Earlier this week, the US House Education and Workforce Committee voted to send a bill to the floor that would shift $160M in Pell Grant funds away from low-income students who attend elite private universities to short-term, non-credit job training programs at community colleges. The funding would be distributed over a five-year period. If you like math, that’s $32M per year.
Currently, Congress funds job training primarily through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) somewhere in the neighborhood of $500M per year. Again with the math, you will note that the $32M per year is less than a 6.5% increase over the annual federal funding that is already available to the nation’s Eligible Training Providers (ETP).
There are about 1,460 public and private community colleges in the US. If the Pell Grant funds were limited only to community colleges and not the entirety of the 75,000 ETPs in the US, that would provide an average of about $22,000 per year per community college for job training support. If these proposed funds were available to all ETPs, the average distribution would be less than $427 per provider per year.
In terms of program participants rather than providers, the WIOA funds about 220,000 students in a year – around $2,275 per student. If the $32M commandeered from the Pell Grant program were added on top of that, it would increase the funding available to each program participant by $145.
Congress can fund both Pell Grant and WIOA programs
So, how much does short-term training cost? In 2021, the average cost to provide short-term job training programs was about $2,125 per participant. (The actual costs range between about $1,000 and $10,000 per participant, depending on the program.) On average, the WIOA already provides full funding for job training programs.
Proponents of the move want the public to believe that these short-term job training programs provide an economically effective on-ramp to the workforce. The results don’t back that up, especially in the current employment landscape. Weekly unemployment claims reached a historical low in October, and the unemployment rate for November was just 3.7%. Nationally right now, there are about 75 available workers to fill every 100 open jobs. In Michigan, the labor market is slightly tighter; there are 85 available workers to fill every 100 open jobs.
In practical terms, the House Education and Workforce Committee is paying to provide minimal training to non-existent workers to fill the millions of open jobs in the US. If every single unemployed worker were paired with an open job, US employers would still have 4 million open jobs.
Stealing money from the Pell Grant program to over-fund short-term training is ludicrous and will only stand to hurt low-income students at elite universities.
If Congress really wanted to increase the funding for short-term training programs, it already has a mechanism to do that without cutting the Pell Grant program. Funding education doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, and we shouldn’t support taking educational grants away from low-income students to create what amounts to pocket change for short-term training programs that deliver only questionable economic impact.
Photo Credit: Eric , via Flickr
