| Each year in the United States, nearly a half billion dollars are spent training roughly one million individuals in publicly-funded programs aimed at improving the lives of adults in, or at risk of, poverty, but these efforts often fall short of their lofty goals. While participants in job training programs do gain skills, their wages and job prospects remain stagnant. If wages are related to skills and skills to training, why is it that wages do not improve? The polarization of labor demand, known as Skill Biased Technological Change Theory (SBTC), appears to be a rich theoretical model to explain these programmatic experiences. While SBTC has explanatory power in helping to understand the poor outcomes of job training programs, it is limited and must be augmented with other theories and methodologies. |
