruel and counterproductive. By hiring more agents, the plan essentially aims to intensify policing of immigrant communities, heightening fear and insecurity for millions of people living in the United States.

Guarding Detention Facilities

The plan also supports the growth of detention facilities to house increasing numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers. This includes hiring more detention camp guards to staff these centers. These roles involve overseeing often overcrowded and under-resourced facilities, where detainees have reported inadequate medical care, poor sanitation, and in some cases, abuse.

The expansion of detention capacity—and its associated workforce—raises ethical and human rights concerns. Advocates emphasize that these are not “jobs” in the conventional sense that foster healthy communities; rather, they sustain a system of incarceration that many compare to modern-day internment camps. Such employment ties economic opportunity to the perpetuation of incarceration and marginalization.

What This Means for Economic Justice

By focusing job creation on soldiers, ICE agents, and detention camp guards, Trump’s plan sidesteps opportunities for broad-based economic recovery. Sectors like education, healthcare, renewable energy, and infrastructure — which could generate millions of jobs with long-term benefits — receive little to no attention.

This approach reinforces a vision of the economy that values security and control over social well-being and equity. It also disproportionately impacts communities of color and immigrants, entangling economic policy with racialized enforcement practices.

The consequences are clear: job growth tied to expanding enforcement agencies may deliver short-term employment but risks deepening social divisions, eroding civil rights, and perpetuating systemic injustice.

Alternatives and the Path Forward

Critics urge policymakers and the public to demand investment in sectors that build human capital, address climate change, and support vulnerable populations. Sustainable job creation should focus on rebuilding schools, hospitals, public transportation, and clean energy infrastructure — sectors proven to stimulate the economy while enhancing quality of life.

At a time when economic inequality is widening and the climate crisis intensifies, the Trump Jobs Plan offers a stark choice: continue down a path where employment grows through militarization and enforcement, or pursue a future centered on justice, opportunity, and sustainable development.

Sources:

• The Intercept: "The Human Cost of ICE’s Expanding Enforcement"

• Reuters: "U.S. Military Recruitment and Funding Under Trump"

• The Guardian: "Conditions Inside U.S. Immigration Detention Centers"

• National Public Radio (NPR): "ICE Staffing Increases Amid Immigration Crackdown"

• Center for Immigration Studies: "Employment Trends in Immigration Enforcement"

Report Reveals Harvard MBAs Struggling to Get Jobs (Palki Sharma)

A new report has revealed that 23% of Harvard MBAs were jobless even three months after their graduation. Similar trends have been reported in top B-schools across the world. Once considered a sure-shot ticket to success, what explains the changing fortunes of MBA degrees?

Credential Inflation Makes College Degree Not Worth The Cost (Randall Collins)

[Editor's note: This article first appeared in Randall Collins' blog The Sociological Eye.]

Belief in the value of college education was sacrosanct throughout most of the 20th century. In the early 2000s, the question began to be raised whether the payoff in terms of a better-paying job was worth the cost. For several generations, almost a taboo topic--but once out in the open, an increasing percentage of the US population has concluded a college degree is not worth it.

The first big hit was the 2008 recession, when graduates found it hard to get jobs. But even as the economy recovered and grew, faith in college degrees has steadily declined.

In 2013, 53% of the population—a slim majority, agreed that a 4-year degree gives “a better chance to get a good job and earn more income over their lifetime.” In 2023, education-believers had fallen to 42%, while 56% said it was not worth the cost. Both women and men had turned negative in the latest survey—even though women had overtaken men in college enrollments in previous decades. The youngest generation was the most negative, 60% of those aged 18-34. Not surprisingly; they are the ones who had to apply to dozens of schools, a rat-race of test scores, scrambling for grades, and amassing extra-curricular activities; most not getting into their school of choice, while paying constantly rising tuition and fees, and burdened with student-loan debt into middle age. Not to mention the near-impossibility of buying a house at hugely inflated prices, many still living with their parents; while all generations now agree that the younger will not enjoy the standard of living of their parents.

The only demographic that still thinks college has career value are men with a college degree or higher, who earn over $100,000 a year. They are the only winners in the tournament. Every level of education—high school, junior college, 4-year college, M.B.A. or PhD or professional credential in law, medicine, etc.—has value as an entry ticket to the next level of competition for credentials. The financial payoff comes when you get to the big time, the Final Four so to speak; striving through the lower levels is motivated by a combination of American cultural habits and wishful thinking.

The boom-or-bust pattern of rising education makes more sense in long-term perspective. For 100 years, the USA has led the world in the proportion of the population in schools at all levels. In 1900, 6% of the youth cohort finished high school, and less than 2% had a college degree. High school started taking off in the 1920s, and after a big push in the 1950s to keep kids in school, reached 77% in 1970. Like passing the baton, as high school became commonplace, college attendance rocketed, jumping to 53% at the end of the 1960s—there was a reason for all those student protests of the Sixties: they were suddenly a big slice of the American population. By 2017, 30% over age 24 had a college degree; another 27% had some years of college. It has been a long-time pattern that only about half of all college students finish their degree—dropping out of college has always been prevalent, and still is.

The growing number of students at all levels has been a process of credential inflation. The value of any particular diploma—high school, college, M.A., PhD—is not constant; it depends on the labor market at the time, the amount of competition from others who have the same degree. In the 1930s, only 12% of employers required a college degree for managers; by the late 1960s, it was up to 40%. By the 1990s, an M.B.A. was the preferred degree for managerial employment; and even police departments were hiring college-educated cops. In other words, as college attendance has become almost as common as high school, it no longer conveys much social status. To get ahead in the elite labor market, one needs advanced and specialized degrees. In the medical professions, the process of credential-seeking goes on past age 30; for scientists, a PhD needs to be supplemented by a couple of years in a post-doctoral fellowship, doing grunt-work in somebody else’s laboratory. In principle, credential inflation has no end in sight.

An educational diploma is like money: a piece of paper whose value depends inversely on how much of it is in circulation. In the monetary world, printing more money reduces its purchasing power. The same thing happens with turning out more educational credentials—with one important difference. Printing money is relatively cheap (and so is the equivalent process of changing banking policies so that more credit is issued). But minting a college degree is expensive: someone has to pay for the teachers, the administrators, the buildings, and whatever entertainments and luxuries (such as sports and student activities) the school offers—and which make up a big part of its attraction for American students. And all this degree-printing apparatus has been becoming more expensive over the decades, far outpacing the amount of monetary inflation since the 1980s. Colleges and universities (as well as high schools and elementary schools) keep increasing the proportion of administrators and staff. At the top end of the college market, the professors who give the school its reputation by their research command top salaries.

Credential-minting institutions have been able to charge whatever they can get away with, because of the high level of competition among students for admission. Not all families can afford it; but enough of them can so that schools can charge many multiples of what they charged (in constant dollars) even 30 years ago. The result has been a huge expansion in student debt: averaging $38,000 among 45 million borrowers; and including 70% of all holders of B.A. degrees. Total student debt tripled between 2007 and 2022.

These three different kinds of inflation reinforce each other: inflation in the amount of credential currency chasing jobs in the job market; inflation in the cost of getting a degree; inflation in student debt. We could add grade inflation as a fourth part of the spiral: intensifying pressure to get into college and if possible beyond, has motivated students to put pressure on their teachers to grade more easily; in public schools, to pass them along to the next grade no matter their performance (retardation in grade, which in the 1900s was common, has virtually disappeared); in college, GPA-striving has a similar effect. Grades are higher than ever but the measured value of the contents of education, ranging from writing skills to how long the course material is remembered after the course is over is low (Arum and Roksa 2011, 2014). College degrees are not only inflated as to job-purchasing power; they are also inflated as a measure of what skills they actually represent.

The remedies suggested for some of these problems--- such as canceling student debt by government action—would temporarily relieve some ex-students of the burden of paying for not-so-valuable degrees. But canceling student debt would not solve the underlying dynamic of credential inflation, but exacerbate it. If college education became free (either by government directly picking up the tab; or by canceling student debts), we can expect even more students to seek higher degrees. If 100% of the population has a college degree, its advantage on the labor market is exactly zero; you would have to get some further degree to get a competitive edge.

Scandals in college admissions are just one more sign of the pressures corroding the value of education. College employees collude with wealthy parents to create fake athletic skills, in a time when students apply to dozens of schools, and even top grades don’t guarantee admission. Since athletics are a big part of schools’ prestige, and are considered a legitimate pathway to admission outside the grade-inflation tournament, it is hardly surprising that some try that side-door entry. There is not only grade inflation, but inflation in competition over the pseudo-credentials of extracurricular activites and community service. Efforts at increasing race and class equity in admissions increase the pressure among the affluent and the non-minority populations. Since sociological evidence shows that tests and grades favour children of the higher classes (whose families provide them with what Bourdieu called cultural capital), there are moves to eliminate test scores and/or grades as criteria of admission. What is left may be letters of recommendation and self-extolling essays--- what we might call “rhetorical inflation”, plus skin color or other demographic markers; but the result will do nothing to reduce the inflation of credentials. The underlying hope is that giving everybody a college degree will somehow bring about social equality. In reality, it will just add another chapter to the history of credential inflation.

Except for the small percentage of really good students who will take the tournament all the way to the most advanced degrees and become well-paid scientists and professionals, the growing disillusionment with the value of college degrees will result in more and more people looking for alternative routes to making a living. The big fortunes of the last 40 years--- the age of information technology—have been made by entrepreneurs who dropped out to pursue opportunities just opening up, instead of waiting to finish a degree. The path to fame and fortune is not monopolized by the education tournament. For the rest of us, finding more immediate ways of making a living (or living off someone else) will become more important.

P.S. The advent of Artificial Intelligence to write students’ papers, and other AI to grade them (not to mention to write their application essays and read them for admission) will do nothing to raise the honesty and status of the educational credential chase.

References

“More Say Colleges Aren’t Worth the Cost.” Wall Street Journal April 1, 2023 (NORC-Wall St. Journal survey)

Average Student Loan Debt (BestColleges.com) 

U.S. Bureau of the Census

Randall Collins. 2019. The Credential Society. 2nd edition. Columbia Univ. Press.

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. 2011. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. 2014. Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Massachusetts removes college degree requirements from most state jobs (Bryan Alexander)

[Editor's note: This article was first published at BryanAlexander.org]

Over the past year at least a dozen American states have taken a very interesting step. They have removed a college degree requirement for applicants to some or most state jobs. It’s a way of helping people “break the paper ceiling,” of advancing without needing to have postsecondary education credentials. Examples include Alaska, California, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania (and Philadelphia), South Dakota, Utah, Virginia.

Now Massachusetts has joined them. (alternative link)

Governor Maura Healey filed an executive order on Thursday to ensure most state government job listings do not include degree requirements and hiring managers use a “skills-based” approach when picking candidates to fill open positions.

Skills-based instead of credential-driven: that’s an important shift.

Healey announced this decision during a speech to Associated Industries of Massachusetts on Thursday, in part to spur companies to rethink their approaches to hiring. She noted that career success shouldn’t be limited to the portion of the state’s population — nearly half, per a recent census count — with a bachelor’s degree.

Did you catch that last point, about almost 50% of the state having a degree? In fact, Walletbub just determined that Massachusetts was the most educated state in America. And that state now set aside those educational requirements at scale.

I don’t want to overstate this decision. After all, Massachusetts employs fewer than 50,000 people (source) so we’re not overhauling the state’s labor force. At the same time, nothing in the governor’s decision prevents people with degrees for applying to state positions. Moreover, the states which have taken such steps number not even one third of the lot; a majority of American states still require postsecondary sheepskin for public jobs. A powerful reason for those decisions is the currently low unemployment level; when that rises, perhaps these states will reverse their positions.

And yet I think this is noteworthy. It stands opposed to the inherited “college for all idea,” instead viewing non-academic achievement as on par with college or university degrees. It may encourage other organizations to do the same – other states, businesses, nonprofits – to similarly downgrade reliance on postsecondary attainment. As word of these shifts gets out it might depress college enrollment to a degree.

Note, too, that this isn’t a partisan move. Republicans and Democrats alike seem equally fond of the idea so far, even in our hyperpolarized times. It’s easy to find examples of this, starting with how the state leaders who have taken this step are members of both parties. A bipartisan pair of governors urged others to reduce college requirements. While the conservative National Review praised the strategy, so did Barack Obama:

Here’s an example of a smart policy that gets rid of unnecessary college degree requirements and reduces barriers to good paying jobs. I hope other states follow suit!

Let’s keep an eye on this trend. As 2024’s elections ratchet up, this could become a partisan issue. Or it might just continue with more governors deciding to open up public jobs beyond academic achievement. Is the college for all consensus shattering?