Right Hand Meet Left Hand: Aligning Workforce and Higher Ed Policy

Congress has finally been earning its keep this summer, particularly on the Senate side where there has been a flurry of activity on education and labor issues. Over the last month, the Senate has passed the Workforce Investment and Opportunity Act (WIOA), released a draft Higher Education Act (HEA) bill for discussion, and introduced a bill to establish a demonstration project for competency-based education. And rumors have it that a reauthorized Carl D. Perkins Act may not be far off. The attention is both overdue, and very welcome.

Noteworthy in the various bills are complimentary policies to support better career education and training. As postsecondary skills and credentials become a necessity for anyone seeking a decent, family-sustaining job, aligning workforce development and higher education policies is more important than ever. Our job training programs are, increasingly, higher education programs, but our policies can make it unnecessarily difficult for students to pay for them or institutions to implement them. Advocates of career pathway approaches should feel particularly encouraged as elements of WIOA and the Senate HELP committee’s draft HEA bill could make it easier for community colleges to build the partnerships and programs necessary to support them.

Let’s start with WIOA, a bicameral, bipartisan reauthorization bill that is moving quickly through Congress. The new law will establish a single set of common measures for adults across the core programs, including adult education and workforce training, and a similar set of common measures for programs serving youth. Common measures should make it easier to co-enroll and track participants across the various titles and programs. A next step, if the Senate keeps up the legislative pace, would be to align Perkins performance measures with the new WIOA measures. WIOA also calls for removing impediments to developing integrated education and training models and to co-enrolling adult education students into postsecondary occupational and academic programs. Under the current law for example, states are prohibited from using adult education funds to pay for job training, which makes the development of mixed models that integrate basic skills education with occupational training difficult to fund.

Moving on to higher education, the HELP committee’s proposal would restore the “Ability to Benefit” (ATB) provision in the Federal Student Aid program that allows adults who lack a high school credential to be eligible for Pell grants if they are enrolled in a career pathways program and/or demonstrate the capacity to complete college level work. ATB was critical to the success of integrated education and training models like Washington’s I-BEST programs that contextualize adult basic skills education into credit-bearing occupational training courses. Restoring ATB would be a nice complement to reforms in WIOA that will make it easier to fund these programs.

The committee’s draft HEA bill also includes authorization for a “Community College and Industry Partnerships Program” that would be jointly administered by the Departments of Education and Labor. Similar to the TAACCCT grants, which are ending this year, the program would fund partnerships between colleges and employers to build sector-specific career education programs and credentials aimed at adult and non-traditional students. Additional partners would include workforce boards, adult education providers, labor management organizations, and community-based organizations. TAACCCT has gone a long way toward helping community colleges develop partnerships that help students transition successfully into jobs and support local economies. It’s heartening to see the Senate recognize the importance of funding these efforts.

The proof, of course, is in the funding, and on that front there isn’t much good news. The WIOA bill devotes a lot of attention to career pathways, sector strategies, and industry partnerships, urging state and local workforce boards to build them. It does not, however, dedicate any new resources for those efforts (though the restoration of the Governor’s reserve should help). On the higher education side, we are still a long way off from a bill and who knows what will become of the Community College and Industry Partnership Program in the various re-writes and negotiations with the House. But the Senate draft bill is a step in the right direction. It reflects a growing consensus around the need to better support students seeking skills and credentials for work, particularly those at the sub-baccalaureate level who may need significant support to succeed at the postsecondary level. It also shows agreement around the value of strong partnerships between educational institutions and other local stakeholders. It’s a great starting point for the HEA conversation.