Making Workforce Pell Deliver: 9 Options for States To Improve Outcomes for Students and Employers

In May 2026, Congress expanded the Pell Grant program to create Workforce Pell (WFP), which funds short-term, career-focused training programs that last between eight and 14 weeks (150–600 clock hours).¹ Pell Grants can already be used to enroll in 15-week programs, but starting July 1, this expansion opens the door for postsecondary students to use their Pell Grants to pay for programs as short as eight weeks. These programs must align with state-defined high-skill, high-wage, or in-demand occupations. The federal government is giving governors key authorities around implementation, including in determining which programs qualify.²

The expansion comes at a pivotal moment. In today’s ever-evolving postsecondary landscape, 1 in 3 college students is older than 24 and often balancing work, family, and/or military service.³ For these learners, full-time enrollment in a four-year degree program may not be practical or aligned with their immediate career goals. Subbaccalaureate credentials offer a faster path to career readiness and advancement, yet chronic underfunding, inconsistent quality, lack of alignment with labor market needs, and weak accountability have long plagued this training ecosystem.⁴

This report outlines nine concrete options for governors to consider when approving WFP programs, with the goal of providing educational opportunities that are aligned with labor market needs and lead to economic mobility for students and workers. The authors intend these options as a flexible menu, and states should prioritize and sequence actions based on their existing policy infrastructure, administrative capacity, and workforce needs.

To understand how well programs prepare people for the workforce, governors should direct their agencies to forge statewide postsecondary workforce data infrastructure by integrating existing assets to connect education records, such as degrees and enrollment data, with employment outcomes, such as jobs and wages. These assets can include existing systems such as statewide longitudinal data systems,⁷ which connect statewide information starting from early childhood through K-12, as well as postsecondary and workforce information, allowing for cross-sector data analysis, unemployment insurance wage records, licensing databases, and workforce case-management systems. Most states already possess these components, but they operate in silos. Siloed postsecondary and workforce data systems block critical insights into education-to-career outcomes, wasting resources and frustrating students because of poor visibility and repeated processes.

Recognizing that implementing a comprehensive data network will require a phased approach, states should begin building the necessary systems now to ensure they are fully prepared to meet the 2028-29 federal requirement to report job placement outcomes by occupation.⁸ Therefore, governors should seek to align state data systems with the U.S. Department of Education’s forthcoming technical specifications to avoid the chaos of 50 bespoke designs that would overwhelm federal oversight and risk state programs being penalized for inconsistent reporting.

Integrated data systems will make it possible for students to identify which programs actually lead to good jobs and higher earnings, empowering them to make more informed choices. Some states are already leading the way on this. Texas, for example, is coordinating across higher education and workforce agencies to identify short-term programs that may qualify for Workforce Pell.⁹ New York is making plans to use labor market data to target priority occupations with strong long-term outlooks.¹⁰ And California advocates are pushing to use the state’s Cradle-to-Career Data System to publish clear program outcomes.¹¹

To that end, governors should establish a Workforce Pell task force housed in the governor’s office to oversee program implementation, issue actionable recommendations that ensure individual programs align with the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) state processes, and that the programs make continuous improvement where needed.

To build a statewide postsecondary workforce data spine, governors should:

• Require all WFP-eligible programs, including noncredit and short-term ones, to report standardized data on enrollment demographics, program characteristics (such as the program’s Department of Education tracking number, known as the Classification of Instructional Programs Code, length, and credentials), completion status, and initial outcomes into a single state system accessible to approval authorities.
• Execute data-sharing agreements across higher education, workforce, human services, and available K-12 systems that include ironclad privacy protections. These sharing agreements should be implemented in a way that safeguards individuals’ immigration status and prevents misuse of power.
• Mandate disaggregated outcomes at renewal, including completion, employment, and earnings by race/ethnicity, gender, age cohort, income level, and geographic region, with warning flags for over- or underrepresentation of underserved groups relative to state demographics and/or labor market needs.
• Issue corrective action notices when data reveal gaps, such as instances where programs serve a disproportionate number of low-income students of color but deliver subpar earnings.

Data infrastructure without analytic capacity is useless. Therefore, governors should fund a compact central analytics staff to build consumer-facing dashboards, run cost-benefit analyses, and conduct audits that feed directly into approval decisions. Furthermore, governors should prioritize allocating resources for hands-on support to community colleges and workforce providers by providing training on program coding, data submission protocols, and interpreting feedback loops that reveal whether their offerings align with high-wage, in-demand occupations.

Such a comprehensive data infrastructure would transform WFP guesswork into precision policy, whereby governors can see which programs work for whom and where, issue approvals accordingly, and continuously improve the entire ecosystem in strategic ways that are responsive to the needs of their respective state labor markets. Without such a system, states risk subsidizing low-value training programs that do not generate the outcomes necessary for trainees, employers, or the broader economy.

Workforce Pell eligibility determinations sit at the critical intersection of higher education finance and workforce development policy, and governors should resist creating parallel approval processes that risk fragmentation.

Instead, governors should leverage their executive authority to establish a joint approval council that consists of, at a minimum, the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO),¹² state workforce board leaders, economic development officials, and/or other relevant licensing board representatives.

SHEEOs work to improve postsecondary education policy and provide data-driven research on education finance and workforce development; workforce agencies and boards can contribute real-time labor market data and employer validation; and economic stakeholders can work to identify strategic industries to concentrate resources on sectors that play a big role in growing the economy. As a collective, this council could mandate and interpret linked state data across student information systems, unemployment insurance wage records, and workforce case management to help inform the creation of new programs that individual agencies cannot produce alone. Governors would then receive a set of recommendations with cross-sector sign-off rather than competing memos from a variety of agencies. This council would also serve to bridge any expertise gaps in the governor’s office by creating a team of deep, sector-specific expertise.

Additionally, this body would be asked to annually evaluate labor market alignment—such as wage record data systems, job placement rates, and fit with high-demand occupations—to ensure decisions reflect a cohesive state strategy rather than siloed perspectives.

Federal workforce law already emphasizes directing public dollars toward “high-skill, high-wage, or in-demand careers,” but states vary widely in how they define these categories and, consequently, in whether and how their training programs satisfy the requirements to qualify as producing those “good jobs.”¹³ To create consistency and transparency, governors should direct state workforce boards to adopt clear, data-driven definitions that reflect the local labor market and regional cost of living.

States should define “high wage” so that WFP programs are approved only if they reliably lead to family-sustaining jobs—the wages necessary for families to cover their cost of living—and not just slightly above-average pay.¹⁴ Governors and their joint approval council would need to adopt a clear, data-driven benchmark using living-wage or self-sufficiency standards that reflect what families actually need to cover basic costs in specific regions of the state, including high-cost urban areas and lower-cost rural communities.¹⁵ States should then publish these thresholds and use their own earnings data to show that graduates of approved programs reach or exceed those wage levels within a set period of time after completion.

“High-skill” work should be defined by labor that requires concrete, measurable, and specialized knowledge.¹⁶ Governors could mandate that such occupations require proof of rigorous postsecondary preparation, such as an associate degree, advanced technical certificate, registered apprenticeship, or industry-recognized certification. Each state’s joint approval council should publish a clear statewide definition of high skill that is grounded in education level, credential type, and skill standards and map approved programs to the occupations and competencies they support. States should also use labor market and outcomes data to confirm that graduates enter jobs that meet these criteria. This definition should align with frameworks such as Perkins V—the primary federal law governing career and technical programs—and employer-validated skill standards to ensure it reflects actual industry needs.¹⁷ For instance, Indiana created a skills-based career cluster model that groups occupations by shared, transferable skills, helping policymakers, educators, and workers align training pathways with high-wage, high-demand opportunities.¹⁸

Moreover, “in-demand” work should be defined in a way that ties program approval directly to real, demonstrable labor market needs, and states such as Washington offer a useful template. Washington law defines “high-demand occupations” as those with a substantial number of current or projected openings, and “high-employer demand programs of study” as programs where the number of completers is substantially fewer than projected job openings, either statewide or in a region.¹⁹ Governors could adopt similar criteria, using state and regional projections to identify occupations for which job openings significantly outstrip the supply of qualified workers and then limit “in-demand” status to programs that train for those occupations, with periodic updates as the labor market changes.

Governors should aim to align programs as closely as possible with all three criteria while thoughtfully considering exceptions in specific occupations where wages may be low despite the critical nature of the work. For example, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that child care workers earned a median hourly wage of $15.41 in 2024 and a yearly median income of $32,050, which is considerably less than high school degree holders, who earn a median annual income of $35,500.²⁰ However, these exceptions should not become loopholes that weaken accountability or lower expectations simply because certain fields currently offer lower earnings than they should. In fact, the low wages in such sectors reveal a deeper structural issue, and many of these jobs—such as child care or elder care—are indispensable to the functioning of the broader economy yet remain undervalued and underpaid.²¹ Recognizing this disconnect underscores the need not to dismiss these occupations as low wage, but rather to address why essential labor is compensated so little despite its immense economic and social importance.

Lastly, states should publish an annual updated report of approved in-demand occupations and eligible training programs that is easily accessible to all current and potential students. Workforce program approval decisions should align with this list. Georgia’s approach offers a strong example: The state workforce board is required by law to identify, approve, and publicly post an annual list of high-demand careers.²² Adopting similar transparency measures can help ensure workforce investments remain tied to real economic opportunity and evolving labor needs.

Some short-term programs have the potential to deliver genuine value by providing a pathway to industry-recognized, portable credentials that are tied to full-time employment and that stack into higher-level certificates and degrees, while others strand students in dead-end training with limited payoff in the labor market.²³ Not all short-term workforce programs are created equal, and governors should treat them accordingly.

As states implement WFP, governors should approve programs only when they can show clear evidence of employer demand and of the credential’s value. For example, governors could require programs to provide documentation of employer engagement through letters of support, work-based learning slots, or hiring agreements.

To make “stackable” and “portable” credentials real, and not theoretical, governors should specify that stackable credentials should 1) carry transcripted credit that applies toward a related certificate or degree in the same field and 2) sit on an articulated pathway where students can progress from short-term certificates to associate and eventually bachelor’s degrees without losing time or credits.²⁴ Portable credentials should be defined as those that are recognized by multiple employers, industry bodies, or across regions and that prepare students for occupations that exist across the broader labor market, not a niche, nontransferable role.²⁵

The expansion of WFP has the potential to broaden access to high-quality, short-term training programs for adults, low-income learners, and workers of color, but that promise will only be realized if affordability and geography are built directly into governors’ approval and renewal decisions.

Rather than asking whether a program pays off, governors should also require evidence on for whom, where, and at what net price? Governors should insist that programs demonstrate strong outcomes for underrepresented groups and across rural, suburban, and urban regions without charging fees that exceed students’ likely value-added earnings.

Governors should prioritize programs that keep out-of-pocket costs low so that students are not pushed into excessive borrowing for very short-term training. One practical approach is for governors to encourage regional consortia, community colleges, workforce boards, and employers to jointly propose WFP pathways that are explicitly tied to local sector strategies—such as health care, advanced manufacturing, and clean energy—and to use existing WIOA plans and regional labor market analyses as the backbone for these proposals.²⁶ This structure helps ensure that approved programs both meet statewide affordability goals and reflect the specific occupational demand and opportunity structures of different regions, rather than concentrating benefits in a few well-resourced metro areas.²⁷

Online education is often promoted as a way to expand college access by allowing students to learn without traditional time and location restraints and is frequently marketed as a low-cost option that enables institutions to serve a large number of students nationwide from a single remote location.²⁸ However, the problems documented in the for-profit college sector over the past decade are largely magnified and concentrated in exclusively online programs, especially short-term offerings.²⁹

Additional evidence shows that students in fully online programs have systemically poorer outcomes than those in hybrid or in-person formats.³⁰ One analysis found that students who enrolled in exclusively online programs were 8.3 percentage points less likely to complete bachelor’s degrees than comparable students who did not enroll exclusively online.³¹ Furthermore, Black students in online-only programs were 8.6 percent less likely to finish their bachelor’s degrees than peers who did not take all their courses online.³² In 2023, nearly 53 percent of students were enrolled in programs that included some online instruction, yet there is limited public information on how systemically these programs are monitored.³³

Moreover, online-only programs are often a poor fit for very short-term vocational training that should involve hands-on practice and supervised skill development. One study found that only about 1 in 5 students in online programs receives hands-on training, raising serious doubts about whether fully online formats can adequately prepare learners for many of the high-skill occupations WFP is intended to support.³⁴ In this context, allocating federal resources to fully online, short-term programs that lack demonstrated effectiveness is risky both for students, who may not receive marketable skills, and for taxpayers, who foot the bill. Because there is currently no robust quality standard that requires fully online short-term programs to justify their cost with strong post-program outcomes, states should take care not to exclude populations such as military personnel serving overseas, veterans, students with disabilities, or others who may rely on accessible online learning opportunities. However, it is reasonable policy to at a minimum require strong safeguards that ensure program quality.

Students have always been able to cross state lines for in-person programs without requiring bilateral agreements; governors might be tempted to extend the same regulatory treatment to WFP distance education programs.³⁵ However, such parity would overlook the fundamentally distinct risk profile posed by online delivery across jurisdictions. Fully or predominantly online offerings enable rapid, low-cost scaling of enrollment to out-of-state students who are likely to receive no campus-based support, often with limited visibility into the effectiveness of instruction or placement services within their home state’s labor markets.³⁶ Therefore, governors should establish differentiated, heightened standards for online learning programs.

States should mandate periodic audits of recruitment practices, student support structures, and complaint data for any WFP program that includes an online component, with particular scrutiny applied to out-of-state enrollment patterns that may reflect aggressive or misleading marketing. Providers should also be required to demonstrate robust access to localized advising, tutoring, and career placement services calibrated to the occupational demands and licensing requirements of the student’s home state, rather than relying solely on generic, nationally oriented resources.

States are required to have complaint processes under statute authorization regulations, and therefore, governors should codify these explicit grievance procedures and make them accessible to students in their participating state, with defined timelines for resolution and mandatory cross-state notification protocols when complaint volumes or patterns suggest systemic issues.

Mandating transparent reporting is one of the most powerful levers governors have to ensure WFP programs deliver economic value. Workforce Pell can only fulfill its promise if prospective students can clearly distinguish between short-term and noncredit programs that reliably lead to good jobs and those that chronically underperform. Governors should require that program-level outcomes be published in a simple, public-facing tool that makes it easy to compare WFP programs side by side with other WFP programs and with traditional degree programs.

These dashboards should, at a minimum, display enrollment patterns disaggregated by race and income, completion rates, post-program employment, and earnings over time so users can see who is being served and how they fare after completion. Governors should also require clear and prominent warnings for programs that fail to meet key benchmarks and disclose when programs fall below established standards. In practice, this means that a student visiting the site immediately sees not just glossy marketing claims, but a concise, data-based signal of whether a program is performing, under review, or failing to meet expectations.

States are already showing what this can look like in practice. Pennsylvania has launched public higher education dashboards; New Jersey publishes postsecondary employment and earnings by institution and demographic group; and Ohio tracks employment, wage gains, and “business value” across major workforce programs.³⁷

Moreover, governors should also require plain-language disclosures delivered to students at the point of enrollment for all WFP programs, clearly detailing total program cost (including tuition, fees, books, and other supplies), expected time to completion, the specific credential earned, and typical job titles and wages for graduates based on state wage record data.

Given that these programs can be as short as eight weeks, states cannot afford to wait one to two years to assess effectiveness; instead, states should mandate rapid-cycle transparency with outcomes tracked and publicly reported after at least four sequential eight-week cohorts to quickly identify which programs deliver. Such an accelerated timeline enables states to rigorously evaluate job quality at the provider level, partnering with colleges to sustain high-performing programs while discontinuing poor-quality ones.

Governors should explicitly prohibit any commissions, bonuses, or payments to recruiters, third-party vendors, or online program managers (OPMs) that reward staff based on recruitment or how much institutional revenue they gain from WFP grants.³⁸

Short-term programs lasting just 8–15 weeks can be aggressively marketed across state lines with minimal upfront costs to providers, creating intense pressure to prioritize volume over quality unless compensation structures are tightly controlled.³⁹ Without a state-level ban, institutions could easily circumvent federal guardrails through tuition-sharing arrangements with unaccredited bootcamp operators or OPMs while delivering questionable outcomes to students.⁴⁰ Explicit prohibition would ensure that WFP dollars flow to programs that serve students effectively.

Rather, governors could create incentive structures focused on institutional performance and not individual head counts.⁴¹ States could offer modest performance bonuses to colleges when their WFP programs collectively meet or exceed established benchmarks for completion rates, job placement, and value-added earnings. These funds should never be distributed as per-student commission to recruiters or advisers.

Another option is to adopt shared-savings or pay-for-results models similar to Virginia’s Fast Forward program.⁴² Under this approach, institutions would receive a larger share of program funding only when students successfully complete programs and obtain qualifying employment. Students’ up-front costs would remain transparent and capped, aligning institutional incentives with student success.

Implementing Workforce Pell effectively will require more than simply expanding eligibility. It will demand a strategic, state-led framework that ensures both access and accountability. Governors are uniquely positioned to convene key stakeholders, set performance expectations, and ensure that WFP becomes a lever for economic mobility and regional competitiveness and not just another funding stream. States can achieve this—and maximize the return on this new federal investment—by prioritizing a strong data infrastructure; aligning education and workforce systems; instituting clear standards for online program quality; and linking short-term credentials to demonstrable completion, employment, and earnings outcomes.

The author would like to thank Viviann Anguiano and Veronica Goodman at the Center for American Progress for their valuable contributions to this report, as well as Hailey Gibbs and Sara Partridge for their thorough fact checking. Additionally, the author would like to thank Antoinette Flores, Iris Palmer, and Wesley Whistle from New America’s Higher Education Policy team for their thoughtful feedback and review.