Foreword by Kevin Carey

The modern labor market is a scary place. Even if you’re good at your job, international trade and automation can take it away. Companies demand more skills than they used to from workers up front, and provide less training on the job. Benefits, wages, and job security are increasingly vulnerable to the demands of the bottom line. Unforeseeable catastrophes like a global pandemic can wipe out millions of jobs that never return.

For many workers, credentials are the best employment assurance policy. Credentials allow entry into prized professions and enable people to move between locations and industries. In the United States, the vast majority of credentials are granted by colleges and universities. For most people, job training happens on campus.

While people will beg, borrow, and steal to enter the upper echelons of higher education, the universities that people want to bribe their way into are irrelevant to the vast majority of current and future workers. Most of the people who are highly vulnerable to job dislocation have full-time jobs, families, or both. They don’t have the time or money to spend four years working on a bachelor’s degree. They need a shorter, straighter path to higher wages and a better job.

Over the last two decades, the higher education system has responded to this demand with a surge of new job-focused programs. Even as the number of traditional-age students moving into dorms in autumn has declined, the number of work-oriented credentials has exploded. Nearly all of these programs last less than two years, and many take less than one year. While the media like to indulge straw-man arguments with wholly imaginary “college for all” advocates who believe 100 percent of people need a bachelor’s degree, anyone paying attention to the real world can see a profusion of less time-consuming programs built around specific occupations and careers.

Enthusiasm for these programs is running so high that some policymakers want to open the floodgates to the vast reservoir of federal Title IV grant and loan dollars, which already allows students to take job training programs as short as 15 weeks, and allow people to use those funds to take job training programs as short as eight weeks long. But the wisdom of this approach is less obvious than it might seem. America’s higher education and labor systems are shot through with economic disparities, structural racism, and gender-based inequality. As the research analyzed in this landscape analysis shows, those problems are particularly acute in the short-term training field.

Much of the value of a four-year degree in the labor market comes from a combination of durable institutional brand names and professional-class acculturation. Short-term training programs offer no such value. They are worthwhile if and only if they immediately lead to job opportunities that pay enough to justify the cost of training. And one thing that’s clear from the research is that many existing programs don’t meet that benchmark, or even come close.

History teaches us that the free market for job training will not naturally correct for this problem. Organizational reputations are too pliable to marketing and consumers are too vulnerable to misinformation. Some programs leave students worse than if they had done nothing at all. Turbocharging an engine of exploitation with billions of dollars in federal subsidies will make matters worse.

Training programs have often reflected the deeply gendered and racialized nature of work. Women—particularly women of color—are frequently drawn to the promise of short-term training programs precisely because they have less and earn less than others in society. But too often they end up spending and borrowing for credentials that lead to low-paying jobs, or no jobs, and debt. Some of the credentials that colleges have created in response to the demand for job-oriented training are not actually valued by employers. By the time students find out, it’s too late.

As this report shows, there is great potential for expanding opportunities for high-quality training. People need a wide range of options for education after high school. Some will follow the traditional college track; many others will not. But the key word is “quality”—affordable, responsive, and built around actual jobs that employers are ready to provide. Education and training done well are hard work, and take time. Shortcuts to long-term prosperity are usually too good to be true.

And while the data and research findings are more than enough to guide us toward caution and a bias toward consumer protection when it comes to new programs and subsidies, they also underscore how much we don’t know, particularly when it comes to how programs affect people from different backgrounds. Short-term training programs and credentials have great promise, but only if they’re funded and regulated in the right way.

– Kevin Carey, vice president for education policy and knowledge management at New America