4-Year Institutions Eye Programs Eligible for Workforce Pell

When the U.S. Department of Education cited short-term workforce programs as a priority for grants from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), community college leaders celebrated. After all, many have spent decades building up these credential options, which are expected to be the main beneficiaries of the Trump administration’s Workforce Pell funding.

So, they were somewhat surprised when the FIPSE grant winners were announced last month and showed a number of four-year colleges and universities on the list.

Almost half of the grants doled out, 10 out of 22, went to higher ed institutions that aren’t community colleges. (Nine were four-year colleges or universities, plus Meharry Medical College, a private historically Black medical school. Michigan State University’s proposal included community college partnerships, but none of the others did.) Of the four-year institutions chosen, four of them—University of Missouri, Michigan State University, Mississippi State University and University of North Dakota—boast R-1 status, the coveted Carnegie classification connoting “very high” research activity. These types of institutions aren’t historically known for their robust short-term workforce credentials, but they won FIPSE grants for such programs including in data skills and construction.

David Baime, senior vice president for government relations at the American Association of Community Colleges, said community college advocates are thrilled to see ED prioritize short-term programs. At the same time, “we were a little surprised at the list of recipients, because they do not reflect the distribution of work that’s being done on campuses in this area,” Baime said. Community colleges have shown “deep and longstanding engagement” in developing short-term programs.

Now some four-year institutions seem to be getting in on the short-term credentialing trend as students signal growing interest in these programs. A number of institutions have started making their first forays into the microcredentialing landscape. While some are embedding certificates and other types of credentials from external providers, such as Coursera, into their existing programs, others are producing short-term programs in-house as an extra draw for students, covering everything from tech skills to the liberal arts.

With financial headwinds facing many higher ed institutions and new federal dollars on offer, “there’s a lot of toe-dipping going on right now,” said Carlo Salerno, managing director of education insights at the Burning Glass Institute, which collects data on credentials and the workforce. “I do think that traditional four-year public institutions are branching out in a way that they haven’t before.”

‘A Market-Driven Response’

Experts say a few factors might account for the unexpected mix of grant winners.

Colleges only had a month to apply for the funds; the department announced the FIPSE grant competitions in November with a December deadline, Baime noted. Community colleges don’t necessarily have dedicated grant writers at the ready to jump on such a task like many universities do, so limited bandwidth “may have been a factor,” he said. “We knew that there was going to be a scramble to get applications put together.”

But he also believes four-year colleges and universities are investing more in short-term programs as the country faces skilled workforce shortages. He said he’s not surprised to see four-year institutions having a “market-driven response to what is a clear economic need” and wading into types of programs historically offered at community colleges.

Four-year institutions are motivated by a “confluence” of forces to venture into this new territory, said Salerno, including financial pressures from enrollment declines driven by the demographic cliff, drops in international students and public skepticism about the value of a degree.

“You have to start suddenly tapping new enrollment resources to make up the difference,” Salerno said. And at a time when students want assurances that degrees lead to jobs, “schools are becoming increasingly in tune to that.” Offering explicitly workforce-oriented programs is one way to better ensure that “what is taught is aligned with what is sought.”

The name recognition that some prominent universities enjoy might also add allure to students interested in short-term programs and to employers who trust the brand, he pointed out.

Short-term programs at such universities “provide a very compelling value proposition for somebody who may have otherwise not thought that [they] could even go to a school like that to burnish [their] credentials,” he said.

He doesn’t see those universities’ offerings competing with community colleges’, which have strong regional reputations, but he suspects “they will invariably crowd out smaller providers.”

Seeking Value

Thomas Brock, director of the Community College Research Center, said he’s heartened to see four-year institutions looking for new ways to attract students, including from demographics they might not have served before.

The trend signals “some rethinking at four-year institutions [about] how they do business, what kind of students they want to attract and for what purposes,” he said. “Community colleges and four-year institutions alike I think are viewing short-term Pell as an opportunity to get students there that wouldn’t be there otherwise.”

Regardless of the type of institution, Brock hopes colleges stand up high-quality programs.

“The caution that comes from grumpy researchers like myself is that, over the years, there’s not a lot of evidence that short-term programs really do lead to higher earnings—or to family-sustaining earnings at any rate,” Brock said. “The million-dollar question for short-term Pell is: Will institutions be able to identify opportunities that make sense for their particular communities, for the employers that they are serving?”

Jeffrey E. Holm, vice provost for strategic programming, analytics and effectiveness at the University of North Dakota, has similar worries as universities jump on the short-term credential bandwagon.

Short-term programs aren’t new for his institution, which has been offering shorter noncredit programs and certificates within its undergraduate and graduate programs for upwards of two decades, in part to better serve rural areas of the state. The university also embeds short-term programs from other providers on its platforms. University of North Dakota faculty members won one of the FIPSE grants to stand up a new short-term data skills pathway in atmospheric sciences.

While Holm is “cautiously optimistic” about Workforce Pell—and open to exploring it for other programs—he’s concerned about a “boom and bust situation” as institutions rush to set up and expand options that may not have the same level of industry buy-in.

“There’s a lot of hype,” Holm said. “There’s a lot of interest in these, but the interest is here and now. If you get that certificate, will that serve you well five years from now, ten years from now? I don’t know the answer to that … Even if it might be advantageous for the next couple of years, I have a little bit longer-term concerns about the sustainability over time of a return on investment.”