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Comment by alaskamiller | Hacker News Reader

The website reads fine, there's even three FAQs to answer your questions at the bottom of the page you referenced.

Job Corps is a training program for 16-24 year olds as an alternative or supplement to high school or college. Your first touch to this would typically be your high school guidance counselor. Your second touch might be your community college counselor. Your other pathway might be through your parole officer.

It's free. It's listed multiple times on the website.

They learn welding, manufacturing, automative tech, construction, hospitality, healthcare, and the best one is probably forestry. It's listed multiple places on the website.

How long is typically 1 to 3 year stints.

Job Corps centers are located in almost every major city in almost every state. It's a government program since the 1960's. There's an entire program finder on the website.

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>Job Corps centers are located in almost every major city in almost every state.

This seems pretty far off the mark. Using their program finder, I find (for instance) that the only one in Colorado is in Colbran. As a Colorado native, I expected that the one in Colorado would at least be in a town I had heard of.

They are in some kind of surprising places. There's not really one in the Seattle metro area, for instance. But there are 2 a piece in Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

I wonder if the weird locations are entirely down to real estate, or if there's a local demographic question or even a correlation between remoteness of location and success rate.

> I find (for instance) that the only one in Colorado is in Collbran

That particular location is run by the US Forestry service. Collbran is very close to a National Forest, so the location seems appropriate.

And in the context of "put the Job Corps Center where the affiliated jobs are", it makes perfect sense. The "Seattle area" center is similarly placed in a lumber town, more than hour's drive (without traffic) from the Seattle.

All I'm saying is that the assertion that there's one in every major city is pretty wide of the mark.

I could have sworn there was one in Colorado Springs, but there isn't one on the map. I wonder if I'm misremembering or if it shut down.

Thanks for the information. It sounds like an interesting program. The FAQ you mention does do a good job of answering these questions. I wish that was more front and center instead of at the very bottom of the footer.

My comment was more about the fact that the "What Is Job Corps" page is very much a marketing page, and I think it leans too heavily in that direction. I bounced off it pretty hard because it's quite busy and clearly trying to sell me something. That's a red flag for me when I'm looking at education programs.

I had to do a triple take to make sure this was actually a federal program and not a scam.

can scams even get .gov tlds?

congress.gov seems to exist

you didn't see the .gov in the domain name?

I did — that’a ultimately why I decided it was legit.

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