College isn't the problem. It's everything else.
The big challenges that could get worse as part of the Trump Administration's war on 'college for all.'
The issue.
The Trump Administration is warring against the idea of college being the surest pathway to jobs, doing so in a way that will worsen the problems America’s over-emphasis on college created for people from low-income backgrounds.1
Explain.
The Administration has not been subtle that an executive order issued last week is the first step to dramatically shrinking and remaking America’s federally funded suite of workforce development programs.
In framing these initial steps, the Trump Administration made it crystal clear what it thinks is the problem with the American workforce.
After years of shuffling Americans through an economically unproductive postsecondary system, President Trump will refocus young Americans on career preparation.
Decades of failed political leadership have left America with a one-size-fits-all approach to workforce preparedness, which previous Administrations promoted as “college for all.”
The Federal Government invests over $700 billion a year in American higher education, but only about half of new college graduates find jobs that require college degrees.
There is some truth here. College has become a way of gatekeeping between the people society thinks deserve a decent job and the people it doesn’t, even when college isn’t really needed for that job.2 But by focusing on the institution of college—not how we treat college and who gets to go to it—and slashing away at alternative programs, the Administration is likely going to make this gatekeeping worse.
Let’s be clear about one thing: students of color and kids from low-income backgrounds kick ass in the most elite of higher-education settings. The problem of “college for all”3 was that its ambition didn’t come with a magical trove of public resources that could actually ensure there was college, for all. Instead, that focus—and the high standard for who could “make it” in college—taught administrators and teachers to sort those who were “college material” into one pile and those who weren’t into another.
The “college” pile of kids went to college. The “not college” pile went… somewhere else.
As college has become more expensive and less certain of a career payoff, that sorting has gotten worse, in ways all too familiar for workforce programs. To say a hard truth, many programs deal with young people discarded for being too hard to “fix” using the limited resources available to public schools.
These young people’s experience of being discarded stays with them because
When you are low income, you tell yourself a lot of stories about how the world works and who gets ahead. Because you don’t know that many people who ever got ahead, very often those stories aren’t true. And if you have no one else who went to college in your family, you or your people sort you away from that pathway because it costs money and you won’t make it. If you don’t do that on your own, the people who control the limited resources that touch your life—especially people in the public school system—will do it for you. Often for arbitrary (or fixable) reasons.
That sorting—and that feeling you’re never good enough—doesn’t go away for the people who have heard it. Believe me, as a first-generation college student and socioeconomic interloper, I know from personal experience.
It was a recurring theme last year when I talked to workers who could trace their career success to Biden-Harris Administration investments meant to create good jobs. They were waiting for the other shoe to drop because work wasn’t supposed to be that good for people like them, who had made “mistakes.”
So?
You can’t say you’re going to make up for the damage of “college for all” while absolutely slaughtering the underfunded suite of workforce programs set up as an alternative or new entrypoint to college. Which is very much the Trump Administration’s intent.
Fewer resources means more scarcity thinking, which means more sorting out of those who are not a “safe” enough bet for a workforce programs to admit. This already happens now. During my time at the Department of Labor, I intervened more than once in situations where a grantee or provider unfairly screened out participants the grantee thought would fail programs because they were a “risk.”
Their reason? “Risky” people risk cost too much money without enough payoff, even when the program was designed explicitly for those “risky” people.4
Shortly after last week’s order, DOL issued a “transparency report” on the average spending per student for the Job Corps program, the largest residential training program in the country, which serves low-income members of populations who fall into the “not college” pile .5 The between-the-lines of the report was that it is time to significantly remake or end Job Corps, something I now very much expect to come out of last week’s executive order.
I have questions about the numbers here, which are missing key details that I would look for as a former policy director of Job Corps.6 Acknowledging Job Corps has its own special history, the report still highlighted to me how Job Corps is a worst-case scenario for what could happen to other programs if there are much fewer federal workforce options available.
Political leaders have long seen Job Corps as a “fix” for a population of young people with disabilities, behavioral health challenges, and learning difficulties that they don’t know how to deal with. Paradoxically, to get more from the program, Congress has pressured Job Corps to take the right kind of student and more of them, as well as move its students into the first jobs available, which tend to be lower-paying ones.
The Hill did this while not keeping up spending on the program, meaning that as a result of normal and increased inflation, the program has been cut over a time when it was supposed to serve more people. Making the job even harder? Following two homicides a decade ago, Congress pressured Job Corps to boot out as many students as needed to honor zero-tolerance disciplinary enforcement techniques that can be… overzealous, let’s say.7
Now, Job Corps could be eliminated for costing too much and not doing enough, when all it had to do was everything.
At the same time it is shrinking non-college workforce options, the Administration’s policies will make college that much more out of reach for more people. The Administration, itself stacked with elite college graduates,8 has taken aim at equity programs that helped low-income kids—including white kids like your author—get an opportunity within higher education. The Administration’s efforts include reinforcing admissions offices’ use of standardized testing,9 which gauge your family’s ability to pay for test prep courses that unlock higher scores much more than your potential as a student.
In sum, all these policy changes, if enacted, mean there could be more of at least one thing for the college and not-college students of the future:
Less.
Card subject to change
Greetings, coincidentally, from beautiful Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where I have been doing some alumni stuff at my alma mater. I presume I’m the visitor from D.C. people are talking about, but I’ve been busy, so I’m not sure.
I might be back in this space before Friday with more stuff on the executive orders, depending on travel and any other hilarity that ensues in the interim.
FRIDAY: Markup time on reconciliation. Where is this money coming from, and what is the effect of the changes proposed on student loans?
NEXT TUESDAY: The killer app for workforce that helps employers and workers.
Many people I respect have recommended Kathleen deLaski’s book Who Needs College Anymore? I’m 15 percent into following through on their recommendation. There are interesting ideas here, and I want to revisit them in a later newsletter.
On Monday, the House and Education and Workforce Committee released bill text that would dramatically re-invent student loans and authorize short-term, employment-focused Pell grants. You can read the bill text here.
I’m still digesting, but I’m skeptical of some of the attempts by The Hill to make colleges responsible for their students getting hired. It’s not a bad idea in theory, but the concepts in the bill feel very much of a piece of some of the problems I describe with Job Corps in the main text. These flatter types of goals tend to result in a conveyor belt approach that routes students to jobs regardless of whether the jobs fit them or pay them decently or not. The provisions here also will be much harder to enforce with fewer federal staff.
Two asides here:
The Administration specified its war is with four-year degrees, but the Administration has a huge problem with execution. See, e.g., TUSKEGEE AIRMEN. Until proven otherwise, the jury is out on whether community colleges could end up targets of the campaign against “college for all” because they have “college” in the title, even though community colleges should be key beneficiaries of this policy switch.
I was at Opportunity@Work’s skills-first hiring event last week. I met someone who got hired through non-college pathways who still went back to college to fill in gaps, once they had the resources they needed to tap into the full well of benefits college can offer. It shows something where skills-first advocates have been ahead of the game: neither college nor the degree is the problem, it’s the way we treat them.
Which, as much as I value efficiency, is a ridiculous way of looking at the problem. And also how 150 percent of federal workforce statutes are built.
Even if the numbers are off, the Administration likely got what it wanted: Fox News published a story saying that Job Corps had an “eye-popping” budget. Annually, Job Corps’ operations budget is $1.7 billion—or about $50 million less than investors tossed at the failed Quibi streaming experiment, something I mention for no reason at all.
Much of my job—and biggest accomplishment—was reopening the system after the first Trump Administration effectively shuttered it during COVID. The other part was dealing with the remainders of Trump I attempts to offload the system’s costs to states and other programs.
I’ll probably write about the report in coming days, but I’ll note that I predicted this exact type of product—and its selective build—in Friday’s newsletter, hours before DOL published the report. I don’t know if we’ll see more of these from DOL, but I would not be surprised if YouthBuild or the Senior Community Service Employment Program got similar “transparency reports” in the buildup to the big report called for by the executive order.
Before someone labels me as “pro-murder” or something—and trust me, I have heard Job Corps opponents go there in the past—I helped rebuild much of Job Corps’ disciplinary infrastructure after the homicides. As an expert in the subject, my opinion is that the legal requirements set up by Congress foster an out-of-date disciplinary system that doesn’t prevent violence near as often as it blocks kids from finishing the program, getting jobs, and getting ahead.
As most administrations are, to be fair.
The Administration also asked the staff at the CHIPS program office—some of whom are the brightest minds in this work, full stop—to “justify their intellect” using SAT scores. Politely, that seems like the type of question that says more about the person asking it and what they’re hung up on.
And if that is the case, well, then bless their heart.