Kiana Munoz didn’t have much time. She had a baby to care for and needed to earn money after just graduating from high school. When she saw that Premiere Career College, a for-profit school in Los Angeles County, promoted its ability to help her get a job as a medical assistant, she enrolled.
But after graduating, she couldn’t find work. She said she spent months searching for a job at doctors’ offices, but eventually gave up and started working at Sears instead. More than six years later, she said she still owes the college more than $5,500.
In 2022, California spent nearly $61 million of taxpayer dollars from the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act to support job training, typically for low-income and unemployed adults, according to the most recent data available. It’s one of the largest job training programs in California — designed by the federal government to prepare students for high-quality jobs .
The reality is far different.
Most adults who receive job training assistance get a tuition subsidy — over the past six years about half of those subsidy recipients went to private for-profit colleges — yet some of the most popular programs were for medical or nursing assistants, whose graduates earned less than $30,000 in the year after graduation, according to student outcome data collected by the state’s Employment Development Department.