Federal Support for Local Workforce Solutions

Community colleges are poised for an expanded role in the U.S. economy as the nation bounces back from the COVID-19 pandemic, according to panelists at a Dec. 7 webinar on federal support for local workforce solutions, hosted by Penn IUR.

Congress is weighing a $40 billion investment in workforce development as part of President Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan, relying on community colleges to match people who were disproportionately hurt by the pandemic to an increasing number of high-paying jobs that don't require a four-year degree.

“Community colleges play a critical role in providing educational opportunity, especially for people from historically underserved groups," said Penn IUR Faculty Fellow Laura Perna, Vice Provost for Faculty and GSE Centennial Presidential Professor of Education, who organized the session. “One role of government is to create, implement, and fund policies that level the playing field for high-quality education, and help more people get the education needed to meet workforce needs.”

The webinar was the second in a series of online discussions on education and workforce solutions for an equitable future, moderated by Perna and Penn IUR Co-Director Susan Wachter. Panelists included James Kvaal, U.S. Under Secretary of Education; Harry J. Holzer, John LaFarge, Jr. S.J. Chair and Professor, McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University; Theresa Y. Singleton, Senior Vice President and Community Affairs Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia; and Donald Guy Generals, President, Community College of Philadelphia.

“We have a really important challenge ahead of us," Kvaal said. The nation faces a range of problems, from a “hollowed out” manufacturing sector and supply chain bottlenecks to student debt and racial inequities. “We need a new skills strategy as part of an overall economic strategy to address those challenges.”

Kvaal said millions of jobs exist that pay more $65,000 a year and don't require a four-year bachelor's degree, and the number is increasing. President Biden's infrastructure and Build Back Better bills would create more than 1.5 million jobs per year over the next 10 years, many of which will only require education between the high school and college level, he said.

The American Rescue Plan Act, passed earlier this year, brought the total amount of emergency relief to colleges and their students to $76 billion, Kvaal said. The money helped students to make ends meet and stay enrolled, he added, while allowing institutions to keep faculty and staff employed and invest in public health measures to slow the spread of the pandemic.

Kvaal said the $40 billion for workforce development in the Build Back Better bill, passed by the House of Representatives and awaiting action in the Senate, includes: funds for sector-based partnerships and apprenticeships; a major investment in community partnership programs; new investments in historically black colleges; a half a billion dollars to help improve graduation rates; and a $550 increase in the maximum Pell grant [to $7,045]. Separate from the legislative efforts, Kvaal said the government has been working to simplify applications for Pell grants for low-income undergraduates and has canceled debt for 640,000 borrowers.

Singleton said community colleges can foster a more equitable workforce recovery by putting students on a path to “opportunity occupations,” as she called the jobs that pay more than the median salary but don't require a four-year college degree. The Philadelphia Fed has served as research advisor to a fund that supported six community colleges across the nation in developing micro-pathway programs to prepare learners for careers in for high-growth, high-paying fields such as information technology, health care, and advanced manufacturing.

Singleton said new research will show that the number of unemployed people without a bachelor's degree was 56 percent higher in June 2021 than in February 2020, even as overall unemployment declined. At the same, she said, the number of postings for opportunity occupations has grown by 2.3 million during the pandemic. “There's just a huge number of these jobs coming on the scene,” she said.

A 10 percent drop in community college enrollment in the spring of 2021 and a 6 percent decline in the fall from a year earlier are a problematic development, she said.

“Money is not enough,” Holzer said. Programs should be designed to reach the students who can benefit and to ensure that they are able to complete the training. The need for “access and affordability” is one reason why the President's original plan had called for free community college, he said.

“How do you expand the offerings and get more people into those programs have them finish in a way that labor market will reward them?” Holzer asked. “There's a model we call sector-based training, where the training providers work hand-in-hand with employers in high-demand sectors, high-demand industries, and train for those jobs in health care and advanced manufacturing and the like.”

He said “little gems” such as Project Quest in San Antonio, Texas—which combines skills training in emerging careers with wrap-around services—have proved very effective, but tend to be expensive. The goal now should be to bring costs down, he said, while expanding training programs and making sure they are nimble enough to keep up with the changing demands of the job market.

One silver lining of the pandemic, Holzer said, was the use of remote learning, which could help lower the cost of job training programs.

“We did have to move to a remote environment,” said Generals, at the Community Colleges of Pennsylvania, “but I view that as an augmentation,” rather than a replacement of face-to-face teaching.

The partnerships that the Build Back Better plan encourages are “really what we do best,” Generals said. “We work with our workforce development environment, we work with the chamber, we work with the four-year institutions, we work with the high schools, the public schools, we work with business and industries,” he said. “The challenge, as I see it, is they do cost.” Equipment, training and teachers for advanced manufacturing jobs, for example, are “incredibly expensive,” he said.

Given the increasing emphasis on job training, Generals said the government should not only increase the dollar amount of Pell grants, but also should expand eligibility.

“Right now, Pell grant dollars don’t support non-credit educational training unless you are able to build up that program to a certain amount of clock hours,” he said. “It's an old model. It's based on liberal arts education. It's based on transferring to a four-year baccalaureate program. And it's not based on the workforce development environment we're trying to create now.”

The federal government has been “quite supportive, particularly as related to the issue of equity,” Generals said, citing minority-oriented programs in life sciences. Job opportunities in life sciences "]”is an area we can expand upon,” he said. “Of course, there's the green sciences. That's an area of new science development and workforce development we can leverage in our favor.”