The U.S. Education Department (ED) on Thursday released materials for the upcoming session of the Accountability in Education and Access through Demand-driven Workforce Pell (AHEAD) negotiated rulemaking committee, which begins its work on Monday. The materials include a meeting agenda, complete list of negotiators and, most notably, draft regulations for the Workforce Pell program.
The materials indicate that ED plans to complete its work on Workforce Pell in the committee’s first session next week. This leaves the other major issue that the committee must negotiate – a new accountability scheme for degree programs – until the second negotiating session in early January.
Community colleges will be represented on the committee by Tonjua Williams, president of St. Petersburg College in Florida, who is an alternate negotiator for public institutions of higher education. Also on the panel is Randy Stamper, associate vice chancellor for career education and workforce programs at the Virginia Community College System, who will serve as the primary negotiator for the state higher education officers category.
More info on eligibility requirements
The draft Workforce Pell regulations add some details to the eligibility requirements that programs must meet, as well as the multi-step approval process that is established to approve programs.
The regulations first address a series of relatively straightforward topics, including program length (150 to 599 clock hours or credit equivalent over eight to 14 weeks), student eligibility and other issues. This section of the regulations clarifies by implication that most non-credit programs are eligible for Workforce Pell. Only non-credit or reduced-credit remedial courses that are part of a for-credit Workforce Pell program are deemed ineligible.
The draft regulations hew to the statutory text in making students who have already received a baccalaureate eligible for Workforce Pell and also state that a student may not receive a Workforce Pell Grant and a “regular” Pell Grant at the same time.
Governor’s role
The regulations then tackle the first stage of the approval process, which is done by the governor of each state in consultation with workforce boards. The governor is responsible for determining that a program:
-Is in a high-skill, high-wage or in-demand occupation and meets the hiring requirements of employers
-Awards a credential that is stackable and portable across employers (with some exceptions)
-Prepares students for a subsequent certificate or degree program in which they will receive credit for the work done in the Workforce Pell program.
The draft regulations give governors great flexibility in how they go fulfill these duties. The focus of the regulations is to require governors to develop written policies and procedures to make the determinations they are tasked with.
Other details
That said, in some areas the regulations do add refinements and conditions to the statutory text. For instance, the state’s methodology for determining whether a program prepares students for a high-wage, high-skill or in-demand occupation and whether the program meets the hiring needs of employers must consider whether the competencies taught in the program align with the competencies needed by employers and incorporate their direct input. Related technical instruction in registered apprenticeship programs in qualifying occupations is automatically deemed to meet employers’ hiring needs.
The state’s policy must also spell out the information that an institution must provide to the state so that it can determine whether the program meets the eligibility requirements. This includes information that enables the state to calculate program completion and job placement rates using administrative data, such as unemployment wage records. This task will be done by the states, even though it is in ED’s purview to determine whether a program has met the completion and placement requirements.
After determining that a program meets the state-reviewed requirements, it then certifies that determination to ED in a form that includes the program’s name, CIP code and date of approval among, other things.
The regulations pertaining to the metrics that ED oversees deviate from the statute in some important respects. First, the law requires that only programs that have been in existence for at least one year may be Workforce Pell eligible. But the regulations would start that one-year timeframe at the point at which the governor approves the program. This would mean that all programs would need to wait an additional year before becoming eligible, even if they had already existed for more than a year. AACC will work with negotiators to push for a change in this provision.
Similarly, the law requires that a program have a 70% placement rate, with no specification that the placement must be in an occupation for which the Workforce Pell program prepares students. The regulations, for the first few years, would hew to this statutory requirement and simply require placement in any job. However, eventually the mandate becomes stricter by requiring placement in the program’s target occupation or a “comparable” occupation.
The regulations allow for the possibility that completion and placement rates could be determined at the federal, rather than state, level.
‘Value-added earnings’
The other major institutional eligibility that the law assigns to ED is whether a program’s tuition and fees for a given award year are less than the “value-added earnings” of program completers from three years prior. Under the regulations, ED would do this by sending identifying information for a cohort of students to another federal agency with earnings data, similar to what is done under the gainful employment/financial value transparency regulations.
The draft Workforce Pell regulations state that, in order to build sufficiently large cohorts, ED would “look back” an additional two years to reach a cohort of 50 students. If that does not occur, ED would go back one more year – for a total of four years of program completers – to try and achieve a cohort of 30 completers. The reason for the shift from 50 to 30 students is unclear.
If combining four award years does not produce a cohort of 30 completers, value-added earnings would not be calculated for the program that year. And if the cohort of 50 or 30 completers that is submitted to the other federal agency does not produce earnings information for at least 16 students, value-added earnings would not be determined for the program that year.
The regulations are silent as to what, if any, are the ramifications for programs for which value-added earnings cannot be computed. The implication is that those programs could still be approved if they meet other conditions. This is important because no program can have value-added earnings computed for at least three years after Workforce Pell is implemented, so this formulation is potentially a way for programs to qualify despite that fact.
The American Association of Community Colleges will keep members informed about the ongoing negotiations.
