Feds will fund job training for all, but will short-term programs pay off?

Low-income Americans who see college as too slow and costly will be able to get federal help to pay for short-term job training, starting next July 1. As part of the Big Beautiful Bill, Workforce Pell grants will fund vocational programs that can be completed in as little as eight weeks.

In theory, only programs leading to high-value credentials will be eligible. In practice, defining what's valuable will be a huge challenge.

Seventy-seven percent percent of recent high school graduates either don’t enroll in college, don’t complete their degree or fail to land a college-level job," notes a recent report by AEI and the Burning Glass Institute. Funding job credentials could "open new, more effective training opportunities."

Or, it could be a huge waste of money.

There are more than 1 million credentials available, the authors write. Only about 12 percent lead to "significant wage gains."

The best credentials "yield annual wage gains of nearly $5,000, increase career switching success sixfold, and boost the probability of promotion in the earner’s current field 17-fold." Black and Hispanic women close the income gap with white men.

But, in what's become "the Wild West of credentials," it's very hard to define what's a valuable credential.

 To qualify for federal funding, short-term workforce programs "will have to meet high standards, including a minimum 70 percent completion rate and a 70 percent job placement rate," writes AEI's Preston Cooper. The median student's income would have to significantly exceed the cost of tuition.

It's important to screen out low-quality training, while funding well-designed programs, he writes. "Virginia’s community colleges offer a program called FastForward, which enrolls mostly students with no college experience and increases their annual earnings by an average of $4,000."

The Education Department, which has lost staffing, is supposed to weed out overpriced, fly-by-night job training programs, writes Sara Weissman in Inside Higher Ed. "State governors must ensure short-term programs prepare students for high-skill, high-wage or in-demand jobs."

New America's Wesley Whistle "worries students will still be lured into subpar programs at for-profits or slapdash, mass-produced online programs also eligible for the funds," she writes. New America is very dubious about the value of short-term credentials.

Community colleges are eager to participate, writes Lisa Larson on Community College Daily. To make workforce Pell work, community colleges must work with employers to design effective short-term training and "collect, analyze and report out verifiable outcomes data."