Dear Colleagues:
Building Skills: Remodeling the Higher Education Act (HEA) is a new series of papers from CLASP. The series will examine how to reform the federal Higher Education Act to advance workforce training at community colleges.
The first in the series, No Educational Experience Should Be an Island, is an interesting, but not easy, read. It looks at some of the costs, time, and articulation trade-offs between noncredit and for-credit programs – features that confound many learners and educators. Struggles identified include the difficulty of establishing credit for prior learning policies and the author comes down firmly on the side of having policymakers require, “as a condition of funding, that any federally funded training program have a thought-out and formalized policy (including articulation of noncredit to credit) already on the books” (p. 4). Suggestions for accessing federal financial aid for noncredit training and building employer awareness of the benefits of participating in career pathways initiatives are briefly touched on.
Are your low-income, lower-skilled students accessing postsecondary education and/or training? Have your students been part of the programs mentioned in the paper (see names below)? Are you teaching, advising, or coordinating in one of these programs/best practice demonstration projects? If so, what have you learned from your experience?
- Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) Grant Program
- Health Profession Opportunity Grant (HPOG)
- First in the World (FITW)
- Workforce Innovation Fund (WIF)
Cynthia Zafft
Postsecondary Completion Moderator