From Rope Bridges to Highways: Building the Postsecondary Infrastructure for Workforce Pell

Featured co-author: Jonathan T. Reid, Program Officer, ECMC Foundation In 2025, Congress passed a long-awaited update to the Pell Grant: students can use Pell Grants for short-term, workforce-focused programs that were previously excluded. This bipartisan accomplishment fills a major gap in college access. Students seeking a fast track to a better career will now benefit from the same financial support as students on a longer academic journey. This has the potential to increase enrollment and revenue for institutions, reduce in-house training demands on employers, and help states meet their educational attainment goals and fuel their local economies. 

However, this enormous potential will only be realized if colleges and universities are ready. Workforce Pell can only be used at accredited, Title IV eligible institutions. They will need to ensure their programs meet federal and state standards, which will ultimately require them to design structures and supports for the students these programs serve, even if this deviates from past practice. Student-centered design isn’t a nice-to-have for Workforce Pell, it’s an absolute must. 

Here are the four key things institutions must do to be Workforce Pell-ready, and why.

Institutions need to ensure they are offering workforce programs that align with the economic requirements of their state. Governor’s offices are responsible for determining program eligibility based on each state’s job markets and economic needs, and institutions will need to maintain eligibility by achieving a 70 percent placement rate into jobs with proven income potential. To do that well will require active communication and partnership among the Governor’s offices, state higher education agencies, workforce agencies, employers, and postsecondary institutions. Connections among these partners that have existed as metaphorical rope bridges now need to become reinforced multi-lane highways. 

Successful institutions will do more than simply lobby the State to include their programs. They will use the State’s guidelines as a way to refine their own program offerings to ensure a strong return on investment for their students. 

Institutions need to ensure a 70 percent graduation rate within time-and-a-half in each of its workforce programs. This is a strict requirement for programs to remain included, and given the short-term nature of the programs, the completion clock ticks fast, leaving no room for life events or institutional bureaucracy to get in the way of graduation. It’s also in the students’ interest to complete the program quickly, either to start realizing career gains sooner or to protect their long-term college access. Workforce Pell doesn’t increase the total funding available to each student; it just gives them another way to use it. The more time students spend using the Pell Grant for workforce programs, the less Pell Grant funds they will have left if they decide to enter an associate or bachelor’s degree program.

Successful institutions will work quickly to understand the demographics and preferences of the students in their workforce programs. When are they available to be on campus? What are their work and parenting responsibilities? Do they need support with transportation, childcare, or food while in the program in order to be successful? What type and frequency of advising do they want? Surveying or interviewing current and incoming students is an important first step, but it must lead to nimble, real-time changes to how programs are structured, when courses are held, and what support the institution provides to complement the reduction or elimination of tuition through Workforce Pell.

Institutions need to implement a new approach to developmental education and English as a Second Language (ESL) programming. Workforce Pell will not pay for these courses, but many institutions require students to take them before they can enroll in the courses required for graduation. Without reforms to these structures, Workforce Pell will bring students to a college’s doorstep only to find they must make a significant investment of time and money before they can enroll in the courses covered by Workforce Pell.

Successful institutions will transition away from stand-alone developmental courses and instead enroll students directly into college-level, credit-bearing courses with additional support delivered as a corequisite. They will also examine their ESL sequences to ensure they are setting students up for success and creating opportunities rather than barriers.

Institutions need to ensure the stackability, transferability, and employability of eligible workforce programs. Workforce Pell is designed such that students have multiple options once they complete their initial workforce program. First, the law ensures that they have a direct pathway into a career. As mentioned before, eligible programs must have a job placement rate of at least 70 percent, and the resulting incomes from those jobs need to more than offset the tuition invested. Second, it also requires that they have a pathway into further education. The workforce programs need to stack, generally understood to mean that the courses count toward longer-term degrees and credentials in the same discipline. 

Successful institutions will create transparent multi-level program maps that clearly show the courses needed for a workforce program and ensure they overlap with and meet the first-year requirements for subsequent degrees and credentials. However, state coordination may be necessary to facilitate guaranteed transfer agreements across institutions, to ensure that students have multiple institutional options for further study toward more advanced degrees.

It’s not all on institutions. State and philanthropic partners need to support institutional readiness for Workforce Pell. States have an important regulatory role in Workforce Pell, but they can also play a key role in supporting institutional capacity to make the necessary changes to ensure student success and the overall success of the Workforce Pell opportunity. The funder community, which is increasingly shifting focus from college access to college success, can move even faster in that direction now that a major access barrier has been addressed at the federal level. 

Successful investments in institutional readiness will include:

• Research. What do we already know about the population of students who will use Workforce Pell, and what do we need to learn? Are they part of overlooked and underserved groups, such as justice-involved students or adults with no prior college experience? What are their career goals, and what do they need to be successful in a workforce program? 

We encourage institutions to examine this independently, but a more scaled study of these questions would complement and bolster those institutional efforts and accelerate progress toward institutional readiness.

• Implementation Support. We outlined a number of structural changes institutions should make to be Workforce Pell-ready. But allowing these suggestions to fall under the category of “other duties as assigned” for professionals with already-constrained capacity is not a recipe for success. Funders and states alike can partner with technical assistance providers, organizations that specialize in infusing expertise and reducing the time burden needed to enact major institutional changes. These partnerships can help to ensure successful change management and implementation of the structural reforms needed to serve Workforce Pell students. 

• Intentional Outreach. The students Workforce Pell seeks to recruit must be reached through different communication channels and with different messaging than those used in traditional recruiting approaches. Institutions can typically reach current high school students and those who have stopped out of their institutions, but how will they reach adults in their communities with no prior college experience who have never considered college? 

States have other avenues for reaching their residents (for example, they license cars and process tax returns), but they typically don’t have robust marketing budgets. Combining philanthropic support with state government communications channels would be a powerful tool to reach the new populations of students Workforce Pell is designed to serve - especially if the messaging is informed by research and highlights what colleges and universities are doing to meet their needs and support their success.