On Dec. 12, a negotiated rulemaking committee established by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) reached “consensus” on draft regulations to implement Workforce Pell grants that were enacted as part of the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” (OB3) Act earlier this year.
This is a significant, though not final, step in the regulatory process.
Negotiated rulemaking is a process required by the Higher Education Act (HEA) for any changes to the HEA student aid programs. ED assembles primary and alternate negotiators representing various stakeholder groups from those nominated by organizations and other members of the public. ED itself also is represented by a negotiator. In this case, the negotiators were dubbed 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 a negotiated rulemaking 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 version of the regulations agreed to by the committee when it issues a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to the public.
As a result of comments made in that next rulemaking phase, the regulations may change further. ED will likely release the NPRM in the next few months, with the aim of having final regulations in place by next July 1.
Several changes were made to the draft regulations issued by ED before the negotiated 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. They return to Washington the week of Jan. 5 to consider another major topic: a new accountability process for all degree programs that was also enacted in the OB3 Act.
