This procedure is extremely shortsighted in chronic labor surplus areas with a long history of declining employment. Elaborate studies have been made in labor surplus areas in order to identify sufficient numbers of local job vacancies and future replacement needs for certain skills to justify training programs for those skills. No effort is made in the same studies to present information on regional or national demand trends in these skills or to consider whether regional or national demands for other skills might provide much better opportunities for the youth to be trained.

Moreover, the current information on what types of training are needed and possible is too limited and fragmentary. There simply is not enough material available on the types of job skills that are in demand and the types of training programs that are required or most suitable. Much of the available information comes not from the Federal government but from an exchange of experiences among states.

State and local agencies in the vocational education field must be encouraged to adopt a wider outlook on future job opportunities. There is a need for an expanded Federal effort to provide research and information to help guide state education departments and local school boards in existing programs.

A related question is whether unemployed workers can be motivated to take the training provided. There is little evidence that existing public or private training programs have any great difficulty getting students to enroll in their programs, even though they must pay tuition, receive no subsistence payments, and are not guaranteed a job. However, there always is some limit to the numbers who will spend the time and effort to acquire training. Again, one major difficulty is the local focus.