Workforce Pell is a shotgun marriage of messy legal requirements. It's going to need a lot of help to succeed.

What we can start to do to make it work.

The issue.

Training programs and colleges are digging into the shotgun marriage of requirements needed to push Workforce Pell through Congress. They’re finding legal requirements that don’t fit many programs in existence, and they’re wondering if the juice is worth the squeeze.

Workers may find themselves wondering the same.

Explain.

Here’s a thing I think when I read the requirements of Workforce Pell, some of which have been lurking for years in congressional legislation: it’s the type of law that happens when policymakers are inherently worried about who and what they’re funding.

In my experience, the more policymakers are nervous about what they’re funding, the more likely they heap on a bunch of requirements that make it harder for the money to get out. I’m fairly certain there have been times when that applied to Workforce Pell, including moments where some lawmakers feared that the lack of accreditation for providers—a requirement added late before it became law—meant Pell would become a windfall for Derek’s Training Barn, where Derek (real name Matt) teaches tomorrow’s workers how to adjust the font size in Microsoft Word for the low price of $2,000 plus fees.

For that reason, so many new workforce programs, like other policy shifts, are shotgun marriages between the initial idea and whatever requirements needed to be installed to get the dang thing into existence.

Unfortunately, what makes policymakers happy doesn’t often have a strong correlation with something that works. In the last couple months, I have heard a near constant stream of concerns among the providers expected to benefit most from Workforce Pell as to whether the juice will be worth the squeeze.

As of today, very few programs could be eligible for Workforce Pell funding when it becomes available next July. Some colleges are wondering if it’s good stewardship to try to bend their programs toward the money at all.

I also suspect the Department of Education has heard something similar. Last week, it made available $50 million to pay for “reforms” in programs to meet Workforce Pell requirements—weeks ahead of the first of hearings that presumedly will actually take Workforce Pell from working in theory to maybe perhaps possibly working in fact.

Why the angst? Well, when Workforce Pell kicks off next summer, participants can get cash only for programs that meet all these requirements, among others:

• The program has to be at least 150 clock hours, meaning the actual time a student is in a classroom, a lab, or other actual training must equal out to about six and a quarter days.

• The program also must be a minimum of eight weeks and a maximum of 15 week. Paired with the clock hours requirement, this means that for a workforce program participant to get funding, the program must train somewhere between eight and 19 hours per week. At the maximum, the worker would be in training for 40 hours per week for four months.

• Before becoming Pell eligible, the program also must be in existence for at least one year, and at least 70 percent of graduates must find employment within six months.

• To generalize, wage and cost data must also show that a graduate is making more money as a result of the program than they spent on it.

• All this must be blessed by governors and vetted on the back end by the Department of Education.

• Oh, and the program must be at an accredited institution, as a result of a last-minute deal to get the bill passed through reconciliation. At least at the outset, this theoretically means there is a good chance that only community colleges and four-year universities will offer Workforce Pell-fundable programs.

All that also requires a degree of state-level coordination, data tracking, and bureaucratic smoothing that I haven’t really seen come together juuuust yet.¹ That means that even if providers get their stuff together by next July, their states might not and end up costing students Pell dollars.²

That adds to an already tough lift for postsecondary education. Schools are feeling a financial crunch due to expected drops in enrollment due to flagging numbers of college-age young people and the Trump Administration threatening to take all of higher education’s money and eat all of America’s political science departments brick by brick in a show of dominance. It’s not exactly the best time to ask them to front money for something that might not have payoff for a few years, if at all.

They’re not the only ones. The density of Workforce Pell training could be a lot for workers compared to the amount of money in return. That could make the new Pell less of an incentive for workers to enter jobs training—and less helpful to getting through it—than I think lawmakers have assumed.

The case of Juice v. Squeeze.

As I feel like I’m writing a lot these days, upskilling is hard—way harder than most members of Congress complaining about workforce matters seem to think it is.

People aren’t just human-shaped bags of skills. They have lives and worries. Personal inertia has an advantage over making a significant life change, especially when people perceive that what it takes to make that change could make it harder for them to care for their families or themselves.

The more bases workers have to touch before getting the money, the less likely workers are going to do it. The fewer those dollars are, the less likely workers are going to do it. On both accounts, Workforce Pell’s requirements are tilted against workers seeing a viable pathway for themselves.

Interpreted on the more literal side—as big new laws tend to be—Workforce Pell only funds jobs programs that are pretty dense. Usually, a college semester is 15 or 16 weeks, during which students take 12 to 15 hours of classes. At maximum, Workforce Pell programs could be as long as 40 hours per week for 15 weeks—in other words, a full-time job for four months. At minimum, Workforce Pell programs are more than eight hours a week condensed into two months.

The easiest way to hit all those clock hours would be to meet them through on-the-job training, similar to the apprenticeship degrees that Joe Ross at Reach University discussed with me last week. That’s not exactly straightforward now if you’re coming to this work fresh. I deeply confused my Robot Research Assistant in digging into the clock-versus-credit-hours distinction in how on-the-job training is treated now.

Accordingly, I wouldn’t assume every college’s administrator or general counsel knows how to make this happen or will be willing to do the work if the payouts aren’t expected to be that much. Ed should be exceptionally clear and make compliance as easy as possible so students aren’t overloaded.

For all that work, there might not be all that much money to cover tuition or living expenses. Take it with a grain of salt because we’re eight months away from implementation, but the estimate I have heard most consistently is in the $2,000 to $2,200 range.³

Considering the training hours of Workforce Pell programs could far exceed a normal college courseload, one would hope that the denser short-term program, the less proration and the more a Workforce Pell grant will payout at least reasonably close to what college students can get (up to $7,395 this academic year). I have my doubts about that. It would be great if Ed’s implementation could avoid absurdly low payouts for what is tantamount to a full-time job.

And not to pile on, but there’s one more concern I have heard a few times from colleges over the past couple weeks. A lot of people have tried college in the past, and it hasn’t worked out for them in their careers. If those people have accessed Pell in the past, they will have access to fewer Pell dollars in the future due to Pell’s lifetime aid cap.

So what do we do about it?

I want to make clear that I see a ton of possibility in Workforce Pell,⁴ and I do think this particular model can work.

By income, it’s probably the best solution for tapping into the golden population, the midtwenties-to-midthirties population of workers who can’t get over the living wage in their current roles and tend to thrive when in workforce development with proper support. This group tends to make too much money to access funding from America’s most consistent workforce funding sources, which are built to route workers into the types of jobs these workers are trying to exit.

But I think the odds are stacked against Workforce Pell working right now, which is not great because I think a lot is riding on it. Congress tends to put a quarter of a thought into workforce programs, overregulates and underspends on them, then complains that the money is the problem when things don’t work out. We’re spending a quarter of what America spent on workforce prior to 1980, and I have heard things suggesting we could be in a cut-forward environment through the next decade, even if Democrats retake power.

This means Ed needs to take some key steps to make this easier to implement after it concludes the hearings coming in the next few weeks.⁵ Ed should make it as easy as possible for schools to use on-the-job training time to meet the clock hours requirements. That seems well within the wheelhouse of what it can and cannot regulate here without congressional approval.

There’s also a middleground of policies that the Administration could try, but I think will need a congressional fix if it’s going to happen. For one, I would set a hard floor that Workforce Pell programs will pay out no fewer than $2,500 per program. To extrapolate on something Joe told me last week: predictability is a killer for workforce programs looking for federal financial support. Training programs—like a business—need some certainty in what different customers are going to pay for the same product. A minimum expected payout for Workforce Pell would greatly help with that and draw in more providers—and students.

And here’s probably the most daring fix I would love for Congress to make, which I’ll freely admit is a side effect of hearing the Administration and Congress complain all year that college is not a good fit for too many workers: Congress should waive the lifetime cap on Workforce Pell eligibility for the first five years of the program.

It’s hard to say at this stage how big of a problem the cap will be, but if the Hill and the Administration really believe “college for all” has damaged the American workforce and denied businesses the skills they need, then this steps sends a hell of a message that they’re open to doing things differently.

Card subject to change.

Hey y’all, it’s almost Thanksgiving. Next Tuesday’s newsletter likely will be a two-for-one edition mixing THE MONEY with a shorter commentary and agenda setting piece. THE MONEY will take off Black Friday, a day where I will do my best to keep it from misbehaving in a Best Buy over an absurdly discounted flatscreen TV. Pray for me as I wrangle this subnewsletter amid The Time of Deals.

This Friday, when THE MONEY presumedly will be a functional member of newsletter society, I’ll be picking up the pieces post-shutdown and pondering where the cash is going.

Coming soon, I’ll also have a special piece for paid subscribers breaking down a key driver of Trump II workforce policy and how we should start changing one of the big conversation points of jobs policy over the past two decades.

So, minor thing.

1. If your totally awesome state has this figured out of course, please feel free to reach out and let’s chat: nick@jobsthat.work

2. Two other concerns that I left out of the main text because good Lord there’s a lot to cover: making sure accreditors are ready to bless these programs or don’t interfere with schools offering them, and helping individual schools sort how each of these programs can stack up into a degree.

3. The estimates in this New America piece very much align with those I’ve heard independently. One of the examples also suggests $4,000 may be on the higher end of the full-time job programs.

4. As I wrote in July, Workforce Pell could turn into a needed revenue source for four-year schools that have become very reliant on out-of-state students and others whose tuition got paid through the now-much-more-capped Parent PLUS federal borrowing program.

5. Another suggestion I have heard is letting accredited colleges buy apprenticeship programs or unaccredited training programs to fast-track past the requirement that the program must be in existence for a year and move these programs into accreditation. I’ll be honest: I don’t know how I feel about that on a variety levels, but I did want to mention it because it sure is interesting if nothing else.