New Congress, New Community College Investment

It's official: both the Senate and the Presidency will change parties. Single-party control–even with a closely divided Senate–increases the likelihood of up to three big legislative packages passing over the next two years. This fact–and the focus on COVID recovery–means the likelihood of a new program to support innovation at community colleges and get people back to work just went up.

The good news is we have been here before and we have a road map for a successful investment. The Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) program was a $2 billion investment in the capacity of community colleges to retrain adult workers. Over four rounds of grant-making from 2011-2014, more than 700 institutions–nearly two-thirds of all community colleges–received a TAACCCT grant as a single grantee or part of a consortium of colleges.

We studied this investment for nearly three years–reading more than 200 final grant evaluations. Our resulting analysis found that students who participated in these programs were twice as likely to complete a program or earn a credential and 30 percent more likely to have positive labor market outcomes than comparison students.

Based on our research, we believe there are some easy fixes that would make a new community college investment even better. You can read more about our recommendations here. We propose:

• Prioritize consortia. We found that larger colleges or consortia of colleges in one state fared better. We recommend that the grants go to state consortia of community colleges or single institutions that enroll at least 15,000 students.
• Increase grant size. Grants should range from $10 million to $15 million, the middle of the TAACCCT grant range but with a larger average size.
• Space out rounds of grants. We recommend three rounds of grants, with solicitations issued 18 months apart to allow adequate time to adjust for changes in the economy and to learn from prior rounds of grants.
• Designate funding for states. Each grant should include a 5 percent set aside to be awarded to a state agency for technical assistance, policy development, and data access while supporting scale and sustainability.
• Designate funding for federal administration. We recommend setting aside 5 percent of the total investment to fund an interagency office with staff from the Department of Education and the Department of Labor to administer, provide technical assistance, and rigorously evaluate the program.
• Focus interventions. We found through our research that student supports, like enhanced advising, were very effective. We would require 25 percent of the grants be used for student support services. After that, colleges should focus on just one or two interventions identified by the federal government. This is the approach used in another Obama era program–First in the World.
• Reshape evaluation. Every grant should have a third-party implementation and sustainability evaluation, due one year after the end of the grant. We learned a lot from the descriptive TAACCCT evaluations. At the same time, we need to know the impact of the interventions. To get at this, 30 percent of grantees should receive additional funding to support a rigorous impact analysis based on a competitive application process. This can ensure grantees have the data and capacity to do a high-quality causal analysis.

Right now, we have an unprecedented need for community colleges to help prepare people to get back to work. After the catastrophic economic shock of March and April, the economic recovery has continued to slow. We still have almost 10 million fewer jobs than we had in February of 2020. And while temporary layoffs are continuing to fall, permanent job losses are on the rise. The percentage of people leaving the labor market also continues to rise to a level we haven’t seen since the beginning of the Great Recession. With this new congress and a new administration where the First Lady teaches at a community college, we have an opportunity and an obligation to provide more federal support for community colleges. And we can do that in a way that maximizes the impact.

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