The arrival of Workforce Pell has been the higher-ed story of the summer. Low-income students seeking training in industries such as construction, transportation, and healthcare can now apply federal Pell Grant dollars toward short-term training programs.
Advocates for Workforce Pell have long argued it’s a necessary way to help people quickly move into jobs in high-demand fields, without the cost and time required of a traditional degree. Eventually 100,000 new students each year could receive the funds. But while Congress enacted Workforce Pell, the stakes are entirely local. Can enough colleges successfully set up programs that qualify for the funds? Do students enroll in programs that lead to good-paying jobs? Or do they spend money on courses that don’t pay off?
Workforce Pell is now in the hands of the states. They have to set up processes to assess whether the programs community colleges run meet the high bar to qualify. And they’ve got to figure out how to distribute the money to students. Reporters at Open Campus’s 21 partner newsrooms have spent months covering these developments in Colorado, Indiana, and Mississippi. And they’ve highlighted the barriers keeping students from accessing money promptly in the prison system, as well as in California, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin.
Our reporting has surfaced the ways states are confronting the same questions and answering them differently. And our reporters are asking more incisive questions and producing more sophisticated coverage because they’re able to see that range in the work of their colleagues. That’s the power of our network model.
Miranda Dunlap, one of our reporters covering career training and pathways at Wisconsin Watch, said reading coverage from across our network helped her explain how the Pell rollout is working there and “not make it seem like Wisconsin is an outlier or slacking.”
“Without the stories from other local network reporters, that simply wouldn’t have been possible, because I saw no other local coverage of this,” she said.
Plus, reporters aren’t left to find story ideas on their own. Our team of expert higher-ed editors has run multiple policy briefings aimed at answering their key Workforce Pell questions, connected them to experts in the field, and seeded stories that clearly show readers the unique local stakes.
“Open Campus connected me with experts who explained the Workforce Pell changes clearly and concisely, which in turn helped me share essential information with Indy readers.”
Claire Rafford, Mirror Indy
And we haven’t limited ourselves to stories. We’ve built products that will allow reporters and practitioners to measure the effectiveness of workforce programs today and assess the success of Workforce Pell down the line.
Working in partnership with The HEA Group, we built a Certificate Earnings Explorer that allows users to explore and compare the economic outcomes of thousands of undergraduate certificate programs.
We also created a multi-part Workforce Pell Briefing designed to help local leaders navigate the new landscape.
About Open Campus
Open Campus is a nonprofit news organization that ensures communities have the independent information they need about higher education. By placing expert reporters in local newsrooms across the country, we help people understand and influence the institutions that shape their future opportunities.