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1. College graduates earn more on average.

1.  workers with a bachelor's degree earned an average of $464 per week than workers with only a high school diploma (Bogle 2),

2.  Workers with a college degree are less likely to face unemployment.

1.  Only 2.7% of workers with a bachelor's degree are facing unemployment, compared to 5.2% of workers with only a high school diploma (Bogle 3),

3.  College graduates are more likely to experience job satisfaction.

1.  77% of workers with a post-graduate degree and 60% of workers with a bachelor's degree believe their job gives them a sense of identity, versus just 38% of those with a high school diploma or less (Bogle 4),

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Fixes

Innovative approaches to helping low-wage earners get better jobs focus first on brushing up on skills they might have graduated from high school without.

By Tina Rosenberg

Ms. Rosenberg is a co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, which supports rigorous reporting about responses to social problems, and a former editorial writer for The New York Times.

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Jesibel Done, 20, a student at the New Community Corporation, an accredited post-secondary school in Newark, is taking classes to become a certified medical assistant in order to earn higher wages. Credit Credit Monique Jaques for The New York Times

The unemployment rate is 3.9 percent. Businesses are desperate for workers. Yet at the same time, a large group of people can't find a job.

The skills people have often don't match the skills employers need. One solution is training them for a specific field: a short, intensive course that prepares students for skilled work in construction, auto mechanics or hospital patient care. In New Jersey at the moment, these jobs can pay $19 or $20 an hour to start.

These programs can be very successful at getting students into high-paying jobs - especially when they work directly with employers to design the training, and employers agree to hire graduates. They aren't always helpful, though, to those who need them most: people who are chronically unemployed or underemployed, working in low-wage, dead-end jobs - sometimes two or three at the same time - like cleaning offices, cooking hamburgers or selling clothes.

Jesibel Done is 20. She's a high-school graduate supporting others members of her family. She'd love to buy a house. But the most she's ever made is $10.25 an hour. (Do that for a year, and you make $21,320.) She's worked at Walmart, Family Dollar, Hollister and 7-Eleven. She's often left a job because family problems needed attention or because of conflicts with co-workers. But she finds another one quickly. "If I keep looking and calling, I usually get a job in a week or two," she said.

At 7-Eleven, she worked the night shift, sometimes running a store alone overnight in Elizabeth, N.J. - not a great place for doing that. Still, she considers that the best job she has ever had - because 7-Eleven pays workers even during their lunch breaks. "You get your whole paycheck," she said.

There are millions of people like Ms. Done. They'd love to have a real career and be able to support a family. But life gets in the way: Training can cost tens of thousands of dollars. They can't take time off from work to study. They have no one to take care of the children. The car has broken down. They've lost their driver's license. Bus fare costs too much.

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Students at the New Community Cooperation learn automotive skills in a program sponsored by Ford Motor Company to train qualified technicians. Credit Monique Jaques for The New York Times

There are other issues: Lots of people need training before they can take advantage of job training. "They don't necessarily have the soft skills," said Jerrah Crowder, a program officer in Newark for the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a nationwide organization that provides financing and technical support to community organizations. "As a human being, how do you function in an organization?" he asked. "Some might not know what to expect in terms of showing up on time, presenting themselves: attire, appropriate communication, customer-service skills."

The best job-training programs understand that students lead complicated lives.

The biggest hurdle for every kind of education is money, so one answer is to make the courses intensive, short and as close to free as possible. (It might seem like part-time, flexible courses would help the students more, but students in such programs tend not to graduate.) Tennessee is trying to eliminate the hurdles with its network of 27 colleges of applied technology, with full-time programs in varied fields like aircraft maintenance, information technology and practical nursing. Two statewide programs, Tennessee Promise and Tennessee Reconnect (for adults returning to school), make two years' free tuition and fees at technical and community colleges for students who qualify. The technical colleges have a completion rate of 84 percent and also very high rates of student employment in their field.

Many programs teach the soft skills. The nationwide training program Year Up gives classroom instruction to high school graduates stuck in minimum-wage jobs - including a lot of time spent on how to be a worker - and then offers internships in tech and business. A randomized control trial found that Year Up participants earned at least 40 percent more than those in a control group - previously unheard-of results.

A student studies to be certified as a medical assistant. Credit Monique Jaques for The New York Times

"There have been some very good results with sectoral training programs," said Dan Bloom, director of employment programs at MDRC, a nationwide organization that studies and evaluates social programs. "The issue has been that they're pretty selective. You have to have a certain literacy level. They're usually not for people way back there in the queue."

What can work for people reading at elementary school level, who can't do fractions, who didn't graduate from high school? (Or even worse - they graduated, but without those skills.)

There's one answer in Newark, inside the New Community Corporation, one of the country's oldest and largest and most comprehensive community development organizations.

"We are cradle to grave," said Rodney Brutton, the director of work force development. New Community offers infant day care, a nursing home and a lot in between: therapeutic counseling, high-school equivalency classes, housing, health care, a charter school, a food pantry - even a community newspaper.

Job training has been a centerpiece for many years. For example, the Ford Motor Company spent a million dollars 25 years ago to create an automotive training facility for New Community - a giant mechanic's garage with a classroom in the back. Ford did it so its dealerships could hire the graduates. New Community also has courses in construction and building trades, culinary arts, medical assistance and patient care.

I met Ms. Done in the clinical medical assistant course, whose schedule is 9 to 3, five days a week, for six months. Her goal is to get a job at the beige brick complex of University Hospital, which you can see from New Community's window. Starting pay is $19.80.

Because New Community is an accredited postsecondary school, students can get federal Pell grants. No student can owe more than $1,800. "That doesn't put me in much debt," Ms. Done said. (Students at for-profit trade schools can emerge from a course with $20,000 or more in debt.)

Students in a class at the New Community Cooperation in Newark, N.J. Credit Monique Jaques for The New York Times

Three years ago, New Community started working with Local Initiatives Support Corporation to improve its wallet-related programs. The company helped New Community to start and fund what it calls a financial opportunities center, making it one of about 90 community organizations with such an attribute. Typically, such centers include a job coach; a social services expert to connect clients to supports that they qualify for, such as bus passes or supplemental food aid; and a financial adviser to help clients reduce debt, set goals and start to save.

New Community had been doing some of those things, but piecemeal. "You can say we were connecting students to living-wage jobs and careers, but it was almost a half-baked cake," Mr. Brutton said. "Yes, we got them a job, but they still went to the local check-cashing place. They did not develop strategies on how to save. They didn't have a financial goal, what it is they want to save for."

The other big Local Initiatives innovation is Bridges to Career Opportunities. New Community just started Bridges two weeks ago. Bridges teaches basic math, science and reading, tailored to each course. The health care courses, for example, are using a number line to put unit measures in order and learning fractions by calculating dosage. They study the prefixes, suffixes and roots of medical terminology.

The automotive, culinary and building trades courses will have their own tailored lessons.

The students might not have been paying attention in high school, but they're paying attention now. "This is why we need to know fractions," Mr. Brutton said. "It's not just because my math teacher said so. It's that I have to cut this piece of Sheetrock and frame up this room."

Bridges runs at the same time as the course it serves, at least two hours a day, three days a week. Traditional remedial education elsewhere is a prerequisite to real courses - and students don't earn credits for it. This is why a lot of students leave college. "They might not even get into that training program because their math skills are not up to snuff, and they 're going to use their Pell money on remedial education and they're going to hate it and be out," said Seung Kim, the Local Initiatives organization's senior program director for family income and wealth.

The concurrent approach isn't widespread, but it should be. The other big - and effective - program is I-BEST, for Integrated Basic Education Skills and Training. Each I-BEST classroom has two teachers: one teaches job skills, and one teaches basic math and reading.

The Bridges program is two years old and now in 31 Local Initiatives sites, in 11 cities. The organization said the average Bridges class raises math and reading skills about two grade levels.

What separates the Local Initiatives organization and its partners from other job-training programs is its holistic approach.

The certified medical assistant class was taught by Dr. Seham to help people qualify for higher paying jobs. Credit Monique Jaques for The New York Times

"Often people just do work force - just that one component," said Maurice Jones, the president and chief executive of Local Initiatives. "But there's all the other things: financial competency, transportation and housing and child care. You have to really do all of these things simultaneously if you really want to have a lasting impact helping people get into living-wage jobs and careers."

An internal study of 34,000 clients of Local Initiatives' financial centers showed that most of them increased their net income, net worth and credit score. (And the more services the clients used, the greater the gains - evidence for the do-it-all approach.) But an independent evaluation published in 2016 found mixed results: for example, in their second year after joining the program, Local Initiatives clients did not earn more than a comparison group.

Mr. Jones said the study showed that clients were getting jobs, but having trouble keeping them. "They had these other things they were battling," he said. "We had challenges keeping people in jobs long enough for wages to increase." The organization began telling its job coaches to stay with clients, even after they found employment. "The value of coaching does not stop when someone gets a job," Mr. Jones said. "This shouldn't have been a revelation, but it was." Now the Local Initiatives company is also starting a pilot program of retention-focused coaching in three sites.

Transportation and child-care issues don't go away, Mr. Jones said. "If you don't help folks solve these problems, I don't care how great your skill imparting is. They won't be able to get to work on time."

Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book " The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism." She is the author, most recently, of " Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World" and the World War II spy story e-book " D for Deception."
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Correction:

A previous version of this article misspelled the name of a nationwide company that supports community organizations. It is Local Initiatives Support Corporation, not Local Initiative Support Corporation.

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Opinion | To Get a Better Job, First Train for the Job Training

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Fixes Innovative approaches to helping low-wage earners get better jobs focus first on brushing up on skills they might have graduated from high school without. By Tina Rosenberg Ms. Rosenberg is a co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, which supports rigorous reporting about responses to social problems, and a former editorial writer for The New York Times.

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-Yellow is the best color to create enthusiasm for life and can awaken greater confidence and optimism.
-Yellow is the great communicator and loves to talk. -Yellow is the color of the net worker and the journalist, all working and communicating on a mental level.
Yellow is the scientist, constantly analyzing, looking at both sides before making a decision; methodical and decisive. Yellow is the entertainer, the comic, the clown.

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-Chemical engineers design, create and optimize the systems and equipment used in chemical, industrial, biological and environmental processes.
- They produce a range of materials, from fuels and fertilizers to processed foods, beer and wine, polymers and pharmaceuticals.
-They also design and operate large-scale chemical process equipment and factories, and play an important role in making industries safer, more efficient and cleaner

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-Entry-level chemical engineering positions require a bachelor's degree
-A strong mathematical               background in calculus, trigonometry, algebra, and geometry along with a thorough understanding of science topics such as physics, chemistry and biology is necessary to enter a chemical engineering program.
-A master's degree is ideal for advanced or managerial vocations in chemical engineering.
-Chemical engineers interested in performing independent or scholarly research usually have doctorate degrees

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-Location: 3001 Mercer University Dr, Atlanta, GA 30341
-Student Body Size: 4,747
-Acceptance Rate: 66%
-GPA Profile: 3.71
-Average SAT/ACT: Reading and Writing 550-640, Math 550-650/ 25-29
-Interest: School of Engineering
-Website: https://www.mercer.edu/
-Email: admissions@mercer.edu
-Phone Number: 478-301-2650

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-Location; Atlanta,GA
-Student Body Size: 25,790
-Acceptance Rate: 57%
-GPA Profile: 3.34
-Average SAT: 1047 Average ACT: 24
-Interest: Business Management and Finance
-Website: www.gsu.edu
-Email: admissions@gsu.ed4
-Phone Number: 404-413-2500

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-If I was accepted to all three programs I would pick MIT's Engineering program. If I were not to MIT I would pick the Mercer School of engineering.
-My post-secondary plans are to go to a four year university in order to attain an Engineering Degree or a Business/Finance Degree.
-If I attain a business degree I would want to work in an insurance company as a Accountant.
-If I attain an Engineering Degree I would like to work as a Mechanical Engineer.

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Mapping Your Future: Develop a career plan

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Mapping Your Future is a nonprofit organization committed to helping students, families, and schools navigate the higher education and student loan processes through trusted career, college, and financial aid counseling and resources.

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-Location: 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, Ma 02139
-Student Body Size: 4,547
-Acceptance Rate: 8%
-GPA Profile: 4.13
-Average SAT: 1,493, ACT: 34
-Interest: Engineering and Finance
-Website: www.mit.edu
-Email: servicedesk@mit.edu
-Phone Number: 617-253-1101

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“Top 10 Reasons Why College Is Important.” Southern New Hampshire University, www.snhu.edu/about-us/news-and-events/2017/08/why-is-college-important.

Rosenberg, Tina. “To Get a Better Job, First Train for the Job Training.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 4 Sept. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/opinion/to-get-a-better-job-first-train-for-the-job-training.html.

“The Color Yellow.” Empowered By Color, www.empower-yourself-with-color-psychology.com/color-yellow.html.

“About Chemical Engineering.” School of Chemical Engineering, 28 Aug. 2018, www.engineering.unsw.edu.au/chemical-engineering/careers/about-chemical-engineering.

Future Inc. “ Back to Topics.” Mapping Your Future: Explore Careers, www.mappingyourfuture.org/planyourcareer/plan.cfm.