The Workforce Pell program, launching on July 1, faces a serious implementation problem. The accountability infrastructure it needs to distinguish between programs that open doors and programs that merely collect tuition doesn’t yet exist at scale.
The U.S. Department of Education estimatesthat federal government program costs over the next decade will total $3.2 billion. So that scale of new money entering a marketplace that can’t yet say which programs build careers could be a gamble, not an investment.
Two new tools, the Certificate Earnings Explorer from The HEA Group and Open Campus, and the Credential Value Index from the Burning Glass Institute, point toward what that infrastructure could look like. Together, they suggest the terms of a transparency compact to guide this work.
