Winners and Losers

States are on the clock to prepare for short-term Pell Grants as big questions loom about data systems, noncredit programs, and clock hours. Community colleges generally see an uphill path, with more optimism from for-profits and some public universities. Also, essays on Workforce Pell and untapped state data, and the final article in a three-part series on pathways into nursing. (Subscribe here.)

Next Steps for Workforce Pell

The rules governing how Pell Grants can be tapped for short-term education and training programs have begun to come into focus, with a federal negotiating committee last week reaching consensus on a regulatory framework for the new Workforce Pell Grants. But the hard part starts now.

States and colleges are on the clock, with six months to sort out their end of the process as the U.S. Department of Education takes the committee’s decision and drafts the final federal rules. Big questions loom, most notably how to bulk up an insufficient data infrastructure on short-term credentials and their value in the labor market.

Congress assigned governors and state workforce boards responsibility for determining if short-term credentials line up with high-skill, high-wage, or in-demand industries or jobs. A recognized accrediting agency must then decide if the program leads to stackable academic credit and a credential that’s portable across employers. 

The feds are tasked with ensuring that programs comply with guardrails designed to protect students and taxpayers, including 70% completion and job placement rates, and an ROI metric calculated by comparing prices with the median wages of graduates.

“If we’re going to invest in these credentials,” says Kermit Kaleba, a strategy director at the Lumina Foundation, “we owe it to do our best to ensure that these credentials offer value.”

Two of the most complex and challenging areas of compliance revolve around the eligibility of noncredit training paths and if programs hit the minimum threshold of 150 clock hours, essentially defined as time in class or faculty-supervised training (see more below on those two issues).

Relatively few existing programs will make the cut, according to many interviews. The performance thresholds will be a challenge, as will proving compliance through data systems that generally fall woefully short. Some colleges and training providers have concluded that the process will be too labor-intensive and expensive to pursue eligibility.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that mandatory federal spending on Workforce Pell grants will total nearly $300M over the next decade, with roughly 100K new Pell recipients receiving grants of about $2,200 annually by 2034. Total program costs will be larger, $2B or more over that period, according to some estimates. 

The Pell program is running short on money, with a CBO-estimated $2.7B shortfall looming. Some experts think the grants might end up costing somewhat more than the CBO estimates, which would contribute to Pell’s budget problem. But the consensus is that federal spending on the program is unlikely to be much higher than what CBO predicted.

Community college leaders generally are pessimistic that many of their existing credentials will be able to clear the bar, with several saying few, if any, programs would be eligible. One statewide audit of a two-year system with well-established short-term credentials identified only a handful where students would be able to access the new grants.

We turned up a few exceptions in our reporting, however. Alamo Colleges in San Antonio, for example, could see a healthy group of its short-term programs qualify. It helps that the two-year system has been working for years on microcredentials, with a recent boost from performance-funding in Texas.

For-profit college representatives were somewhat more hopeful than their community college peers. But that sector is small, accounting for less than 7% of undergraduates who attend colleges inside the federal student aid system.

Training for heavy equipment operation, truck driving, and high-wire linemen are among credential programs across the sector that might qualify for inclusion, says Jason Altmire, president and CEO of Career Education Colleges and Universities. These are high-demand jobs in every state and education programs that can offer program lengths within the requirements.

“A key matter to be resolved will be the regional variability of state determinations of workforce demand, opening the door for political decisions that might swing back and forth depending on each new administration,” Altmire says. “We prefer certainty and would hope to avoid partisan pendulum swings like we’ve seen at the federal Department of Education over the years.”

Likewise, while large numbers of online and distance education programs overseen by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission are affordable and focused on career paths, many DEAC-accredited institutions are choosing not to pursue Workforce Pell, says Leah Matthews, the commission’s executive director and CEO.

“Without established job placement services and robust systems for employment verification and monitoring,” she says, the “administrative and compliance costs associated with Workforce Pell make participation prohibitively expensive.”

Some four-year public universities, however, may be particularly well positioned for eligibility, say a wide range of sources. Interestingly, the draft federal rules would allow holders of bachelor’s degrees to qualify for Workforce Pell, a departure from what Congress probably had in mind with a grant program for on-ramps to higher education.

The National Governors Association is launching a readiness academy on Workforce Pell, which many say will be a helpful resource for states as they grapple with implementation. NGA, which has been rocked by the nation’s worsening partisanship, has partnered on the project with the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, another key constituency in preparing for the grants.

“There will be winners and losers, especially in the first four years,” one source says.

Credentials of Value

In Connecticut, the governor has had a cross-agency group—including higher education, labor, and K-12—working to define credentials of value since March. It released the state’s first comprehensive list of validated industry-recognized credentials in September and developed a definition of what will count for Workforce Pell, says Kelli-Marie Vallieres, Connecticut’s chief workforce officer.

The state also has been tracking outcomes for many short-term programs, with those offered through its Career ConneCT initiative averaging an 80% completion rate, Vallieres says. Not all of those programs will meet other requirements for the grants, but the state expects some will.

“There will be some programs that will qualify,” Vallieres says. “We’re really excited about this opportunity.”

A Question of Data: Many other states are not as far along. Lisa Larson, CEO of Education Design Lab, recently partnered with the American Association of Community Colleges to convene a Workforce Pell advisory group of about 60 senior leaders at colleges, nonprofits, community-based organizations, and funders.

One of the biggest questions, she says, is whether states will be able to put the right systems in place to take advantage of the new funding opportunity. Data remains the biggest challenge.

“How can they possibly move as fast as they need to move?” she says.

Program Structure: Even if states can meet their obligations on the tight timeline, many short-term programs will be filtered out of Workforce Pell by two restrictions set by the legislation: 

• Only programs of at least 150, but less than 600 clock hours will qualify, and

• All noncredit credentials must map to credit that applies toward a certificate or degree program.

“Articulating credit to noncredit programs isn’t the norm,” says Mark D’Amico, professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and an expert on noncredit education. And guaranteeing that the credits would apply to a degree program is even less common.

Many noncredit credentials also are unlikely to meet the clock-hour requirement. D’Amico is one of several researchers who has extensively studied noncredit education in eight states over the past couple of years, through the State Noncredit Data project. The median length of noncredit programs in all but one of those states, Tennessee, was between 15 and 100 clock hours, he says.

Programs in high-need fields like certified nursing assistant and phlebotomy, whether noncredit or for-credit, are often less than 150 clock hours. The resulting jobs also tend to be low-paying, and may not meet the value-added earnings criteria in some states and regions.

Looking Forward: Standards for quality and value are critical, D’Amico says, and states will be able to modify some programs over time to meet Workforce Pell’s particular requirements. But doing so may not always make sense.

“States use the noncredit function to meet their specific needs,” he says. “Not all those are going to meet the Workforce Pell parameters, but they may still be meeting local and student needs.”

Larson believes that the legislation will incentivize states and colleges to think more creatively about short-term credentials and how noncredit learning can map into degrees. Many college leaders, she says, are looking at this as a longer-term opportunity.

The Kicker: “It’s just not going to be the massive numbers right away,” Larson says. —By Elyse Ashburn

Improving Nursing’s Broken Path

A three-part series by Colleen Connolly on nursing career paths concludes this week with her piece for Work Shift on the growth of high school healthcare programs.

“A must-read for anyone who cares about career mobility and the future of the healthcare workforce,” Iris Palmer, a director at New America, wrote about Colleen’s first article, echoing what we’ve heard from many readers.

Here’s some of what experts shared with us about the series:

For far too long, certified nursing assistants have carried an enormous share of the emotional and physical labor in healthcare without receiving full recognition for the skill, judgment, and compassion they bring to the bedside, says Geoffrey Roche, SVP of healthcare solutions for Risepoint.

The solutions exist, he says, pointing to innovative models like UW Health’s registered nurse apprenticeship in Wisconsin. “This isn’t just a workforce strategy,” says Roche, who previously led workforce development in North America for Siemens Healthineers. “It’s an invitation to build a culture where the people who show up every day for our patients are finally shown a path toward their own growth and advancement.”

We talk a lot about “stackable pathways” from medical assistant or certified nursing assistant roles to registered nursing careers, but too often they’re stackable in name only, says Lisa McIntyre-Hite, executive director and COO of C-BEN Solutions.

Without clearly defined competencies and institutions willing to do the hard work of mapping, assessing, and awarding credit for what learners already know and can do, these pathways remain slow, expensive, and discouraging. “If we want mobility to be real, stackability has to be competency-based, not just sequential,” says McIntyre-Hite. “We have to create the systems and infrastructure to award credit for competency.”

Ohio’s North Central State College is recruiting CNAs and other staff at local hospital systems to participate in training to become licensed practical nurses, says Tom Prendergast, executive director of strategic and institutional transformation at the community college. Hospitals allow the students to flex their schedules, while the college offers its labs and clinicals in the evenings and on Saturdays.

North Central also is one of many two-year colleges to recently drop a key testing requirement for its LPN program, says Prendergast. “Instead, we are having them complete a set of science and/or gen-ed courses with the idea that they pass with a certain grade to meet program acceptance.”

Open Tabs

Short-Term Credentials
Active state investments in short-term, nondegree credential pathways grew to at least $8.1B over the past year, according to an analysis by HCM Strategists, which looked at 111 state-funded initiatives across 34 states. The total spending identified includes at least $4.5B exclusively targeted to short-term nondegree programs and another $3.6B to support flexible initiatives that are applicable to those credentials, although not exclusively.

Talent Marketplaces
The Education Department announced a $15M challenge grant to create the next generation of talent marketplaces. The challenge is a national call to action designed to accelerate the development of statewide efforts to “give learners, earners, and employers a clearer way to validate skills, opening doors to stackable credentials and stronger recognition of prior learning and work experience,” writes Nick Moore, an acting assistant secretary at the department.

Workforce as Infrastructure
The federal government should modernize and scale the nation’s training system by expanding apprenticeships, supporting industry partnerships, and closing the digital-skills gap, according to JPMorganChase’s Center for Geopolitics and its PolicyCenter. States must build robust regional talent pipelines through work-based learning, employer-aligned credentials, and data-driven funding. The report cites local models, including Houston’s Resiliency Workforce Collaborative.

Pipeline to Teaching
The College Board and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching have partnered on a bid to strengthen the K-12 teacher pipeline and expand student access to career-connected coursework. The two organizations are launching a multi-state coalition to design teacher certification pathways and to reimagine how educators are trained and supported to teach high school courses that prepare young people for college and careers.

AI and Jobs
Several factors are contributing to the weak job market for young people, including AI as well as interest rates, tariffs, and the over-hiring of coders during the pandemic, Molly Kinder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said recently on the Your Undivided Attention podcast. Kinder, who coauthored a related report from the Budget Lab at Yale, said news media headlines about AI’s impacts on jobs have been sensational, instilling more fear than is justified.

Merged Course Platforms
Coursera and Udemy have announced a merger, creating a combined company worth roughly $2.5B. Leaders of the two online course providers cited an AI-driven inflection point, arguing that the united platform will be in a stronger position to “address the global talent transformation opportunity.” Coursera recently reported 191M registered learners globally. Udemy has thousands of enterprise customers, including Ericsson, the World Bank, and Volkswagen.

Job Moves
JB Holston has been named the next executive director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education. Holston, a senior advisor at Boston Consulting Group, previously was CEO of the Greater Washington Partnership. He will succeed Angie Paccione, who steps down next month.

Martin Kurzweil has been named managing director of Ithaka S+R, a nonprofit focused on helping colleges improve their performance. Kurzweil will lead the organization he joined in 2014. He will succeed Catharine “Cappy” Bond Hill, a former Vassar College president who will step down after nine years at the helm of Ithaka S+R.

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