Introduction

The collapse of good labor market opportunities for workers without a college degree is the elephant in the room in higher education policy discussions today. Over the last several decades, the earnings gap between those with and without a college degree has grown increasingly wide. A high school diploma no longer provides a guarantee of financial security, let alone opens the door to the middle class. Policymakers are asking what can be done to restore America’s middle class and what higher education’s role should be. Proposals run the gamut, from making college tuition-free so that more Americans can pursue a degree, to directing more higher education funding to shorter, non-degree programs that are easier to complete and are supposed to lead directly to a job.

The latter camp has introduced a host of proposals in recent years, known as “short-term Pell.” These lawmakers and advocates call for broadening the eligibility requirements for the Pell Grant—the federal government’s primary source of student aid for low-income students—to include extremely short-term job training programs (as short as eight weeks), some of which do not provide any college credit or require any college-level learning. Potential, newly eligible programs under these rule changes also run the gamut, from truck driving to emergency medical technician to help-desk operator. What these programs all share is the promise of a postsecondary credential that leads directly to a job in dramatically less time than it takes to get a two- or four-year college degree. 

Policymakers must consider whether these changes to the student aid programs will open up new pathways to economic security or divert precious student financial aid dollars to programs that fail to lead to good jobs and/or altering students’ educational paths and the opportunity to pursue further education. The American higher education system already does not do enough to ensure that the least advantaged students see the promise of a college degree. That needs to change. But at the same time, we have to make sure that the proposed solutions do not make things even worse. And we need to understand what has been tried in the past before funneling millions of dollars and, more importantly, millions of Black, brown, and low-income students into low-quality job training programs.

The good news is policymakers are not flying blind. Dressed up as “innovation,” the idea is hardly new. While “short-term Pell” is the latest iteration of proposals of its kind, it is far from the first. In fact, since the earliest days of federal financial aid, there have been efforts to expand the reach of its funding to help Americans not interested in going to traditional college. Today, a number of short-term programs are already eligible for federal student aid. This proposal would open the door for even shorter programs. The bad news is that there is little compelling evidence that these programs offer a promising future and the historical record has shown a disturbing pattern. 

Each time Congress has amended the Higher Education Act to include more vocational and job-focused programs, the federal government has struggled to contain the growth of fraudulent and predatory providers, or to ensure the quality of programs offered by even the most trusted ones. The lessons from those earlier reforms can help guide policymakers in their current efforts to address the educational needs of Americans.