A panel of higher education policy experts on Monday laid out the landscape for community college leaders gathered in Washington, D.C., as they prepared to visit with lawmakers to make their cases for two-year college priorities.
The group began the discussion at the annual Community College National Legislative Summit (NLS) by reviewing the past year to develop a framework for what might happen over the next year. The conversation touched on Workforce Pell, accreditation, appropriations and uncertainty regarding how the Trump administration will disburse funds for certain grant programs. (NLS is run by the Association of Community College Trustees in partnership with the American Association of Community Colleges.)
A common theme in the discussion was for community colleges to develop closer ties with state agencies and governors’ offices.
Kristin Hultquist, CEO and founding partner of HCM Strategies, noted that states will play a large role in running Workforce Pell. On July 1, the Education Department (ED) will begin accepting Workforce Pell applications from governors, she observed.
“If you don’t have a strong working relationship with your governor’s office [and] statewide workforce development board, those are the relationships you need to tend to,” she said.
The addition of Workforce Pell plus increases in general Pell applications will add to the financial strain on the program, Hultquist said, noting that there’s a 27% increase in the number of students qualifying for the Pell maximum award. She said she hopes Congress will infuse more money into the program with fiscal year 2027 appropriations.
‘Proof of concept’
The panel also discussed the administration’s so-called interagency agreements. ED signed agreements with a handful of other agencies to co-operate selected programs. For example, ED has sent certain staffers to the Department of Labor, which will run career and technical education, adult education and other programs.
Preston Cooper, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said the administration is taking this route, in part, since it would need approval from Congress to shutter ED. This approach is a “proof of concept,” he said, showing that certain programs would not be affected if they weren’t run by ED.
But “if something goes wrong, then that discredits the whole idea of moving programs over to different agencies,” with advocates citing it as a reason to keep ED, he said.
Jared Bass, senior vice president for education at the Center for American Progress, said there are many concerns with this shift, among them, whether agencies have the capacity to handle large additional programs. He compared it to Texas sending its programs to a much smaller-staffed Delaware to run them. He added he’s concerned there could be snags with running certain grant programs, which could result in delays in disbursements on which colleges and students rely.
Advocate and inform
College advocates should also pay attention to how ED’s revised grant priorities shape funding in the upcoming cycle. It’s not unusual for incoming administrations to set their own priorities, said Amanda Fuchs Miller, president of Seventh Street Strategies and a former Education Department official. She encourages colleges to prepare to apply for those competitions differently without changing goals to serve students, citing the recent Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grants, for which ED revamped its priorities.
Fuchs Miller also said it’s crucial for college advocates to share with lawmakers any challenges they faced in getting grant awards from ED, especially when they were cancelled or delayed. Members of Congress have historically been informed when the administration makes changes to grants or ends them, but that’s not happening currently and lawmakers may not know it is happening, she said.
