The Programs That Work Screen Out Four in Five Applicants

Anthropic published a 124-page review of 56 randomized job-training experiments run since 1973. The average program barely moves the needle. The rare ones that do work by refusing almost everyone who asks.

This is a single document, not a newsroom's coverage of one. The desk reads corpora built from multiple outlets far more often than it reads one report cover to cover, but the format the finding takes here — a company that makes the technology now driving "Americans' top concern about AI" publishing a self-skeptical review of the standard policy answer to that concern — is worth naming before the numbers start. The report is "An Evidence Review of Worker Retraining," published August 12, 2026, co-authored by the independent economist David Roodman and Anthropic's Maxim Massenkoff. It reviews 146 impact estimates from 56 U.S. randomized trials run between 1973 and the present, plus a handful of European studies, and asks one question: if AI displaces workers at scale, would retraining them actually work.

The training-primary programs in the review — ones where training was the main thing on offer, not a minor add-on — lifted employment "an average of 2.8 percentage points in the second year after randomized assignment to treatment, and 1.7 points in years 3–5." Earnings rose by "$1,139 and $791 per year" over those same windows, in 2025 dollars. The typical program ran about six months and cost "roughly $13,000 per person." The report's own verdict on that average: "Job training programs have small impacts."

Scaling it up did not help. Three federal programs have been put through randomized evaluation. The Job Training Partnership Act "lifted employment among low-income adults by about 2.3 points, from a base of about 70%," with "no clear benefits for low-income youth." The Job Corps, a 1960s war-on-poverty program, "did not affect employment or earnings in follow-ups extending 20 years." Its successor, the Workforce Investment Act, "returned essentially zeros ... for low-income adults and for dislocated workers." The report's plain summary: "The impacts of large-scale US programs are as small."

One cluster of programs — the report calls them "sector programs" — does not fit that pattern. They screen applicants heavily, teach skills employers have specifically asked for, and place graduates directly into jobs with the employers who helped design the curriculum. Their discounted lifetime impact on earnings comes to "$60,319" per person, against "$14,146" for training-primary programs generally — roughly a sevenfold return, at a lower average cost per person than the ordinary programs it is being compared to.

The report is direct about how that number is bought. An evaluation of one such program, Per Scholas, "and three other programs reports that the programs take about 1 in 5 applicants." The admissions process is doing real work: "Demanding application processes, with multiple interviews and/or take-home work, select for people who have the need, grit, ability, and family support to throw themselves into this challenging experience." The report calls successful sector programs "arbitrageurs or matchmakers," connecting workers and employers "who would not otherwise have connected."

Nor does the model travel easily. An attempt to replicate one strong program, the Center for Employment Training in San Jose, "failed at all 14 trial sites, including 4 run by the CET itself outside of San Jose." Of several deliberate attempts to scale a promising sector program, the report counts exactly two successes in its randomized evidence: an expansion of Year Up outside Boston, and one site, out of three, in a separate multi-site demonstration.

The report's own hedge, stated plainly rather than buried: "it seems doubtful that we currently have programs capable of meeting the moment." Its proposed next step is not a bigger version of the programs that already exist at scale — those are the ones that returned close to zero — but a deliberate stress test of the ones that work in miniature: "a 'fire drill' evaluation meant to rapidly scale and test leading job retraining programs."

claim: sector-model job-training programs can be scaled to meet a large, sudden labor shock without losing the traits — selectivity, employer partnership, short curricula tied to local demand — that make them work in miniature · status: unresolved, by the report's own account · confidence: the report proposes testing it, not assuming it.

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