The higher education community didn’t find much to celebrate in Congress’s passage of the “big beautiful bill,” with one notable exception: the expansion of Pell grants to shorter-form workforce training programs. Workforce Pell has finally become law after years of advocacy, stalled negotiations in Congress and a groundswell of support from educators, employers and learners.
Many in the higher education community have cheered the inclusion of workforce Pell. It’s been a long time coming, and it holds the potential to rewrite higher education as we know it. It’s the first-ever federal funding stream specifically designed to cover the costs of short-term training programs, and in doing so will push colleges and universities to align better with the world of work. It’s an incentive to break down the cultural, operational and programmatic silos that so often exist between degree programs and short-term workforce programs. It’s a forcing mechanism to answer the age-old question of how to measure employment and earnings data from these programs.
But the bill’s passage is just the first step. Just because workforce Pell has been signed into law doesn’t mean that we know how to implement it yet. Plenty of questions remain about how the outcomes of these programs will be tracked, and how states and the federal government will work together to implement them. In short, translating policy into practice – fulfilling the program’s potential to realign higher education with the needs of a fast-changing economy, and to create new pathways to economic opportunity – will take a lot more work.
Gearing up for change
First and foremost, colleges have some redesigning to do. For years, higher ed institutions have built their own short-form training programs, often (and ideally) in partnership with local industry. Absent a national system, they’ve developed curricula and ways of tracking those programs that are often school-specific.
Now that these programs are eligible for federal funding, though, a lot is going to change. And colleges will need to take the lead in making those changes. That means investing the capacity and infrastructure to collect, analyze and report out verifiable outcomes data. It will require creating new – or evolved – governance structures to better integrate workforce programs into the rest of the institution’s systems and infrastructure. It will, of course, depend on buy-in from faculty — who will need to be empowered to work with employers and design programs into a context that meets the Pell criteria and ensures trackable connections to upward economic mobility.
To enable success across America’s colleges, state system leaders have a lot of work to do as well. As written, the workforce Pell provision puts a fair amount of burden on states, from monitoring workforce training programs to ensuring that the credentials students earn are portable across systems. But state education leaders have a lot on their plates, and success will depend on working proactively to manage that burden.
The states that emerge as leaders in workforce Pell implementation will be the ones that bring together higher education systems with workforce boards and executive branch leadership to identify which programs are most “in-demand” for their local economies. They’ll be the ones that take the lead on building or reforming systemwide policies – like credit for prior learning – that will ensure these short-form programs are stackable for learners. And they’ll be the ones doing the hard work of quality assurance for both new and existing programs.
Employers’ role
While they’re not mentioned in the bill, employers have a role to play, too. After all, in order to align their training programs with workforce needs, colleges have to know what their local workforce actually needs. That depends on commitment from employers to collaborate with the colleges in their region — including not just sharing information on the jobs they’re hiring for and the skills they need from applicants, but actively co-designing programs with institutions, not to mention actually recruiting and hiring from those programs.
This can’t be a one-time collaboration, either — employers and colleges will need to work together on an ongoing basis to keep their programs up-to-date. But the employers that stay at the table with institutions in their state or region, and work closely with them to ensure their training programs are up to date, will reap substantial rewards in the form of stronger and more resilient talent pipelines.
Work already underway
Making workforce Pell work will depend on all of these stakeholders stepping up. The good news, though, is that some schools and systems are already showing that it’s possible.
Consider the work already underway at the Colorado Community College System, which has scaled a short-term training program for qualified behavioral health assistants across the state thanks to philanthropic and public funding. That pathway now has a 73% completion rate and qualifies for Medicaid reimbursement.
And beginning this fall, more than a dozen Colorado high schools will offer one of five behavioral health “micro-pathways” – designed by my colleagues at the Education Design Lab in tandem with Colorado’s community colleges and 50+ employers in the state – creating a pipeline into the new associate degree in behavioral health. That program didn’t happen overnight. But the intentional investment of institutional leaders, state decision-makers, and employers has made it a reality that’s transforming students’ lives.
At a time when higher education in the U.S. is facing increasing skepticism, workforce Pell has the potential to help colleges do more to shape the future of work. And as a former community college leader myself, I’ve seen firsthand what it takes to bring together colleges, state leaders and businesses to actually bring these programs to life. It’s not easy. But if we can do it, the result may be a version of higher education that looks different than today’s — in a way that students, employers and policymakers alike can all get behind.
