Nearly Everyone Supports Career Education. But What Would Make It Work?

Few things enjoy bipartisan support in Washington these days. The idea that more needs to be done to encourage job training outside of the bounds of a four-year degree is one of them.

Nearly a year into the Trump administration, officials have made a point of promoting alternative pathways and credentials. “We need a change in mind-set when it comes to higher education,” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told the administration’s newly formed Task Force on Apprenticeship Expansion on Monday. “We need to stop forcing kids into believing that a traditional four-year degree is the only path to success.”

The task force is a product of an executive order, signed by President Trump in June, to “promote affordable education and rewarding jobs for American workers.” That order also directed Ms. DeVos to “support the efforts of community colleges and two-year and four-year institutions” to incorporate apprenticeship programs into courses of study.

Support could take many forms. If the administration’s goal is to bolster career and technical education, what is the best path: More money? Streamlined funding options that already exist? Pilot programs to test partnerships between businesses and institutions?

Perhaps it’s some combination of the above.

“We fund career and technical education in funny ways,” said Mary Alice McCarthy, director of the Center on Education & Skills at the think tank New America. “It’s kind of the leftovers.”

The funding is spread out across departments. Some federal programs, including the primary law supporting vocational education, are administered by the Department of Education, others by the Department of Labor.

Making it so that more Americans can join the work force with skills that employers want — and, perhaps, without a four-year degree — is a tall order. But advocates and lawmakers hope that with legislation moving through Congress, test programs underway across the country, and the backing of the administration, it can be done.

“The idea here is to encourage students of all ilks — whatever their idea of success is and what their passion is — to move forward in that way,” said Kathleen Smith, acting assistant secretary for postsecondary education. “There’s nothing really off the table.”

A Confusing Landscape

Vocational education is one of the oldest federal education programs, and administration after administration has tried to advance it. President Bill Clinton signed the School-to-Work Opportunities Act in 1993. The George W. Bush administration sought to create links between work experience and certifications that could translate into credit for continuing education.

The national apprenticeship program, as it stands, is small. Roughly 500,000 registered apprentices participate in programs that have been approved to meet federal and state standards. Most of those apprentices are in skilled trades.

Job-focused education is funded via four major sources: the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, and the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Some students can use Pell Grant funds to support their studies, but many academic programs are too short on credit hours to allow that.

If all of that information already sounds complicated, that’s because it is.

The intricacies of the vocational-education system make it difficult not only for students to access it, but also for businesses to find a way in. Lawmakers have been looking for ways not only to make it easier for students to get financial aid, but also to streamline the process for getting programs off the ground.

Some of that work can be done through a reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965, the federal law that governs higher-education policy, which is overdue for an update.

Ms. DeVos has said that the law needs a complete reworking, and that members of Congress should “start from scratch.” Leaders of the House and Senate education committees largely agree.

Advocates have their wish lists for a reimagined law. It should include apprenticeships, they argue — which do not appear in the current version — be more friendly to competency-based education, and open federal work/study to develop work-force skills.

A spokesman for the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, chaired by Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, told The Chronicle that Republicans see expanding federal work/study as a path to job training. The panel is expected to release a reauthorization bill soon.

The House has also made progress on another bill, a reauthorization of the Perkins Act, which it has referred to the Senate Education Committee. That panel, which has been tied up with health-care reform, has not yet taken action on the bill.

A spokesman for the Senate committee said reauthorizing the Perkins Act is a top priority for Sen. Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee. Mr. Alexander, he said, had asked Sen. Mike Enzi, Republican of Wyoming, to develop a proposal.

Bipartisan legislation has also been proposed to open up Pell Grants to programs with fewer credit hours.

The Trump administration, however, says the bureaucracy alone is not going to get the job done.

Apprenticeships offer customized options to meet the needs of employers and build the requisite skill sets of students, Ms. Smith, the acting assistant secretary, told The Chronicle. But the administration does not want to increase the amount of regulation on the books. “We want to get the federal government out of the way of innovation and new ideas,” she said. “More regulation off the top is probably not where we’re going to go. We don’t want to make it more difficult for colleges, universities, and others to participate in this.”

Innovation and Industry

The concept of “innovation” brings with it other questions: How do you measure effectiveness? What would work on a large scale?

The Education Department has a useful testing tool: experimental sites, at which it can waive regulatory requirements. They “are a really important avenue for us to test new programs and see how they can be sort of expanded and replicated,” Ms. Smith said.

One such experiment is a cooperative venture among Northwestern University, General Electric, and the American Council on Education. Established under the Educational Quality Through Innovative Partnerships program in the last year of the Obama administration, the program offers an accelerated bachelor’s degree in advanced manufacturing, including “experiential training” from General Electric.

“This is a way to kind of get around some of those rules and look at processes that might work on all three ends,” said Jonathan S. Fansmith, director of government relations at the American Council on Education.

“The department gets to find out what quality assurance looks like and how to ensure that there are good outcomes and good actors in the field,” he said. “Industry gets to have a direct hand in creating a curriculum that’s tailored to their needs. And institutions get experience in terms of working with industry to build programs, while getting the flexibility from federal regulations to make those relationships and drive the aid so that students who are interested can pursue it.”

That’s what the Trump administration hopes to do by considering the removal of regulations on a broader scale, said Ms. McCarthy, of New America. “They’re trying to make it easier for companies to set up these programs that combine on-the-job learning with classroom learning,” she said.

“They want to make it easier for businesses to set these up, and they want to help businesses partner with their industry associations and colleges to help them do that, rather than having to go through the government.”

Adam Harris is a breaking-news reporter. Follow him on Twitter @AdamHSays or email him at adam.harris@chronicle.com.