News and Highlights

Workforce Pell's slow rollout and employer-led partnerships in Colorado.

Author

Paul Fain
August 06, 2026

I’ve been off, mostly. So this week’s issue features new reporting from Work Shift on Workforce Pell and a piece from Alison Griffin on the $90M Opportunity Now Colorado grant program. I’ve also pulled together recent opinion writing and the latest news in our Open Tabs. A full newsletter will be back in your inbox next week. (Subscribe here.)

Workforce Pell’s Slow Rollout Begins

The financial aid program officially launched in July, and predictions are becoming reality with only a sliver of short-term programs qualifying in states from coast to coast.

Work Shift • Margaret Moffett

Issue Brief: How Colorado's Construction Industry Built Its Own Workforce System

This is the first in a series of reported briefs about Opportunity Now Colorado, a $90M grant program that invested in employer-led workforce partnerships across every county in the state. This piece profiles the model that emerged in the construction industry, with analysis of what other states could apply to their own emerging industries and workforce needs.

Work Shift • Alison Griffin

Scaling Workforce Development to Meet the AI Moment: A Four-Wave Framework for Understanding the Field’s Progress

Matthew Muench, a veteran of major philanthropic pushes on workforce, proposes a new structure for understanding why most organizations remain sub-scale and what could create a meaningful breakthrough.

Issue Brief • Matthew Muench

The Best Interview Isn’t an Interview—It’s a Training Program

For workforce training to pay off, employers have to treat it like an integral part of the hiring process—and colleges have to build programs that don’t view graduation as the end.

Opinion • Tiffany Bishop

Building the Noncredit Data Infrastructure: State by State, Institution by Institution

Spurred on by Workforce Pell, the first true national movement to improve noncredit data is taking off. Much work remains.

Opinion • The Real Deal

Now That Workforce Pell Is Here, Colleges Must Quash These Three Myths About Stackable Credentials

Myths have grown up around stackable credentials. Here are the most persistent ones—and how institutions can respond.

Opinion • Eric Bing and Jane Oates

Employers Can’t Fix a Broken System One Training Program at a Time

More companies are stepping up to fund training, especially in the skilled trades. That’s a good thing—but they’re at risk of creating one-off workarounds that don’t add up to anything bigger.

Opinion • Scott Laband

Open Tabs

Performance Funding
The funding formula for Texas community colleges has hit a rough patch. The performance-based model is the most-watched state funding stream in higher education. It has driven big funding increases as the two-year colleges issued 22% more credentials. But recent gains have blown past state projections, leaving a budget gap the Texas Legislature may not cover, as Sneha Day reports for The Texas Tribune. As a result, the community colleges face substantial funding shortfalls, like a $1.4M cut for the small Paris Junior College.

Workforce Alignment
Community colleges are preparing students for a labor market that’s changing faster than the systems designed to respond to it, finds a report from the Harvard University’s Project on Workforce. The new playbook, which builds on a multi-year collaboration between the Project on Workforce and the Education Design Lab, provides practical tools for dynamic labor market alignment and institutional agility, including data and technology frameworks for workforce decision making.

Technician Jobs
Amazon has selected Guild’s Marketplace as a partner for its Career Choice employee education benefit program. Guild will provide Amazon’s hourly employees with structured and guided learning through its Guild Navigator, connecting employees to maintenance and engineering technician job opportunities while helping the company develop a talent pipeline for those roles. More than 300K+ Amazon employees have participated in Career Choice.

Skilled Trades
The U.S. Department of Defense last month announced the launch of a workforce development initiative. Created through the Pentagon’s industrial base efforts, BuildFreedom.US seeks to unite government, industry, and educational institutions to increase awareness and provide scholarships for careers in the skilled trades. Build Freedom also donated $10M to support the mikeroweWORKS Foundational Scholarship program.

Credentials of Value
The Gates Foundation’s new long-term strategy seeks to help millions more Americans earn credentials that open real economic doors. It will focus on key transition points, including the one from high school into and through college. The foundation also announced structural and personnel shifts, with Matt Gee now leading AI and data infrastructure work. Patrick Methvin will be interim president of the U.S. Program, replacing Allan Golston, who is stepping down.

Graduate Mobility
Two-thirds of workers with four-year or graduate degrees live in the state where they attended high school, finds a report from the Strada Institute for the Future of Work and the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. Half of workers with those credentials cite economic opportunity as their primary motivation to cross state lines. Those who work in math, computer fields, engineering, architecture, and the arts are the least likely to be homegrown.

Surveying Intermediaries
Apprenticeships for America has begun a national survey of apprenticeship intermediaries. The survey, which AFA is conducting with Education Northwest, seeks to better understand organizations that support apprenticeship, including community-based groups, workforce development boards, training providers, government agencies, and more. Responses to the survey, which will be open until Sept. 4, will be used to help create a field report.

New Fund
The $7M Innovative Postsecondary Models Fund seeks proposals that rethink how education is designed, delivered, financed, and assessed. Managed by Panorama Global, the fund is backed by eight foundations, most of which are focused on higher education. It will award grants of up to $1M to support organizations across instructional innovation, affordability, workforce alignment, and efforts to expand access. Applications will be open for six weeks.

Job Moves
Monty Sullivan has been nominated to lead the North Carolina Community College System. His nomination by the State Board of Community Colleges will be considered by the General Assembly. Sullivan led the Louisiana Community and Technical College System for 12 years.

Beth Goldberg has been hired by Humanity AI as the $500M grantmaking collaborative’s executive director. Goldberg previously led R&D at Jigsaw, a Google incubator that builds free and open-source technologies focused on human agency.

Michael Brickman has departed his role as a senior policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Labor, which followed stints as a senior policy advisor at the White House Domestic Policy Council and as a senior advisor to the education secretary. Brickman is a policy director at the Cicero Institute, where he worked before joining the Trump administration.

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