A negotiated-rulemaking committee on Friday reached consensus on draft regulations to implement Workforce Pell grants that were enacted as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OB3) this summer.
This is a significant, though not final, step in the regulatory process.
The Higher Education Act (HEA) requires negotiated rulemaking for changes to the HEA student aid programs. The U.S. Education Department (ED) assembles primary and alternate negotiators representing various stakeholder groups from those nominated by organizations and other members of the public. A negotiator also represents ED. In this case, the negotiators’ panel was called the Accountability in Higher Education and Access through Demand-driven Workforce Pell (AHEAD) Committee.
Usually, public two-year colleges are a distinct stakeholder group represented on such a committee, but in this case all public institutions — two-year and four-year — were lumped into one category. The American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) objected to the committee’s makeup, particularly given the importance of Workforce Pell to community colleges.
Nonetheless, community colleges were represented in the process by Tonjua Williams, president of St. Petersburg College in Florida and a former member of the AACC board of directors, who served as alternative negotiator for public institutions of higher education. Williams and Melissa Gonzalez, the college’s chief legislative officer, worked tirelessly during the week to raise areas of concern for community colleges.
Comments and clarification
Consensus is not the final word on the draft regulations. When a negotiated-rulemaking committee reaches consensus, ED is bound to use the panel’s version of the regulations when it issues a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to the public.
As a result of comments in that next rulemaking phase, the regulations may change further. ED will likely release the NPRM in the next few months, aiming to have final regulations in place by July 1.
Several changes were made to ED’s draft regulations issued before the rulemaking session, including changes to rules regarding credit articulation between Workforce Pell programs and certificate and degree programs, the process by which online Workforce Pell programs could serve students in other states, and the process by which programs that fail outcome metrics can regain eligibility. However, the draft regulations were not fundamentally altered during the week.
AACC will provide a detailed summary and analysis in the days ahead.
One important issue was clarified regarding the requirement that a program must have been offered for at least one year before it can be approved for Workforce Pell. Most had read the draft regulations to say that the one-year clock did not start until the governor approved a program, which would have pushed the entire Workforce Pell program back by at least a year. ED clarified that the clock starts on the date that the program first meets all the requirements, as determined by the governor, and that date can be before the program is submitted to the governor for approval.
The AHEAD Committee’s work is not done. Negotiators return to Washington the week of January 5 to consider another major topic: a new accountability process for all degree programs, also enacted in OB3.
