Background and Introduction

Since their earliest days, community colleges have been asked to fulfill a “dual mission” that includes meeting the academic and workforce development needs of their communities. Community colleges are a critical piece of our higher education infrastructure, as open access institutions providing a range of credentials, enrolling close to 40 percent of all undergraduates. As providers of career-technical and workforce education, they are also critical to the success of local economies, meeting the needs of both job seekers and employers. Indeed, according to a recent survey by the Community College Research Center, 48 percent of working adults have used community colleges at some point in their lives to advance their job prospects.

While community colleges seek to carry out their dual mission, the policy environment in which they operate is heavily tilted toward their academic mission, with the lion’s share of state and federal funding going to support degree-seeking students. But many community college students are not interested in a degree. Rather, they are looking to obtain the skills and/or credentials necessary to get a job, keep a job, or move up in a job. In Illinois, for example, of the 600,000 plus students enrolled across the state’s 48 community colleges in 2020, nearly a quarter were enrolled in “noncredit” courses and 47 percent of students in credit-bearing courses indicated that they were not seeking an associate degree.

Meeting the needs of the large share of community college students seeking specific skills for local, in-demand jobs can be challenging for colleges. The funding colleges rely on for their academic offerings – Pell grants, federal student loans, state-based student aid programs – often cannot be used to pay for programs that are short-term, highly-specific, or need to be delivered on-the-job or be taught by experts other than faculty. Funding for job training through programs like the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, Trade Assistance Act, or state workforce programs, is often insufficient to cover the costs of standing up and/or sustaining a new program.

To better understand the challenges and opportunities for community colleges face in developing financing strategies to support their workforce development mission, New America partnered with the Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF), a community development financial institution (CDFI) with forty years of experience as a lender and advisory to the nonprofit sector. Using research from our New Models of Career Preparation project, which is identifying and elevating high-quality non-degree programs at community colleges across the country, NFF interviewed college leaders, as well as experts in the fields of workforce development and community college administration. The interviews took place over a five-month period spanning 2020 and 2021, and enabled NFF staff to analyze how non-degree programs are currently funded, to identify innovative approaches, and to explore how specific practices contribute to a program’s ability to achieve its mission. The research also surfaced a number of promising financing practices that college leaders can use to secure the resources they need to build high-quality non-degree programs.

Over the past two years, American workers and employers have been wracked by a set of unprecedented economic and social challenges. Many employers are struggling to find and retain workers, while many workers are looking to move into jobs that pay better and are safer. For both groups, access to high-quality non-degree workforce training programs can play a critical role in helping them reach their goals. This paper offers some concrete strategies that community colleges can use to stand up and sustain the non-degree programs that their communities need.