Getting through Workforce Pell's state freakout stage.
States are getting anxious about how much Workforce Pell puts on them. How should they plan ahead?
The issue.
Workforce Pell is going to create a lot of work for state officials. They don’t feel terribly confident they can do it, or that federal officials will help them all that much.
Explain.
We’re 141 days from the expected start date of Workforce Pell, which will open up grant resources for non-college, workforce-focused programs for people below a certain income level. While a lot of people are thrilled these resources are finally about to be available, Workforce Pell also will require a lot of front-end work from state officials before money can reach workers. I have heard growing fears in recent weeks about a slow or rocky start to the program.
To briefly address that last issue first: please don’t assume Workforce Pell is a failure if it has a slow start this summer. In fact, I would say that comparatively few eligible programs is the likelier than not possibility at this stage. Mediating expectations won’t be easy given how many times I have heard political leaders say “Now there’s Workforce Pell!” as the answer for nearly everything about workforce. Still, circumstances mean some tamping down of expectations of immediate success might be in the best interest of advocates who have fought hard for this funding.
Why? In an ideal world, which isn’t this one, there would be more time to sort out complicated requirements for program. As I wrote in November, the legal requirements of Workforce Pell describe the theoretical kind of program Congress was able to get approved by Congress, not good programs actually in existence.
There are things to like in those statutory requirements, like tying long-term eligibility to whether the program leads to the actual hiring of workers. There are also things I’m not sure are realistic, like eligibility requirements that would have a worker in training for as many as 40 hours a week for four months in exchange for payouts that might not be more than a few thousand dollars. And there are things that, while neat, might not be the easiest thing for existing, good workforce programs to sort to get the funding, like how to make sure their programs stack up into a degree.
I estimated in December that, nationwide, 0.3 percent of the more than 730,000 credentialing programs would qualify for Workforce Pell funding, based on what I was hearing at the time. Obviously, not all 730,000 of those programs are going to be quality and many need to be filtered out. Eventually, I think good programs will be able to tap into the money once they know the pathway.
To have a pathway, though, you need state leaders to build it. That’s where I’m increasingly hearing concerns.
The Department of Education regulates Workforce Pell, but its role is more backend than you might think coming into this discussion cold. Ed will verify things like completion rates and whether students’ wage gains were more or less than the fees they paid. Governors (or someone designated by them) will handle setting up the process of approvals, including assessing the length of programs and if each Workforce Pell-funded program stacks into Degree Voltron.
In December and January, Ed held public negotiations for the regulations that it will use to implement Workforce Pell. My understanding is that, fairly or unfairly, what state leaders took away from those hearings is that Ed is giving them a mess of unfunded mandates with a ton of expectations and no time to really get good processes in place.
What’s missing.
I like the idea of Workforce Pell. I like that it has quality controls around increasing wages and actually connecting people to jobs, the metrics that really matter in this business. What Workforce Pell pays out is not going to be much money, but it’s probably going to be enough to open some doors neither workers nor colleges knew were available to them.
I do think that Ed missed an opportunity in its negotiations to help make the process parts of Workforce Pell more intuitive, something that shouldn’t be seen as a sacrifice of the quality controls so much as a more effective way to put them in place. We’re still waiting on Ed’s final rule. In an ideal world, Ed will offer states clear templates for how to set up their approval processes in guidance documents unpacking the rule.
That’s not saying states need their collective hands held, but rather acknowledging that there is an awfully compressed timeline here, big expectations, and legal requirements that are really hard to put into practice. That type of directing of states is not the Trump Administration’s style, to say the least, but given the hype here (and that at least one chamber of Congress tried to rename the money “Trump Grants”), they might want to give states clearer guideposts for getting Workforce Pell off the ground.
So what should we do about it?
Well, in the presence of current pressures to make Workforce Pell work, and in lieu of federal guidance that eases implementation, I have an answer. If you’re a state leader who’s bothered by the unfunded mandates of all this, it’s probably not what you want to hear—but it is focused on the other metric that really matters in this business: getting things done.
I think there are good quality programs that can, and should, be supported by Workforce Pell. I think that state leaders, without having to do too much asking around, can figure out what they are. Ahead of July 1, state leaders should light the path for those programs to get approved and money spent by shepherding these programs into eligibility, or as much as Ed’s final rules allow.
What does that mean? Well, it doesn’t mean trading paper back and forth for months until a college figures out how to frame some nitty little point in a way that a state thinks fits all of Ed’s requirements. Instead, it means having a state official be someone’s policy concierge, coaching programs and colleges through an application process and helping them find answers where Workforce Pell has questions they haven’t been asked before. The endgoal being that they get the pieces in place so that when they ask for approval, that approval comes not too long afterward.
Those officials also should diagnose the chokepoints in college and state bureaucracies that could slow down consideration and approval for reasons that don’t have a dang thing to do with quality. The point is “beta testing,” or “proof of concept,” or whatever buzzy term you want to call knowing how to make the process effective for future programs without being onerous for onerousness’ sake.
It is a lot of work—I’ve done things in the same neighborhood plenty of times—but if I were, say, one of the states governed by future presidential hopefuls trying to paint themselves as “The Jobs Governor,” it would be a priority worth the investment of staff time and resources.
Someone has to make this work. It might as well be you.
Check out my new project blending apprenticeship and skills-first hiring.
Last week, Third Sector Capital Partners published a white paper by Dr. Joy Coates, Third Sector’s managing director for post-secondary opportunity, and me on what we’re calling “The Nexus Method.” In short, there’s a little-appreciated piece of existing Registered Apprenticeship rules that, when blended with skills-first hiring strategies, could fill the reported gaps in key sectors and improve the outcomes of both skills-first hiring and Registered Apprenticeship. The paper unpacks it and how it could be used in newsier fields, such as the trades, cybersecurity, and, of course, manufacturing.
You can read the paper in full here. It’s rare you get to break the news that there’s a cool strategy you can try out in workforce without big legislative changes. Also, if you like the attempts at practical policymaking and offering tangible examples that I bandy about this space, you’ll enjoy this paper quite a bit.
I greatly appreciate Third Sector for publishing and financing this research, and Lordy, it’s a blast to work with Joy Coates. Hope you’ll give it a read.
Card subject to change.
Speaking of panic: a lot of people are starting to get antsy about the Labor Department’s $145 million in apprenticeship funding, which DOL announced the existence of in January but has not yet started competing here in mid-February. If we don’t have the money on the street by Thursday, I’ll talk about some of the extra hoops facing DOL in this particular pot of money. I’ll also update what dollars you should be keeping an eye out for, as well as a little catchup on DOL’s recent activity to blend its programs with Ed’s.
