Testing Ground

California’s competency-based online college may have cracked the code on motivating students to complete self-paced certificates. Also, Trump issues a series of orders on education, including apprenticeship, and a look at how the administration’s DEI purge is affecting the skills-first hiring movement.

Personalized Timelines for Earning Certificates

Part of the mission of California’s Calbright College is to serve as an R&D lab for the community college sector. And early results are in from the online college’s successful experiments in meeting the needs of working learners, with potentially broad applications for higher education.

The statewide, competency-based college had a slow start after its creation in 2018. It faced existential challenges during the pandemic, with small enrollments, leadership turnover, and state government questioning the college’s funding. Yet Calbright lately has been surging. The college now enrolls roughly 4,800 students, the vast majority of whom are over 25 and come from underserved backgrounds.

Calbright also is ready to step out with its research-and-innovation lab role, which seeks to engage students to develop solutions for the barriers they face.

“What we’re learning at Calbright College about bringing flexible education and workforce to adult learners, rather than waiting for them to come to us, brings a lot of implications for education and job training programs across the U.S.,” says Sarah Jimenez, a Calbright spokesperson.

The college has partnered with the University of California at Irvine and ideas42, a nonprofit that taps behavioral science to address social problems. The $4.1M, five-year research project is focused on student-success solutions including short-form mobile videos aimed at engagement, peer tutoring, learning communities, and reframing public benefits.

Finding the Right Pace: One of the collaboration’s most promising experiments centers on working with students to set personalized timelines for completing their coursework. 

Being self-paced and online can be a big draw for working learners. But that flexibility requires students to be much more self-disciplined to stay on track. So, working with ideas42, Calbright tested suggesting program milestones based on data from past completers. Once the timeline is set, students receive weekly outreach to monitor their progress, and get help with making adjustments and accessing supportive services.

“I’ve rarely seen results like what we saw in our initial timelines project,” says Tom Tasche, senior director of innovation at ideas42, pointing to the “near doubling of the one-year program completion rate.”

Calbright now offers timelines to students across all its programs, which include IT support, data analysis, cybersecurity, project management, and network technology, with a pilot in HR learning and development and a localized medical coding program in Los Angeles County.

Tasche points to the power of helping students set a personalized target date for completion, and then visualizing what they need to do to reach that goal.

“This pilot demonstrated that we need to be honest with students about what it means to complete a program in, say, six months versus a year,” he says. “It means they should be prepared for a certain pace of progress.”

The next phase of Calbright’s work with ideas42 will be to move beyond just sharing findings with the two-year sector, says Tasche. The partnership seeks to create a collaborative network where other colleges, counties, and community partners actively participate in designing and testing behavioral solutions.

The college’s experiments could influence community colleges nationally, as well as policy, says Lisa Larson, interim CEO of the Education Design Lab.

The Kicker: “Calbright is in a great position as an innovative institution but also a design studio and testing ground for a new approach to higher education,” she says.

— Click here to read the full article on Work Shift.

White House Aims to Boost Apprenticeship

President Trump released a series of education-focused executive orders Wednesday, including ones on artificial intelligence in K-12 education, reforming higher education accreditation, and registered apprenticeship.

The Details: In the executive order on workforce training and apprenticeship, the White House directed the secretaries of the Labor, Commerce, and Education Departments to develop a plan for the United States to reach at least 1M new active apprentices. It doesn’t specify a timeframe for the goal.

Last fiscal year, the system added just shy of 315K new apprentices, and had a total of 679K active apprentices, with both numbers having grown substantially during the past 10 years.

The order commits to protecting and strengthening registered apprenticeship, specifically—which is notable given that the first Trump administration eschewed that system and instead attempted to create a new class of industry-recognized apprenticeships. The order specifically directs the departments to, within 120 days, map out ways to:

• Expand registered apprenticeship to new occupations and industries, including high-growth ones.

• Scale apprenticeship, improve its efficiency, and provide consistent support to program participants.

• Enhance connections between apprenticeship and the higher education system, including through the Perkins Act and the federal student aid system.

In addition, it calls for a review of all federal workforce development programs and for a report on how to integrate programs, reform or eliminate poor performers, increase upskilling for incumbent workers, and identify alternatives to the four-year degree that can be mapped to specific in-demand skills.

The broad strokes are generally ideas that have bipartisan support in Congress and many states—though consensus often breaks down on the details, especially around alternatives to the four-year degree. And many experts believe predictable federal funding would be needed to dramatically increase the number of apprentices in the U.S.

The administration’s actions on workforce education so far have failed to match its rhetoric. For example, it has cut several grants for apprenticeship research and programs, including significant ones for teacher training. They were swept up in the Department of Government Efficiency’s cost cutting and anti-DEI efforts.

The Staffing: Sources say it will be difficult for the White House to make progress on apprenticeship, at least in the short run. The directive comes amid sweeping new cuts to career staff members at the Labor Department, following deeper ones at the Education Department. And the acting head of the Employment and Training Administration appears to have been forced out this week. 

Bloomberg Law reports that Amy Simon, principal deputy assistant secretary of the ETA, which manages the registered apprenticeship system, left the Labor Department this week, with an administration spokesperson pointing to a memo prohibiting leaks to third parties. Simon worked at the ETA in the first Trump administration and is respected across party lines. She had been appointed to her new role just last month. John Ladd, the longtime career administrator of the Office of Apprenticeship, left earlier this year.

The Education Department, which the administration aims to completely shutter, did gain some significant workforce expertise this week. 

Nick Moore, who is well-regarded in the field, was just hired as deputy assistant secretary of the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education. Moore is the longtime director of Alabama Governor Kay Ivey’s Office of Education and Workforce Transformation, where he played a lead role in the creation of the Alabama Talent Triad. The state has also been a leader on apprenticeship. 

And Michael Brickman is returning to the department as a senior advisor. During Trump’s first term he led policies related to accreditation, distance and competency-based education, and employer-led partnerships. —By Elyse Ashburn and Paul Fain

Don’t Say DEI

The National Science Foundation has cancelled hundreds of grants it says no longer align with its priorities under the Trump administration, including those focused on diversifying the STEM fields. The vast majority of the education and training grants that were cut were held by research universities, according to a public database being maintained by leaders at the nonprofit rOpenSci and Harvard University’s School of Public Health.

Based on that list and other publicly available information, it appears that most grants with a significant workforce development component—including the Regional Innovation Engines—have been spared for now. Some of those engines, along with other grants for community college technician training, were included in an original database of “woke” NSF grants compiled by U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and slated for targeting.

The NSF has not released an official list of the grant terminations, but DOGE, which has led widespread cuts to federal programs, posted on X that 402 “wasteful DEI grants,” totaling $233M had been cancelled.

Chilling Effect: Beyond the NSF, the DEI purge across the federal government and the administration’s pursuit of nonprofits, universities, and large corporations it views as engaging in prohibited DEI activities has led many large organizations—especially companies—to walk back their diversity commitments. That, in turn, has raised questions about the potential impact on the skills-first hiring movement.

Skills-based hiring is primarily focused on expanding the pool of qualified workers and opening up opportunities for Americans without four-year degrees. But the movement also has had a significant focus on diversifying high-demand fields—in large part because of the sheer demographic reality in many parts of the country, but also because of explicit concerns about inequity.

So, is skills-based hiring now at risk? Reporter Lilah Burke dug into that question in an article for Work Shift, speaking with a range of experts who advise companies and track corporate behavior. They all thought the skills-first push would continue apace—if for no other reason than the acute hiring need in many industries.

What we are likely to see, however, is a rhetorical reframing around skills-based hiring practices, says JB Holston, a senior advisor at Boston Consulting Group and former CEO of the Greater Washington Partnership. Rather than emphasizing diversity and reaching people who are underrepresented in their industries, companies are likely to use language that refers more to the company’s bottom line.

OneTen, a coalition of 60-plus major American companies, has already made that pivot. The organization launched in the wake of the nationwide protests around George Floyd’s murder, with the participating companies committing to train, hire, or promote 1M Black workers without four-year degrees within 10 years. As recently as early January, its homepage mentioned a specific focus on equity and Black talent, but no longer does.

For group’s like SHRM, skills-first hiring has always been about the business case, says Clay Lord, senior program director at the HR organization’s foundation.

The Kicker: “It is clear to all of us that the status quo is not sustainable,” Lord says. “A skills-first future is inevitable.” —By Elyse Ashburn and Lilah Burke

Open Tabs

Student Outcomes
An updated Carnegie Classification system—including a new designation on student access and earnings—is out today from the American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation. The new classification compares similar institutions based on whether they are enrolling and creating opportunities for students that reflect the locations they serve and whether their students earn competitive wages. The system classified 479 institutions as “Opportunity Colleges and Universities,” meaning they are models for student success.

Hiring STARS
Skilled workers without four-year college degrees have made progress in the labor market, reports Opportunity@Work. These workers held 783K more good-paying jobs in 2023 than they would have under projections of roles that previously would have been open to them. Shifting employer behavior is the driver, the nonprofit found, estimating that 10M skilled workers without degrees could move into higher-paying jobs by 2030 if skills-first practices become the norm.

Care Workforce
Demand for direct care workers—including home aides, nursing assistants, and childcare providers—is expected to surge, with an estimated 8.9M jobs needing to be filled during the decade ending in 2032, according to the National Skills Coalition. The median wage for these workers is just $25K. The coalition has formed an advisory council to address challenges facing the care workforce, and plans to soon release a policy report and public education campaign.

Aspen Prize
Southwest Wisconsin Technical College is the winner of the 2025 Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence. The two-year college was recognized for a completion rate of 54%, which exceeds the national average by roughly 20 percentage points. Five years after completing, graduates of the college also earn nearly $14K more than the average new hire in the region. Southwest Tech will receive $700K from Aspen, with two finalists also getting $100K each.

Sector-Crossing Data
California has rolled out its Cradle-to-Career Data System, which displays key milestones in students’ experiences over time and provides insights about education and career pathways. The tool unveiled by Governor Gavin Newsom links datasets from K-12 and higher education, social service, and workforce entities to unite information from disconnected data across sectors. The system is aimed at the public, educators, researchers, and policymakers.

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