Well, we'll definitely have fewer people going to college.

The workforce costs of the changes to student loans and how four-year schools could use the new Workforce Pell to survive.

The issue

Congress just did its best to slam the door for people without means to reach higher-wage occupations requiring a degree. We kind of need those people to fill some awfully important jobs. Maybe they still can.

Explain.

I’m a first-generation(ish) college student.¹ Over the years, folks in higher education have picked my brain on how they get more students from low-income or first-generation backgrounds at four-year schools. At times, I have said “Give them money” far more quickly than wanted or appreciated.

To put it in very simple math that strips out my personal experience: college costs money. People who don’t have money don’t exactly have the best sense of how to get money because they don’t have any. Giving those people the means by which they can cover the cost of college (money) results in more of those people going to college.

It also makes them feel secure enough to aspire to fill jobs that employers and society needs filling. I do think we need fewer jobs with degree requirements and more effort to actually hire people without degrees. It’s also true that we still have jobs with shortages where it’s going to be hard to ditch the degree. Some of them are awfully important and hard for AI to replicate, like nursing and medicine.² Heck, increasing the number of people in medicine whom, upon occasion, might not have had means has been shown to improve the quality of care.³

Of course, giving money to people without money at scale is… not exactly how higher education works. I have been part of this conversation for two decades now. Speaking very frankly as someone who entered college as an outsider, that mindset doesn’t sync with universities’ longtime role as a gatekeepers for wealthier layers of American society. There are institutions that do a better job at opening doors,⁴ but for many college administrators and donors, poor students don’t look as likely to be someone who will come back and help the school later as those who already have means.⁵

I think that shows an extraordinary lack of imagination, but I also acknowledge that the ragged politics and economics of higher education also have incentivized some schools to cater even more toward wealthier students. Midway through my time at Alabama, my alma mater made changes to scholarship funding that, had they happened a couple years sooner, would have prevented me from having the money I needed to go to school there. The reason why? To attract higher-spending, out-of-state students from wealthy suburbs to help make up for below-average state funding.

Even that option likely will go away very soon for many schools. Declining birth rates mean that there aren’t as many wealthier kids to go around. Given that we already have too many four-year schools and decreasing demand, a good many of them could go away in the coming years because of a lack of students to help pay the bills.

These are all complicated problems that have gotten harder over the past few years as the cost of college ballooned and the return on that investment has appeared to diminish for many young people.

Don’t worry, though: Congress is here to make things worse.

As you probably heard last week, lawmakers finally completed work on The GodBilla Is Majestic Act. In addition to doing many other things that will make it harder for people to climb socioeconomic rungs, Congress effectively cut off access to jobs requiring a four-year degree for many students from lower-income backgrounds.

Congress installed new borrowing caps that are unlikely to keep up with attendance costs—even at in-state tuition levels—for many students.⁶ The bill sets $50,000 per year borrowing caps on professional degrees and a $200,000 lifetime cap. Both will make it harder for a student without means to enter medical school, which has an average cost of $60,000 per year and $240,000 overall.⁷

Of course, these changes accomplish a key goal of the current congressional majorities. Aside from “apprenticeship stuff” and “efficiency,” “We need fewer people going to college” has pretty much been the mantra of this Congress on workforce. The bill certainly will assure that.⁸

So where will students go if they can’t afford college? As I have written about the past few months, this bill mostly kinda sorta aligns with the fuzzy (and contradictory) workforce goals of the Trump Administration and its congressional and political allies. They believe that if you prevent young people from going to college they will head to the trades or the factory floor,⁹ where employers says they are struggling to find workers, albeit for questionable reasons.

Beyond a big logic leap, seeing through that second part requires more money than I think the Administration and Congress are willing to spend. The final bill did include a version of Workforce Pell—short-term Pell grants for jobs-focused training—that survived the Senate Parliamentarian in part by limiting eligibility to accredited institutions like colleges and community colleges.

For community colleges, this could be a huge boon now that they don’t have to compete with unaccredited programs as they would have in earlier versions—that is, if community college students can ever access the money.

As someone who has implemented messy workforce statutes in the past, I think it’s going to be harder than it needs to be to get money out of this version of Workforce Pell. It requires gubernatorial designation of a 150-to-600-hour, eight-to-15-week program¹⁰ as eligible for funding, and the (staff-depleted) Department of Education must annually verify several technical details of approved programs.¹¹ Eligible programs also have to be established for at least one year, making it harder to set up new programs to tap into the new market. All for an amount of money that likely will be significantly less than the $7,400-per-year maximum available for college students who take a full load of college classes.

Therefore, much like America’s main pot of workforce cash—the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act—Workforce Pell looks to be a maze of bureaucratic switchbacks meant to ensure the government spends as little money as possible on workforce development. In theory, you could blend Workforce Pell and WIOA, but even if you work out the individual eligibility math, WIOA cash favors the shortest and least amount of help possible. That has meant that longer programs that work and the government actually wants to promote—like Registered Apprenticeship—get a microscopic amount of funding from WIOA. Without significant changes—ones I don’t think this Congress would make without causing more damage—I’m doubtful these two funding sources will blend together easily, which is most of the battle in ensuring they blend together at all.

That is not to say what Congress left behind is all bad. I think there is a potential lifeline here for universities if they are willing to crack the gates a little bit wider for people without an abundance of means.

So what do we do about it?

Congress required that Workforce Pell dollars support programs that provide credit toward certificates or future degrees. Put another way, when you complete a program eligible for Workforce Pell, it could count as a chunk of what you need to earn a full degree later.

This, too, I think will be a boon to community college leaders, who—because they can’t just assume a wealthy alumnus might fund something—tend to be much more creative and revenue-minded than their four-year counterparts. If some of them are not already planning on partnering with apprenticeship programs to break those programs’ classroom instruction components into smaller and more fundable chunks, I suspect they will be soon.

Four-year schools should do the same. I’m not saying that Yale should open a welding program tomorrow; rather, public four-year schools should take advantage of the changes in the law by splitting up the degree for degree-required jobs where they already have a competitive advantage or outright own the market, such as medicine or engineering. This would engage the return-on-investment concerns colleges face with many young people by making it slightly less of an investment and help fill jobs where we need students who aren’t turned off by the price tag.

In other words, universities should set up programs where students can earn a few chunks of the degree and use them to get a job that matches their proven skill level, then finish the rest if they think they want it later.¹²

By making this approach more affordable and marketing it as such, universities could make up for potential revenue gaps by opening the door to more students who can pay a lower price point for some college, but not all of it—even with loan cuts. This would disarm the impact of the reduction in wealthier students due to the enrollment cliff. Also, unlike community colleges and workforce providers, four-year schools have more resources to navigate the bureaucratic switchbacks in Workforce Pell and help both themselves and their students maximize available funding. And their small-plates degree programs would have more credibility due to their universities’ existing brand and cache and relationships with large employers.

That is easier said than done. Colleges will have to fund these programs on spec for at least a year to access a relatively small amount of Workforce Pell cash. The so-called “commuter schools” built on helping midcareer professionals get ahead probably will seize upon this opportunity, but I don’t think it’s unfair to say there are some administrators and alumni who would rather their universities gatekeep than survive. And that’s before you get to accreditors—whose approval is a key part of Workforce Pell—and their willingness and speed in blessing things that are not quite shaped like the traditional four-year degree.

But as much as the four-year college experience is not made for people without means, opening the door to more of them is as viable a strategy as any to help them survive this moment and fill the degree-required jobs America needs to fill.

Donate to The Lenita Jacobs-Simmons Memorial Fund.

Last week, I wrote about the sudden loss of my friend Lenita Jacobs-Simmons, a true warrior for workforce. Her friends and family, along with the Greater Washington Community Foundation, have set up a memorial fund that will help create more opportunities to enter and grow within the workforce field. You can read more about it and donate here.

Card subject to change / Hello, valued customer.

First, apologies for another late newsletter due to travel and the consequences of travel. Following a 16-hour cross-country drive, my velociraptors kids have re-enacted several of history’s greatest revolutions.

Next week—calamity pending—I’m starting something a tad ambitious in this space. The short of it is this: we know we need to remake a great deal of the public policy around workforce in the United States. I’ve been in environments where big things happen without a plan—which, let’s be honest, is basically how Congress operates. Maybe, just maybe, we can build something that gets to where we need to go, spurs policymakers to try something different, and can be shared with the people who stand to benefit from making these systems better without explaining decades of workforce lore.

So next week, I’m going to start building that plan. I’ll do an introductory newsletter outlining how I think we make the pieces fit together in a more useful way. I’ll then build a policy document that lays out what this could look like in practice, bounce it off some key experts, and offer an opportunity for feedback for paid subscribers (including some more hands-on feedback for Founding Readers). I’ll then share it here with the feedback and store a more complete build in that resource section I keep saying is coming for paid readers.

The idea being to not only build a better policy—and breaks out of the 'regulate or don’t regulate' binary that dominates this space—but also offer more insight into how workforce policy actually gets made.

And eventually I’ll piece this into… something else.

So what big problem are we starting to fix next Tuesday? How to better regulate Registered Apprenticeship, of course.

FRIDAY: Speaking of which, the Trump Administration just said it’s not going to enforce antidiscrimination in apprenticeship. Seems bad. Plus new funding listings and other insights on what’s happening with federal workforce cash.

1. I fit within most definitions I have seen of the “first generation” label and I use “first generation” from time to time when folks need stuff in tidy buckets. I took my first college classes when I was 13, at least a year ahead of when my mother started hers, even though she finished a degree a couple years before me. Life is messy, though, and we’re living in an especially pedantic time of American politics, so I flag here that I use a load-bearing “ish” as necessary.

2. I imagine there is an AI Head who is willing to helpfully explain to me how a superagent could replace the work of 40 nurses. It’s at times like this that I wish my mom was alive to explain how she didn’t think that superagent’s “robot ass”—a phrase she would inevitably use, I assure you—could put in a line worth a damn.

3. I would appreciate this as someone who has gotten plenty of blank stares from medical professionals when I explain my family didn’t have health insurance when I was younger and that’s why one thing or another didn’t get fixed.

4. This fall, the University of Texas System will expand an initiative that (on paper) looks like it definitely will help lower-income students. Promise+ will cover in-state tuition for students from families earning $100,000 or less annually. Texas also is the home of the best first-generation state school program found by my Robot Research Assistant: Texas A&M offers up to $24,000 off the $60,000 in-state cost of its degree.

Unfortunately, that’s still less than half the cost of the degree. Now, I have been told since A&M joined the SEC that Texas and Texas A&M are not rivals, even if they’re now in the same conference. I know the cost of oil in the Permian isn’t what it used to be, but I do wonder if A&M can do better than those tea sippers up in Austin—a phrase I use for no reason whatsoever.

5. Disagree!

6. To show my work: the University of Florida has one of the country’s lowest in-state tuition costs at around $6,400, but it estimates its average in-state cost of attendance at $24,180, or $96,720. The lifetime cap on borrowing (without repayment) is $57,000 for independent students and $31,000 for dependent students. If you’re a dependent, the new law caps your parents’ borrowing at $65,000. Thus, at Florida, which is on the lower end of in-state costs, the new federal limits leave students $720 short under the school’s own estimate, and that’s before you get into the added complication of annual borrowing limits. There are on-paper ways of making up that gap, obviously, but yikes.

7. “But what about private loans?” you might ask. I can tell you from personal experience that if the choice is don’t go to school or go to a bank—where they feel considerably out of their depth—many young people (and their parents) from low-income backgrounds will choose the former, not the latter. Strangely, if you don’t have money, bankers don’t seem quite as friendly as they might for others.

8. I do think there is genuine belief among some lawmakers that imposing these loan limits will solve the student loan crisis by avoiding students from low-income backgrounds getting a college degree that doesn’t pay off professionally. Based on these lawmakers’ approach to finding solutions, they are liable to light your kitchen on fire if you mention you didn’t have enough to eat for dinner last night. Which frankly syncs with other parts of last week’s bill.

9. Thing is: you don’t have to kneecap the ability of young people who do want to go to college to motivate younger people to want to go into the trades and manufacturing. There has been a massive surge in interest in these occupations in recent years. The minds already have been changed, and policymakers just needed the actual opportunities to follow through on it, something that could be opened up through expanded federal funding for workforce training programs beyond the complicated mess that is this new Workforce Pell provision.

On that front, Congress’ response has been to cut the significant amounts of federal workforce training money in March, and the Trump Administration has proposed eliminating almost all of the Department of Labor’s workforce funding and replacing it with a greatly diminished block grant.

Cool.

10. An interesting aside: the math for a 600-hour, 15-week program equals out to 40 hours per week. That means the Workforce Pell section envisions a scenario where students enter a training program that is effectively a four-month, full-time job. By law, to attend that program, they will get less than the $7,400 annual amount available to college students who stay below certain income thresholds and take a full load. If you treated the Pell payout like a salary—and admittedly it shouldn’t be given that it’s intended to cover the cost of attending such a program—even the rosiest payout estimates fall well short of a living wage for a single person with no dependents anywhere in the country.

11. Unless regulations fill in the gaps, the bill also installs “stackable” and “portable” as key components of Workforce Pell eligibility but leaves the terms up to the definition of… whomever, something I have written about quite a bit in THE MONEY. On one hand, that makes implementing Workforce Pell even messier. On the other, I’m glad my drawer of stackable and portable T-shirts is still in the running for Workforce Pell cash in Wyoming or wherever.

12. Apprenticeship degrees—where paid on-the-job experience is a key part of the model—look like a good fit for this approach.