New Gatekeepers

The Education Department moves to bring new blood to accreditation while two major accreditors begin endorsing quality noncollege and noncredit credentials. Also, park developers eye a marriage with workforce development, an essay on what employers really think about apprenticeships, and the Real Deal on the purpose of nondegree credentials. (Subscribe here.)

Seal of Approval for Alternative Credentials

Two major college accreditors have begun endorsing short-term credentials offered by noncollege providers, giving them a seal of approval if not a path to federal dollars. But those moves are unlikely to help head off the Trump administration’s plan to upend accreditation.

MAGA’s pursuit of higher education’s quality-assurance system has focused heavily on DEI. Yet the administration’s push for upstart accrediting agencies also is about potentially funneling federal money toward skills training and alternatives to traditional college.

New blood in accreditation remains a Trump priority, according to Nicholas Kent, the U.S. under secretary of education.

“Not only does the current system lack accountability,” says Kent, “but it creates an unfair, monopolistic environment where institutions and programs are often at the mercy of a small, cartel-like group of organizations without any viable alternatives.”

Too few accreditors control access to billions in taxpayer funds and crucial professional licensure opportunities, Kent says. And the Education Department is committed to making the system more competitive as well as accountable.

Higher education’s enrollment growth is being driven by certificates and other more bite-size programs, and sources say the administration wants accreditors to reflect that shift.

This week the department announced that it has officially recognized accreditation reform as a national need under a federal fund. The competitive grant will direct $7M to support institutions that seek to switch accreditors where costs are prohibitive, and will back the growth of new and emerging accreditors.

The fund also includes $50M for the creation and expansion of high-quality short-term programs.

Discourse around Republican-led moves to encourage competition in accreditation—like the institutional accrediting agency being developed by public university systems in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas—has been dominated by the culture war. But those upstarts also could feature more of a focus on short-term credentials.

The department in May moved to streamline the process for institutions to switch accrediting agencies, saying it is seeking to ensure colleges aren’t locked into relationships with accreditors whose priorities or values do not align with their own.

The administration’s broader goals should become clearer when the federal panel that oversees accrediting agencies meets and begins naming new members. Also planned is a negotiated rulemaking early next year aimed at removing “burdensome requirements” on institutions and accreditors and reducing barriers to entry for new accreditors.

Finally, the department says it plans to launch an experimental site initiative focused on accreditation.

The hope is that accreditors could be up and running—with federal aid eligibility oversight powers—before the end of Trump’s term.

Noncollege and Noncredit Recognition: In the meantime, two college accreditors plan to continue their experiments with quality reviews of short-term and noncredit programs.

“Our ambition is to help higher education address other credential pathways,” says Barbara Gellman-Danley, president of the Higher Learning Commission, the largest U.S. accrediting agency.

Higher education in this case includes noncollege providers as well as colleges of all types that are seeking to enter new credential spaces.

After years of research and work by its Credential Lab, HLC last month launched a process for evaluating and endorsing organizations that provide short-term and alternative credential programs. Those that meet the commission’s quality standards earn an endorsement that HLC hopes will distinguish them and help students and employers navigate the complex and growing credential marketplace.

The quality-assurance review is designed to identify education and training providers whose offerings prepare learners for the workforce. Requirements also include financial and legal stability as well as protections for learners. 

Gellman-Danley says established industry certifications, like those offered by Microsoft or AWS, are less likely to benefit from the endorsement than are courses or credential programs from alternative and third-party providers. The Corporate Finance Institute, for example, was among a small group of organizations that tested the process earlier this year.

HLC is committed to the endorsement project and has created a business unit around it, says Gellman-Danley: “If we do a good job of this, it will be a desirable recognition.”

Signal of Quality: The New England Commission of Higher Education also just rolled out a new recognition process in the alternative credential space. The quality-assurance framework is for noncredit programs—those offered by both traditional colleges that hold NECHE’s institutional accreditation and noncollege providers that exist outside of federal aid eligibility. 

A first group of eight organizations received that recognition, including three Maine community colleges and Per Scholas, a major tech training provider.

Per Scholas has a proven track record, with research showing that its training program is rigorous and prepares students for jobs that boost their economic mobility. Those studies were important for the nonprofit’s philanthropic backers, says Tamara Johnson, COO at Per Scholas. She hopes the new recognition will be a signal of quality for employers and students.

“We’re hopeful that this provides that additional validation,” Johnson says. “They really did look at all aspects of our program.”

The NECHE process included an in-person visit to the Per Scholas campus in Cambridge, Mass., a review of the group’s finances, and interviews with alumni and employer partners.

Per Scholas remains outside of the federal aid system. If its programs eventually do become eligible for Pell Grants or other forms of aid, Johnson says, that money would help with access and scaling but would not be used to move cost burdens to students.

“We are 100% committed to being at no-cost for learners,” she says.

Maine’s community colleges are at the leading edge of short-term workforce training. The system’s philanthropy-backed training center aims to serve almost 100K students by 2030, thanks in part to unusually engaged employer partners that increasingly are contributing money and other supports.

NECHE’s noncredit quality review was useful for the three colleges that completed it, says Dan Belyea, the system’s chief workforce development officer. “Getting questioned and having people poke holes” in the programs “validates the good work that you do.”

How business partners view the accrediting agency’s quality stamp depends on how the system brands it, says Belyea. But he’s sold on the value of NECHE’s review.

The Kicker: “We’d like to have all our colleges go through that process,” Belyea says.

Green Space, Good Jobs

Across the country, cities have turned abandoned bridges, railways, and waterfronts into innovative public parks. This includes well-known parks like the High Line in New York City, Gas Works Park in Seattle, and the 606 in Chicago. 

While many of these parks have added much-needed green space to lower-income neighborhoods, they can come with a big downside: increasing property values in a way that prices out longtime residents. The High Line Network and the Urban Institute recently released a nearly 50-page report on how workforce development could be an equally big solution to combat this problem. 

The goal is to provide the community not only with green spaces, but also lasting jobs and opportunities to grow their own wealth.

Five cities in the High Line Network, led by Washington, D.C., ran a three-year pilot project to develop scalable and replicable workforce training models. The projects focused on training for the trades and also for roles, like administration and management, that would last well beyond construction.

The work started with partnering with organizations that already knew the neighborhoods and how to create individual economic mobility. For San Francisco’s Indian Basin Waterfront Park, that meant partnering with unions and a local construction pre-apprenticeship program. In Dallas, the Trinity Park Conservancy partnered with a number of organizations including the Lone Star Justice Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for reform in the juvenile and criminal justice systems. 

“They’re connected to people from our communities who need access to jobs. We wanted to work with people who are trusted in the community,” Sam Acosta, director of community and government relations at Trinity Park Conservancy, said at an event that brought together leaders from the five cities for the report release. 

The groups also quickly learned that providing jobs wasn’t enough; workers needed help with transportation, childcare, and even legal services to be able to get to those jobs. Others needed training on résumé writing and interviewing, a need that prompted initiatives like the 11th Street Bridge Park in Washington, D.C., to involve corporate partners.

Others had to take an earn-and-learn approach. In Buffalo, N.Y., Friends of the Riverline partnered with the Buffalo Center for Arts and Technology (BCAT) to create a free landscape maintenance technician program to prepare residents for existing jobs in the city, as well as for the park in the future. In the first year of the pilot, Jeff Lebsack, executive director of Friends of the Riverline, said the program went well. But in the second year, it was a “flop.” 

“Sometimes free is too expensive,” Lebsack said. “We realized that free workforce training isn’t necessarily a good deal when you’ve already got a job you don’t want to miss and you have childcare responsibilities and now you have to take this training.”

So for the third year, the organization and BCAT created an earn-and-learn model where students were paid $20 an hour to participate in the classroom and field training. With this approach, they received more applicants than they could accept. 

Read the full article on Work Shift. —By Colleen Connolly

Open Tabs

Student Success
The Education Department announced changes to a high-profile grant competition—redirecting $167M in funds Congress intended for student success initiatives to administration priorities like AI, ideological diversity, and short-term credentials. The move to reorient FIPSE set off alarm among student advocates and colleges, many of whom rely on those funds to test and provide support services, Jessica Blake of Inside Higher Ed reported.

Pharma Manufacturing
Community colleges are driving higher ed's enrollment rebound, with a 4% gain this fall compared to a roughly 2% increase at public four-year institutions and 1% gain at four-year privates, per initial data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Undergraduate certificates saw a 6.6% bump, with growth in IT, healthcare, advanced manufacturing, and skilled trades programs.

Youth Apprenticeship
The College Board has partnered with CareerWise to connect its career-focused AP courses in business and cybersecurity to youth apprenticeship. The initiative will initially focus on Colorado and New York City but plans to expand nationwide. In New York, the College Board has committed to hire some of the high school apprentices to work in its offices.

Apprenticeships in Manufacturing
A multi-employer apprenticeship model can help the manufacturing industry fill its talent gap, Gardner Carrick, chief program officer at the Manufacturing Institute, said in testimony before a U.S. Senate hearing last week on apprenticeship. Latitia McCane, director of education for the Apprentice School at Newport News Shipbuilding, called for occupational registration flexibility and the use of intermediaries to connect community colleges with small businesses.

Technical Colleges
Voters in Texas overwhelmingly approved an $850M endowment for the Waco-based Texas State Technical College system. Unlike the state’s community colleges, TSTC is not able to issue bonds, reports Nicholas Gutteridge for The Texas Tribune. The endowment will come out of the state’s general revenue fund. The system plans to use the money to fix the infrastructure of its 11 campuses, upgrade classroom equipment, and expand its footprint across the state.

Job Moves
Daniel Greenstein has been appointed chief of industry transformation for Ellucian, an ed-tech company. Greenstein previously led Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education, after a stint at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Byron Garrett has been appointed CEO of Genesys Works, a nonprofit focused on career pathways for high school students. Garrett previously was EVP and chief revenue officer at the United Way.

Thanks for reading. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, subscribe here. —PF