The U.S. Department of Education released a notice of proposed rulemaking in early March outlining how it intends to implement changes to the Pell Grant program mandated by the Big Beautiful Bill (BBB). The draft regulations would introduce two significant policy shifts: creation of the new Workforce Pell program, permitting Pell Grants to support short-term workforce training offered by eligible institutions, and a new restriction making students ineligible for Pell if their total nonfederal aid meets or exceeds their cost of attendance.
In a letter submitted on April 8, 2026, the Center for American Progress commented on the proposed regulations, urging the department to strengthen safeguards within Workforce Pell, enhance transparency, and prevent low-value programs from drawing public dollars. Without rigorous guardrails and data reporting requirements, Workforce Pell risks channeling federal aid to programs that fail to deliver meaningful earnings gains, potentially leaving students from historically marginalized backgrounds with poor outcomes and unmet costs.
The comments include recommendations to:
- Increase data transparency and reporting requirements, such as:
- Expanding required reporting to include additional program-level outcomes beyond completion, placement, and earnings.
- Ensuring all data are public, easily accessible, and disaggregated by student demographics.
- Standardizing data so outcomes are comparable across Workforce Pell programs, enabling informed student choice.
- Expanding guardrails on written arrangements to:
- Reduce allowable instruction by ineligible partners from 25 percent to zero to prevent quality and oversight risks.
- Limit Workforce Pell eligibility to programs where Title IV institutions retain full instructional control and oversight.
- Encourage governors to differentiate standards for online versus in-person Workforce Pell programs due to distinct risk profiles.
- Exclude continuously enrolled students from value-added or placement calculations to avoid penalizing stacking pathways.
- Strengthen the measures for the Value-Added Earnings (VAE).
- Strengthen verification of job placement and earnings using independent or administrative data.
- Require public reporting of job outcomes for all Workforce Pell programs to deter gaming.
- Implement a rapid-cycle evaluation model (e.g., after four sequential eight-week cohorts) for timely insight.
- Allow voluntary early submission of data before the statutory 2030–31 deadline for faster improvement cycles.
In this comment, CAP outlines a variety of changes that could be made to the proposed rules to mitigate the harms of the BBB.
Click here to read CAP’s comment letter.