Congress wants to Supersize Community College Training through TAACCCT

Today, the House introduced a new bill that included $9 billion over 7 years for the federal Trade Adjustment Act Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant. This funding would be a win for our economy, a win for displaced workers, and a win for community colleges.

Congress created the original $2 billion TAACCCT grant in 2010 at the height of the Great Recession. The program was the largest targeted investment in community colleges the federal government had made and was meant to increase the schools’ capacity for providing training for in-demand jobs.

We conducted an 18-month research project to determine the impact of TAACCCT that included reviewing each of the 220 final evaluations for individual TAACCCT grants. We used a set of criteria to determine which evaluations were sufficiently rigorous for inclusion in a meta-analysis of the impact on student outcomes. After extensive review, we found thirty-six studies that met the criteria for inclusion in the meta-analysis, a statistical method that combines the results of multiple studies.

The impact they showed was impressive.

We found participants were nearly twice as likely to complete a program or earn a credential and were twenty-seven percent more likely to have positive labor market outcomes--employment or wage gain--than similar students enrolled in non-TAACCCT programs.

This new bill plans to more than quadruple the size of TAACCCT.

This supersized version of TAACCCT would do even more to support people reconnecting to the labor market and the colleges that serve them.

Unfortunately, this current legislation does not make key changes that we have come to believe over the course of our research would make the program even better. These include:

• Creating a fund for states to help pave the way for access to labor market outcome data and support for scaling and sustaining innovations.
• Increased technical assistance support for colleges who may lack the capacity to create a competitive application but who enroll and serve many vulnerable student populations.
• Requiring colleges to use some portion of their grant on student support services like childcare, food, and emergency aid.

We hope Congress and the Department of Labor consider some of these changes in the program as the process moves forward.

The unemployment rate is still stubbornly high. The labor participation rate is still at historic lows. As the United States pulls out of the pandemic, we need to connect more people to good job opportunities and especially those hit hardest by the pandemic -- women, racial minorities, and rural communities.

To do this, the right federal policy move is to give more resources to our engines of opportunity: community colleges.

Bravo to the House of Representatives for committing to this historic investment in TAACCCT.

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