For decades, the federal government has helped millions of Americans climb the opportunity ladder by financing their postsecondary education and training. But it’s paid too little attention to whether the credentials actually moved them up that ladder toward better jobs and higher earnings.
This spring, the U.S. Department of Education undertook its most serious effort to solve that problem. It issued three separate regulatory packages that, taken together, point in a single direction. Community colleges have a lot at stake in what Washington is doing.
The Workforce Pell final rule opens the Pell Grant program for the first time to short-term workforce training programs. The proposed Student Tuition and Transparency System (STATS) ties every program’s access to federal loans to a test of whether graduates out-earn people who never enrolled. The proposed Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) rule will dramatically rewrite the rules under which accreditors judge colleges. All three packages came from negotiated rulemaking committees that reached consensus, giving these changes unusual staying power.
Taken together, they describe an approach that redistributes power across American higher education. And that redistribution runs in one direction. It’s away from the institutions and accreditors that have long governed quality, toward three new centers of power: an earnings-accountability system measuring what graduates actually earn, state governments whose governors decide which workforce programs deserve federal aid, and students with new rights to information about costs, outcomes and transfer credit.
