Second Chances for A Better Life

Today's New York Times features an article highlighting the importance of mobility and redemption in attaining opportunity:

Job Corps Plans Makeover for a Changed Economy

LAUREL, Md. — Over the last four decades, even as failed experiments
and partisan disputes took the luster off the war on poverty, the Job
Corps, the government’s main effort to give poorly educated youths a
second chance at a diploma and a trade, was widely seen as one of the
few success stories.

But now, as the economy has
turned against those with low skills and researchers have questioned
the long-term impact of the Job Corps on the lives of its graduates,
this remnant of the Great Society is facing an urgent need to reinvent
itself.

“Once you could go into the Job Corps and get a G.E.D.
and go out and make a living,” said Esther R. Johnson, a career
executive in the Labor Department with a doctorate in education who
took over the corps last March. “You can’t do that anymore.”

Dr. Johnson wants the Job Corps to aim higher, helping graduates into careers with a bigger paycheck.

Job Corps is a perfect illustration of the positive role government can play in safeguarding and providing opportunity for citizens.  Many of the participants have dropped out of high school in an age where a college degree is the minimum barrier to entry into a shrinking middle class, and many more require a second chance to restart their lives after going astray in their  youth.  Job Corps - and other similar programs mentioned in the piece - provide for that, to the benefit of the participants, their communities, and the nation:

With better training, high school diplomas or, better, degrees from
community colleges, many graduates of such programs, it is hoped, will
become chefs instead of hamburger flippers; plumbers, electricians or
carpenters instead of pickup laborers; nurses instead of health aides.
A newer course at the Laurel center trains students to install cable
and other electronic systems.

A study published in
2001 that surveyed Job Corps graduates and a control group, conducted
by Mathematica Policy Research for the Labor Department, found that the
program led to significant increases in self-reported earnings over
four years and to lower arrest rates.

Michael Whitfield, a subject of the Times' article, says it best:

Now 19, he has been accepted by a two-year college where he will study
criminal justice to become a police or parole officer. He credited the
Job Corps with helping him straighten up and discover his goals. “I
really can’t see people making it these days without a diploma,” he
said. “I was lucky; I had a second chance.”