Can Workforce Pell Separate Fast Credentials From Dead-End Training?

“There are a large number of requirements in the Workforce Pell program for colleges, but the bar itself is actually not all that high.”

Clare McCann, Managing Director of Policy and Operations at the American University’s PEER Center

For the first time, federal Pell Grants can support college programs as short as eight weeks. Workforce Pell brings federal aid into a part of higher education built around speed: short programs designed to help students gain a specific skill and return to the labor market quickly.

For adults balancing jobs, children, and other responsibilities, that structure can make education far easier to pursue. It also means more students will make high-stakes decisions about credentials that vary considerably in what they deliver.

Those outcomes will matter as states determine which programs qualify for Workforce Pell and colleges decide where to expand short-term offerings. Students may see an eight-week program as a practical route into a new career, especially when a longer credential would require more tuition and more time away from work. The value of that choice depends on what happens after completion: whether graduates find jobs, whether those jobs provide enough hours, whether earnings improve meaningfully, and whether the credential creates room for advancement. Federal eligibility rules will increasingly shape which of those options receive public support.

To better understand how well Workforce Pell can identify programs that create lasting economic value, how much responsibility states will carry in screening and comparing programs, and where the current rules may leave room for weak outcomes, we spoke with Clare McCann, a higher education policy researcher and co-author of the PEER Center and Washington Student Achievement Council analysis.

Clare McCann is the American University Peer Center’s policy and operations manager. Prior to joining the PEER Center, she was the director of higher education at Arnold Ventures.

McCann also worked as a senior policy advisor for the U.S. Department of Education related to issues on higher education in both the Office of the Under Secretary and the Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development, and with New America’s Higher Education Program. McCann holds a degree in political science with a public policy focus from the George Washington University.

Sorting short-term programs is difficult because duration tells policymakers relatively little about economic value. An eight-week welding program, a childcare certificate, and a healthcare credential may all fall into the same broad category of short-term training, yet the jobs they lead to can differ sharply in wages, employer demand, available hours, and opportunities for advancement. That makes program length a poor proxy for what students are likely to gain from enrolling.

McCann points to the field of study as one of the clearest factors shaping those outcomes. She explains that some lower-level healthcare fields and childcare programs tend to produce lower earnings nationally, while technical areas such as precision metalworking, including welding, generally perform better. The differences reflect more than the credential itself. Labor demand for a particular skill, the regional economy graduates enter, and the industry’s broader economics all influence whether training translates into stable employment and higher earnings.

Those considerations matter especially for students with limited flexibility in how long they can remain in school. In Washington, more than 61 percent of very-short-term certificate holders are over age 26, and students of color are more heavily represented in these programs than in associate- or bachelor’s-degree pathways. Many adult learners are weighing several costs at once: tuition, time away from work, family responsibilities, the likelihood of finding employment after completion, and how much that job is likely to pay.

McCann explains that this is what makes return on investment difficult to reduce to a single number. Students have to consider what a program costs, what they may give up while completing it, whether the credential leads to a job at all, and what they are likely to earn afterward. A short program can offer real value when those pieces line up. When they do not, speed alone does little to improve the outcome.

States will screen programs that may look similar on paper but deliver very different results in practice. Washington’s data offers an early view of just how wide those differences can become.

For states, the challenge is that short-term programs can look similar on paper but produce very different results after students leave the classroom. Washington offers an early view of that problem because very-short-term certificates already account for about half of all certificates awarded by the state’s public institutions. The system is large enough to show how widely outcomes can vary before Workforce Pell expands this market nationwide.

Among Washington’s very-short-term certificate programs, median annual earnings three years after completion range from about $21,500 to more than $75,000 depending on the field. McCann says those differences are difficult to reduce to a simple rule. “There are some fields of study that we see are broadly lower earning across the country,” she explains, pointing to some lower-level healthcare and childcare programs. By contrast, fields such as precision metalworking, including welding, “tend to be higher earning.”

The field itself is only part of the equation. McCann points to “the labor market demand for those skills and qualifications,” the specific regional labor market students graduate into, and “the larger economics of those industries” as factors that shape what a credential ultimately delivers.

Washington’s data shows more on this context. Graduates in family and consumer sciences earn close to $35 per hour, roughly similar to graduates of medical assisting programs. Yet median annual earnings three years after completion are about $29,400 for family and consumer sciences graduates, compared with nearly $55,000 for medical assisting graduates. The gap points to differences in how much work graduates are actually able to secure, even when hourly wages appear relatively strong.

The same complication appears when programs are measured against Workforce Pell’s federal thresholds. Among the five most common very-short-term certificates in Washington, more than 70 percent of graduates are employed one year after completion, and four of the five have median earnings above the report’s approximate benchmark of 150 percent of the federal poverty level.

That still leaves an important question for states: how high should the bar be when a program technically qualifies for federal aid, but its graduates remain only marginally better off?

That question becomes more difficult once eligibility is separated from economic mobility. Workforce Pell includes a long list of requirements intended to keep federal aid tied to programs with measurable labor-market value. States must look at factors such as employment and earnings when determining which short-term programs qualify. Those safeguards give policymakers a framework for screening programs, though the level at which they set those standards will determine how much they actually distinguish among them.

McCann sees that threshold as a central weakness in the current design. “There are a large number of requirements in the Workforce Pell program for colleges, but the bar itself is actually not all that high,” she says. She points specifically to the earnings requirement, which expects graduates to earn more than 150 percent of the federal poverty level. “That’s still a very low level of earnings for graduates from these programs,” she explains.

Her concern is that programs can remain inside the system even when the economic return they provide is modest. “I think my expectation is that there will be room for low earning programs to maneuver and find their way into Workforce Pell,” McCann says, adding that some may retain access over time because “the specific bars that have been set out in the statute are not especially high.”

That matters because Pell eligibility is finite for students. A short program may consume only a portion of that aid, but the decision still carries an opportunity cost if the credential produces weak earnings or leads nowhere afterward. McCann argues that policymakers should judge programs partly by whether they represent “a good use of students’ limited Pell Grant eligibility and their time and their money.”

She also calls for scrutiny at the level of individual programs and institutions. A field may perform well nationally while a particular college produces much weaker results. McCann says earnings should be assessed early so that “if you have a particularly poor-performing program, even if it’s in a field that is broadly higher earning,” that program can be removed before more students enroll.

The federal standards establish a floor. States still have to decide how much evidence of value they want to require above it, especially when the students using these grants may be choosing among credentials with very different long-term returns.

Setting a higher bar is only part of the work states face. Students still have to decide among programs that may all qualify for aid while offering very different combinations of cost, time, employment prospects, and earnings.

McCann says that makes transparency especially important for short-term credentials.

“A short-term credential sounds very attractive,” she explains. “The idea that you may in just eight weeks be able to launch a career is very compelling.” States, she says, have an obligation to make sure students understand the likely outcomes of different programs and how a short-term option compares with a longer credential.

The comparison is more complicated than placing tuition and expected salary side by side. McCann describes return on investment as a decision that also includes “what it’s going to mean to be out of the labor market,” time taken away from family responsibilities, expected earnings after completion, and “your likelihood of being able to find a job at all.” State data systems can help put those factors in front of students before they enroll.

Information alone does not resolve the accountability problem. McCann emphasizes that even strong consumer data is “never enough.” Policymakers also have to act on what the numbers show, particularly when programs consistently leave students with poor outcomes. “It’s just as important for policymakers to make sure they’re acting on that information,” she says, including taking action against underperforming programs and setting standards high enough to keep students from being directed toward credentials that fail to pay off.

That responsibility will grow as Workforce Pell expands the number of short-term programs eligible for federal support. States will decide which programs enter the system, what students are told about them, and what happens when outcomes fall short. Those choices will determine whether the new aid creates more routes to economic mobility or simply more routes through the credential marketplace.