Education and education access are directly connected to economic growth. Despite the dysfunction in Congress, especially over border issues and foreign aid, there are key education bills that can provide not only solutions for the issues they address but also models for getting things done across a range of other issues.

Two pieces of legislation that could improve our economic future by advancing education and workforce development passed the Committee on Education and the Workforce a few weeks ago with broad and bipartisan support, demonstrating that consensus is not only possible and practical but achievable.

The success of these bipartisan solutions could break down walls of division and better the lives of our nation’s students while bolstering our cities’ economies.

In mid-December, the committee approved the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, with support from both Republican Chairwoman Virginia Foxx and ranking Democratic member Bobby Scott, who co-sponsored the legislation.

The bill would expand Pell Grants to provide needed tuition assistance for short-term education and training directly linked to career opportunities, easing the costs of attaining the education and skills that all students, and especially low-income students, desperately need.

The bill would also fund access to online learning, further cutting costs and making education more flexible and accessible.  A vast array of students across red and blue states would benefit from the bill’s commonsense approach, as would our community colleges, employers and, by extension, all Americans.

Related: ‘August surprise’: That college scholarship you earned might not count

That same House Committee voted, a bit earlier, also with bipartisan support, to reauthorize the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. This legislation includes federal funding to support education and skills-based training directly connected to career opportunities and economic success.

This too will directly impact our nation’s community colleges, which are the key engines of economic mobility.

Under the bill, existing Labor Department funding could be repurposed to provide eligible workers with individual, customized education and training accounts, leading to improved career opportunities.

The bill would also specifically address the education and training needs of our incarcerated youth by providing them with the education and skills needed to ease their transition into a stable future. And it would add accountability provisions to ensure that spending for education will lead to concrete job growth. Like the Pell legislation, the bill has broad support among education and business leaders.

Passing short-term Pell along with passing workforce and education legislation would provide a clear pathway from high schools to colleges and careers, ensuring a brighter future for millions of students across the nation.

Both pieces of legislation could potentially pass the House and the Senate and be signed into law early in the New Year. 

Smart investments in Education can be both the answer to governmental gridlock and spur economic progress.

Of course, as is usually the case with legislation that clears committee hurdles, the bills contain small flaws that demand fixes. 

For example, in the Pell bill, one item that could derail passage in the full House and Senate and set back the nation’s commitment to social mobility for students is a provision calling for a reduction in student loan eligibility for students at some of the most selective colleges. Another flaw is that the legislation could open the door to abuse by predatory for-profit colleges. These parts of the plan can easily be fixed to ensure passage.

Passing short-term Pell and workforce and education legislation would provide a clear pathway from high schools to colleges and careers, ensuring a brighter future for millions of students across the nation. 

Related: OPINION: It’s time to put the brakes on student debt and give more students a shot at higher education

We’ve seen bipartisan support deliver dynamic education and economic growth before, most recently when Democrats and Republicans in both the House and the Senate united behind Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer’s CHIPS and Science Act.

That act mobilized efforts to restore American leadership in the semiconductor industry while creating good-paying jobs and reducing the cost of automobiles, refrigerators and computers.

The CHIPS and Science Act, with bipartisan support, also included a huge investment in education research, and became a model for the progress that can be achieved when parties come together to better the lives of the people.   

Now is the time for more bipartisan progress. Passage of these two critical education bills would be a fine start, fueling job creation and bettering the skills and future incomes of our nation’s students, who need our support now more than ever. And the bills’ passage would provide a model for how to eliminate gridlock and address our core economic challenges in a positive manner.

Most polling suggests that the top-of-mind topics for most Americans are the proverbial “kitchen table issues,” led by the economy and its effect on working-class Americans.

These bills address those issues. Americans with the education and skills to be employed in growing industries will earn higher wages, and the increased tax revenues from those wages will support our nation’s schools at all levels. And these bills’ prioritization of our community colleges will help them become an even stronger engine for jump-starting and sustaining America’s growth.

In recent years, it’s begun to seem that dysfunction is the one thing that Washington can be reliably counted on to provide. But let’s not simply accept that Congress can no longer come together to support initiatives that meet our needs and provide enhanced opportunities.

For many years, education issues have divided Americans; these core education bills can unite us. They deserve prompt action.

Stanley Litow served as deputy chancellor of schools for New York City and as president of the IBM Foundation. He now serves as adjunct professor at Columbia University and as trustee of the State University of New York where he chairs the Academic Affairs Committee.

This story about breaking political gridlock was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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In just the past eight years, American confidence in higher education has dropped from 57 percent to 36 percent, with more saying they have “very little” confidence than a “great deal.”

There are many reasons for this souring on colleges and universities, from high tuition sticker prices and large amounts of student loan debt to political polarization and doubts about graduates’ work readiness.

But one of the biggest contributors to declining public confidence in American colleges may be the disproportionate amount of attention paid to elite, top-ranked universities.

Americans are rankled by certain aspects of how elite institutions have behaved and what they represent. But, please America, don’t blame your local college or university because of them.

The “Varsity Blues” admissions scandal in 2019 perhaps epitomizes what bothers Americans about elite higher education. The scandal revealed a widespread scheme in which wealthy parents gained admission to elite colleges for their otherwise unqualifying children through “side door” bribery of college employees.

Related: ‘I did all of it,’ acknowledges mastermind of breathtaking college admissions scandal

The lengths the wealthy were willing to go for their children felt particularly egregious given the already enormous imbalance of rich students gaining admission to top-ranked colleges.

For example, a baby born to a family in the top 0.1 percent of income in the U.S. has about a 40 percent chance of going to an Ivy League or other elite college.

At the same time, a baby born to a family in the bottom quintile of income has a less than one-half of one percent chance of admission. In other words, someone born in the top 0.1 percent is roughly 100 times more likely to land in an elite college than someone born in the bottom quintile.

Among “Ivy Plus” colleges (Ivy League plus University of Chicago, MIT, Stanford and Duke), more students come from the top one percent of income distribution than the bottom 50 percent.

The fact that wealthy students dominate enrollments at elite colleges is an insult to one of America’s most deeply held values: meritocracy.

Institutions believed to be the best educational organizations in the world, with highly selective admissions and academic standards, are failing to enroll the best and brightest students from poor and middle-class families.

Related: The college growing gap between Black and white Americans was always bad. It’s getting worse

Now, on the heels of the Supreme Court striking down affirmative action earlier this year (which prevents colleges from using the consideration of race in admissions) there is a lawsuit against Harvard aimed to prohibit legacy admissions — a policy that gives preference to children of often wealthy alumni.

This is a prime example of an unsavory practice among elite colleges that is becoming more visible in the public arena — and is certainly disagreeable to the vast majority of Americans. (Fully 75 percent are in favor of ending legacy admissions.)  

Instead of being thought of as the superheroes of higher education, elite colleges are — sadly — now seen by the public as villains.

Also, while nearly 8 in 10 Americans say they would find it difficult to pay for a college education, those same elite colleges and universities are racking up billions in endowments.

The collective endowments of the Ivy League total roughly $200 billion and are projected to reach a trillion in value by 2048.

Yet the percentage of students enrolled in the Ivy League who receive Pell Grants (federal funding provided to low-income students for college tuition) sits at a mere 18.5 percent, while the percentage of students nationally who get Pell Grants is 40 percent.

Despite its enormous wealth, the Ivy League is less than half as likely as schools nationally to enroll low income, Pell Grant recipients. And with the Ivy League schools’ estimated annual costs approaching $90,000 per student per year, they seem downright unapproachable to most Americans.

Related: Podcast: Affirmative Action . . . for the Rich

There is much to be proud of with respect to our nation’s elite colleges. Elite colleges are most certainly educating some of the best and brightest our country has to offer. And they conduct research and support discoveries that improve the health and well-being of Americans, the efficacy of our military and the overall global competitiveness of America.

However, negative stories about them are dominating the news. Instead of being thought of as the superheroes of higher education, elite colleges are — sadly — now seen by the public as villains.

They would be wise to heed the superhero advice that “with great power comes great responsibility.”

Responsibility, in the form of upholding the democratic ideal of meritocracy and providing equity for students from lower income families, is how elite colleges can help all higher education regain the public trust.

In the meantime, Americans should ask themselves how they feel about the colleges and universities in their own regions. America has the most diverse higher education system in the world, and we ought to pay more attention to the important ways in which it serves many types of students and their myriad education and career goals.

Public universities, community colleges, Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), federal work colleges and affordable private colleges are just some of the many wonderful options that exist across our higher education landscape: Let’s focus on them.

Such a reframe and refocus will help us all see the incredible asset that American higher education is for our citizens, our country and the world.

Brandon Busteed is the chief partnership officer and global head of Learn-Work Innovation at Kaplan and an internationally known speaker and author on education and workforce development.

This story about elite colleges and meritocracy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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It seemed like a match made in heaven.

Dominican University of California needed something fresh. The college wanted to offer students a hands-on learning experience in a lucrative tech field blooming in the Bay Area. Make School, a San Francisco-based gaming company turned for-profit educational institution, was already offering a short-term tech boot camp, designed to meet that same goal.

Together, they envisioned a set-up through which Dominican students could take computer science classes and earn a minor, and Make School students could take a few classes from Dominican faculty and earn a bachelor’s in applied computer science in only two years.

The partnership, established in 2018, would be the first of its kind. Though it had special approval from Dominican’s accreditor, Make School’s program received little oversight or regulation. No one was watching out for warning signs, financial or otherwise, of issues at Make School.

When Make School suddenly closed in 2021, Dominican leaders were in uncharted territory, left to figure out how to help 167 students continue their education, a spokesperson said. The majority left the program without any credential to show for their time and effort.

Nicola Pitchford, Dominican’s vice president for academic affairs at the time and now its president, said the university did everything they could to help the students, but acknowledged it was “a really lumpy ride.”

“There’s not yet a regulatory framework that provides clear guidance and boundaries for institutions trying to do this,” Pitchford said. “We would have been very grateful for not having to pioneer quite so much.”

“What you have is trusted brand-name schools, from community colleges to state universities, knowing that they have these valuable brands, and literally renting them out to for-profit companies.”

Ben Kaufman, director of research and investigations at the Student Borrower Protection Center

Make School’s disastrous downfall, as documented by a Student Borrower Protection Center report provided to The Hechinger Report, should sound alarm bells about partnerships like this, advocates for students warn.

When colleges and boot camps team up, the colleges typically just put their name on the programs while the boot camp companies recruit students, develop curricula and teach classes. Such arrangements are quietly proliferating with few, if any, quality controls or assurances in place to protect students. At least 75 such partnerships exist between colleges and three of the country’s top boot camp provider companies: edX, ThriveDX and Fullstack Academy.

When students enroll in a traditional college, they know they are attending an institution that has met certain standards set by the federal and state governments and accrediting agencies. If their education doesn’t meet those standards, or if their school lies to them or closes, they are entitled to certain protections, including, in some cases, debt cancelation. There is quality oversight and transparency about student outcomes.

When students enroll in a tech boot camp, however — even if it has the name of a college pasted all over it — they have none of those assurances. This kind of program, which typically takes two years or less to complete and does not offer academic credit, is unregulated and is often marketed as an alternative to traditional colleges and an accelerated pathway to high-paying tech jobs.

No one collects any information on how many former boot camp students end up with the jobs they trained for or whether the many students who take out private loans to pay for these programs are able to make their payments.

For the colleges and the boot camp providers, however, partnering is a win-win. The programs grow but remain unregulated while bearing the crests of the accredited and respected colleges and universities. The colleges can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars without having to do much work, according to reviews of the contracts obtained through public records requests.

“What you have is trusted brand-name schools, from community colleges to state universities, knowing that they have these valuable brands, and literally renting them out to for-profit companies,” said Ben Kaufman, director of research and investigations at the Student Borrower Protection Center. “The students will take on the debt because they trust the school, then go to a program that is usually very superficial.”

The rise and fall of Make School

After starting in 2012 and pivoting from gaming to education in 2014, Make School operated for years as an unlicensed educational institution.

It received a citation in 2018 from California’s Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education for operating without approval. Nevertheless, later that year, it joined forces with Dominican, a nonprofit college in San Rafael, California. A spokesperson from Dominican said that, when they signed the contract, college leaders were unaware that Make School was operating as an unapproved educational institution.

The partnership was approved by Dominican’s accreditor, Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission, or WSCUC, through a special set-up that allowed Dominican to essentially sponsor Make School and help it be fast-tracked toward independent accreditation. This set-up allowed Make School students to access federal aid dollars.

Colleges that receive federal funding must uphold certain standards of “program integrity,” including accurate representations of the nature of their educational programs, financial charges and graduates’ employability.

Colleges typically receive about 20 percent of partner boot camp revenue

Dominican’s accreditor did not review Make School’s curriculum. WSCUC collected some financial information from Make School, but only at the onset of the partnership to make sure that Dominican would be able to sustain it, according to Jamienne Studley, president of WSCUC. Make School didn’t have to disclose any ongoing information about its financials to the federal government or the accreditor.

As for employability, the Student Borrower Protection Center report says that Make School made what appear to be “misrepresentations” about the employability of its graduates, as well as about the price and academic nature of its program.

Related: It’s a shell game’: How under-the-radar companies help for-profit colleges stay in business

The SBPC now says that Dominican is liable for misrepresentations made by Make School and that the partnership violated required standards of “program integrity.” That contention is “vigorously disputed” by Dominican, according to a statement provided by its spokesperson. The statement added that the applied computer science program was developed in full compliance with the accreditor’s standards and is certified by the Department of Education. Dominican also said that, before being contacted by The Hechinger Report, they were not aware of SBPC’s allegations.

SBPC’s Kaufman said they had not contacted Dominican “because we didn’t think there was anything in our investigation that would have been a revelation to the school.”

Ashutosh Desai, one of the co-founders of Make School, declined to comment for this story. Jeremy Rossmann, the other co-founder, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

One student, Andrea Graziosi, learned about Make School in early 2020. She badly needed a job. She was recently divorced and desperate for income to support herself and her two children. But with a decade-long gap in her resume, she struggled to lock down anything beyond a gig at a local yoga studio and occasional substitute teaching jobs.

She had earned a bachelor’s degree in finance two decades earlier, but Make School promised that it could help her land a good job, and she became convinced it represented the best shot at supporting her family. So, for an entire year, Graziosi spent 10 hours a day at her computer, listening to instructors. She found most of them to be inadequate at explaining the material. In order to complete her homework assignments, she spent hours each night re-teaching herself the material, with help from Coursera and YouTube tutorials.

In the spring of 2021, Make School’s finances were in disarray. On July 1, 2021, dozens of students who attended Make School before its partnership with Dominican filed a lawsuit against Make School alleging predatory and deceptive marketing and lending practices.

Shortly after the student lawsuit was filed, Make School leaders learned that they would not receive independent accreditation from WSCUC. On July 13, 2021, they told Dominican they planned to close, Pitchford, the university president, said.

Without warning, Graziosi found that she was unable to enroll in classes for the fall. Several instructors announced leaves of absence. In a private Slack channel, students began to panic.

“Is it just that the universities are getting money that they wouldn’t otherwise get if they didn’t take these deals with these boot camps?”

Jonathan Hammond, former UNH boot camp student

Days later, they learned via email that Make School, which Graziosi had trusted to resurrect her professional life, was closing. She said students received mere days to download projects they’d spent months on, projects the school told them would help them get high-paying tech jobs. But without the server to host and display the projects, Graziosi said, they were rendered virtually meaningless.

The news devastated Graziosi. She experienced anxiety so severe, she said, that she sought medical care for heart problems.

“I was holding on to it as my way to be OK, you know, to have a job and to sustain myself,” Graziosi said. “And the way that they did it was so wrong.”

Related: Left in the lurch by for-profit college direct loans

Exactly three weeks after the lawsuit was filed against Make School, Dominican announced that it was absorbing the applied computer science program.

“We really worked as hard as we could, once that transition happened, to support the transitioning students in every way that we could,” Pitchford said.

According to figures provided by the university, of 167 students enrolled in Make School at the time, 57 percent opted to continue their studies at Dominican, about 20 miles away; only 40 percent of the Make School students who were enrolled in the summer of 2021 went on to earn a degree from Dominican.

Graziosi was not among them. She already had a bachelor’s degree, and, feeling that she’d wasted her time and money on the short-term program, she had zero trust in either institution.

No one knows how well boot camp students fare

Some experts say that Make School’s case is an extreme example. Most boot camp partnerships end up being a positive for students, said Jim Fong, chief research officer at the University Professional and Continuing Education Association. He sees the fact that colleges lend their brand names to these companies as an indication that the colleges believe in their quality.

But boot camp student success rates are typically self-reported and rarely externally vetted. Much of the data that boot camps provide comes only from the students who reply to surveys. Such results are unlikely to reflect overall outcomes.

For instance, the company edX, which offers more than 200 boot camps at about 50 colleges, partnered with Gallup to study the outcomes of its boot camp students. They sent a survey to more than 40,000 people who had gone through the boot camps, and about 4,000 responded. Of those respondents, the study reported that 17 percent had jobs in STEM before attending a boot camp, and after attending, 48 percent had jobs in STEM. They reported median salary increases of between $5,000 and $15,000. But what about the 36,000 students who did not respond?

The federal government collects vast amounts of data from accredited schools, including graduation rates, and tracks earnings data for student loan borrowers. But colleges are not required to report any information on non-credit-bearing boot camps to the Department of Education, according to a spokesperson.

“There’s not yet a regulatory framework that provides clear guidance and boundaries for institutions trying to do this.”

Nicola Pitchford, president, Dominican University of California

The department recently released guidance that would allow the government to review contracts between colleges and third-party providers, but only when their programs are eligible for academic credit. Most boot camps would still be exempt.

Similarly, none of the six regional accrediting agencies, responsible for overseeing most two- and four-year institutions, monitor boot camps, according to officials at each agency.

“There really is not yet a sort of rigorous or uniform way of assuring students of the quality of these programs, what kinds of outcomes they have,” said Lawrence M. Schall, president of the New England Commission of Higher Education. “There is a need for some quality assurance in that world, but we are not there yet.”

The lack of oversight of these boot camps is dangerous for prospective students, said Stephanie Hall, a senior fellow at the think tank Center for American Progress. “A lot of trust is placed on the idea that universities are approved by federal and state governments and accreditors,” she said. “It’s a bit misleading and deceptive on the part of both the university and the boot camp.”

And the attendance costs for these unregulated boot camps are often immense.

“Effective and accessible programs are necessary opportunities for workers, particularly those underserved by traditional 2- and 4-year pathways.”

Anant Agarwal, edX founder

A review of contracts shows that short-term boot camps can cost students up to $18,000, depending on program length; and because these programs typically aren’t eligible for federal aid, students must pay out of pocket or take out private loans.

At Make School, tuition was advertised as $90,000 for the two-year program, but some of that could be paid with federal student loans and grants due to the program’s unique arrangement with Dominican, the Student Borrowers Protection Center found.

The federal aid could be combined with income-share agreements, or ISAs. Under those agreements, students paid nothing up front, but as soon as they landed a job making at least $60,000 a year, they were on the hook to repay their entire tuition in monthly installments. Some students signed multiple ISA agreements, and after they finished paying one back, had to begin paying off another; they could be stuck paying back up to $250,000 for up to a decade, the Student Borrower Protection Center found.

The payout for colleges

The financial benefits of these boot camp agreements for the colleges can be large. A review of seven contracts, including at least one each from edX, ThriveDX and Fullstack Academy, shows that colleges typically receive about 20 percent of the boot camp revenue, while the for-profit companies collect the rest. (Ohio State University redacted the revenue split details from its contract, saying they were “trade secrets.”)

Up until September 2020, the University of Central Florida could get up to 40 percent of the net profits for its boot camp run by ThriveDX (known as HackerU at the time), according to their contract. Students paid $13,000 for courses in ethical hacking, $16,000 for cybersecurity or $25,000 for a bundled version of the two.

If there were four cybersecurity cohorts, each filled with a maximum of 40 students, UCF would be due roughly $1 million per year (minus expenses) from the cybersecurity program alone. In September 2020, the contract was amended so that the college receives 16 percent of all revenue.

Meanwhile, as noted, colleges are not responsible for much. They often just approve access to their brand name logos and alumni databases, which give the boot-camp companies a captive audience for recruiting.

“The third-party provider is doing all the work, the marketing work, all the education, they employ the teachers,” said Kevin Carey, vice president for education policy and knowledge management at the think tank New America. “So it’s 20 percent in exchange for, basically, just selling access to their alumni network and their brands.”

No boot camp providers agreed to be interviewed for this story. A statement from edX founder Anant Agarwal provided by an edX spokesperson emphasized the quality of their programs and said that their boot camps are supported by top engineering faculty from colleges across the country.

“With the labor market the tightest it’s been in a generation, and with the rapid pace of technology projected to displace millions of jobs over the next decade, effective and accessible programs are necessary opportunities for workers, particularly those underserved by traditional 2- and 4-year pathways,” Agarwal wrote.

Related: Could the online for-profit college industry be ‘a winner in this crisis’?  

But not all students see the value of these boot camps.Jonathan Hammond, who took out a private loan for $10,000 for a coding boot camp at the University of New Hampshire run by edX, said he had no idea that the boot camp wasn’t run by the university until after he’d enrolled.

Emails reviewed by The Hechinger Report show that the person he messaged back and forth with about financing used the email address coding.bootcamp@unh.edu and had an email signature that referred to the correspondent as an admissions coordinator for the “UNH coding boot camp.”

Hammond said that since edX “disguised themselves” as UNH, “I don’t know if I have ever spoken to someone from UNH directly.”

Thespokesperson from edX said that they take measures to ensure students are aware of the partnership between the university and the company, including training staff to answer phones by saying they are calling from the university “in partnership with edX.”

But murkiness about who runs a partner boot camp is common. At UCF, for instance, the name ThriveDX only shows up on a page answering frequently asked questions about one of the university’s boot camps. The university also partners with edX to provide boot camps in UX/UI, digital marketing, data analytics and coding.

UCF officials declined to be interviewed for this story, but provided some data on student outcomes. That data shows that about half of the students who complete the programs opt to receive career support, and about 85 percent of those students get jobs.

One student, Andrew Rodriguez, said that one of the university’s edX boot camps helped him get out of the service industry and into developer jobs building websites for causes he cares about. He said it was worth taking out a private loan to finance his boot camp education.

“My associate degree, I haven’t been able to do anything with it,” Rodriguez said. “Getting a bachelor’s degree gives you more options, but I got pretty good options with just the boot camp.”

He said he understood that the program wasn’t entirely run by the University of Central Florida, but the endorsement of the college helped him trust it.

Hammond, the UNH student, had a different experience. Although he totally immersed himself in his studies each night after work, he said, he still felt the program was not worth the money. He said he still had to take free online courses to fill in the gaps left by the course.

The career support from the UNH boot camp also left a lot to be desired, Hammond said. He recalled that the school’s online job fairs often featured people who worked in tech fields different from the focus of the boot camp or people who had no control over hiring at their companies.

Another student helped Hammond connect with a recruiter about six months after the boot camp ended, he said, and he was hired as a web developer. He said he could have done the same job before attending.

“Is there anything that the students are getting from the colleges?” he said. “Or is it just that the universities are getting money that they wouldn’t otherwise get if they didn’t take these deals with these boot camps?”

This story coding boot camp programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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As the public grows more skeptical of the value of a college degree, career and professional training has become a popular alternative. Indeed, it is long past time for Americans to recognize the value of training programs in the labor market.

But we must not lose sight of the fact that a bachelor’s degree is still the most reliable route to the middle class.

Despite the value of the bachelor’s degree, there is widespread concern about the high cost of college and the growing student debt burden. Only half of all Americans think that the benefits of college outweigh the costs according to a recent survey from Public Agenda. Notably, college undergraduate enrollment dropped 7 percent between 2019 and 2022.

The Biden administration’s student loan debt forgiveness plan is a clear acknowledgment that college costs and the accompanying debt burden have become unsustainable for too many Americans.

Cost concerns make growing interest in job training programs and other pathways to good jobs that don’t require college degrees appear all the more reasonable. Since the 1980s, the U.S. economy has undergone a technologically driven transformation, providing larger monetary advantages to workers who have education or training beyond a high school diploma.

Our projections show that, by 2031, 72 percent of all jobs in the country will go to workers with at least some education beyond high school, as will 85 percent of good jobs, meaning jobs that pay at least $38,000 per year for workers ages 25 to 44, at least $49,000 for workers ages 45 to 64 and $72,000 at the median nationwide, with adjustments for cost-of-living differences by state.

Training programs can be viable pathways to well-paying jobs, particularly in the short term. Nearly one in five good jobs go to workers without a bachelor’s degree but with some education beyond high school, including a training-related certificate or certification, an associate degree or some college education.

And certificates and associate degrees are broadly viewed as more affordable than bachelor’s degrees. In a survey from Morning Consult close to two-thirds of adults said community colleges and professional training programs are affordable, compared to just 35 percent who viewed undergraduate education at an in-state public university as affordable.  

Related: How higher education lost its shine

But despite these findings, a college degree remains a worthwhile long-term investment. Our research has consistently shown the substantial payoff of a bachelor’s degree in the labor market. Over a lifetime, a worker with a bachelor’s degree typically earns $1.2 million more than a worker with no more than a high school diploma, compared to a lifetime earnings boost of just $300,000 for those with some college education but no degree and $400,000 for those with an associate degree.

Furthermore, median lifetime earnings for master’s degree holders are $1.6 million higher than for those with no more than a high school diploma.

We must not forget that the bachelor’s degree is still the gold standard for workers in today’s economy. By 2031, we estimate that 43 percent of all jobs and 66 percent of good jobs will demand a bachelor’s degree or higher. By contrast, just 13 percent of jobs will demand an associate degree, and 16 percent of jobs will demand some education beyond high school but not a bachelor’s degree.

We must not lose sight of the fact that a bachelor’s degree is still the most reliable route to the middle class.

Yet, it’s no surprise that uncertainty about the value of a college degree is growing when politicians from both parties are touting growth in jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree. Earlier this year, Maryland dropped the degree requirement for thousands of state government jobs.

And since the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed last year, politicians have been promoting the expected growth in infrastructure jobs that will only require a small amount of training beyond high school.

Unfortunately, the impending growth in infrastructure jobs brought on by the bill will be fleeting. Our research shows that growth in infrastructure jobs — most of which are typically filled by men — likely won’t last into the next decade.

That is because it takes many more workers to build infrastructure than to maintain it, and the sustainability of these jobs will depend on whether Congress funds infrastructure in the future. The risk is that temporary infrastructure jobs will draw even more potential students, mostly men, away from postsecondary education. As a result, there may be a need to retrain the infrastructure workforce in the next decade.

Meanwhile, we need to start holding training programs accountable for ensuring that graduates have good financial outcomes in the labor market. The JOBS Act, which was passed by the House as part of the America COMPETES Act but did not become law, would have expanded access to Pell Grants for high-quality, short-term training programs.

That funding would have been accompanied by accountability provisions, including that programs demonstrate that their participants receive a minimum 20 percent median earnings boost after completion. We should renew consideration of these measures to strengthen the pathway to good jobs through training programs.

Related: STUDENT VOICE: Higher education can — and should — help nontraditional students like me

Furthermore, new gainful employment rules being considered by the Biden administration would ensure that earnings from these programs exceed their graduates’ debt — and the earnings of local high school graduates — following program completion.

Promoting training programs and protecting consumers with accountability measures will give more people access to skill development and opportunities in the labor market.

At the same time, we should not forget that the bachelor’s degree still offers the best chance for people to secure sustainable economic opportunity. The bachelor’s degree is not the only pathway to the middle class, but it is the most reliable route.

Anthony P. Carnevale is the founder and director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Nicole Smith is a research professor and the chief economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

This story about the value of a bachelor’s degree was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Congress is considering President Joe Biden’s historic plan for transforming our social safety net, including the grossly underfunded care economy that includes the elderly, the disabled and young children.

All sectors of the care economy need more resources, but caregivers working as home-based child care providers, who are disproportionately women of color, need the most. Some have embarked on a shared campaign called Care Can’t Wait to fight for better pay, working conditions and respect.

There are 6.4 million children in home-based child care, including both licensed family child care and license-exempt family, friend and neighbor care.

Families choose home-based care for many reasons: responsive relationships with trusted and loving adults, continuity of care, flexibility in hours and a culturally affirming environment for their children.

Black and Latino, Spanish-speaking, rural and low-income families are especially likely to choose home-based care.

It is time for our public systems to recognize the value of home-based child care for the millions of families that choose it, and compensate providers fairly for their work.

Related: Our fragile child care ‘system’ may be about to shatter

In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for example, the state provides just $13.63 a day for home-based child care by a relative of an infant, while paying $45.98 a day for care in a licensed child-care center. That’s less than $14 a day perinfant for a 10-12 hour workday on average.

Nationwide, home-based relative and neighbor caregivers, when paid, earn about $8,000 a year on average.

As we look to make our systems more equitable, child care advocates can find lessons in the more labor-organized elderly/disabled care sector, in which workers are better paid because there is a primary payer of care: Medicaid. Home caregivers earn about $16,200 a year.

That is still not nearly good enough for an industry that is rapidly growing and maintains extensive waiting lists for care — but stands well ahead of the state of play for home-based child care. 

Home-based relative and neighbor child care providers, when paid, earn only about $8,000 a year on average.

Elder and disabled care advocates are currently centering their advocacy around consumer choice and the desire to ensure that unpaid, unseen relative and neighbor caregivers are compensated for the care they provide.

The Care Can’t Wait coalition is advocating for $400 billion in home and community-based services (HCBS) to ensure that low-income consumers can receive the resources they need in the setting they most desire: their homes.

There is broad acceptance that institutionalizing care is not ideal for consumers or their families. These desired new investments would enable relatives and neighbors of Medicaid recipients to “bill” for care provided and ensure that caregivers can earn a living wage with benefits.

Child care advocates would do well to consider this more mature system and approach and to focus on family choice.

Half of all families with children in nonparental child care now choose relatives and neighbors to meet their care needs in a home setting. This trend has increased during the pandemic. Given that the families choosing home-based care are more likely to be Black, Latino, immigrant, rural and low-income, any equitable public system must include support for these families and caregivers.

As Congress considers making child care an entitlement and creating programs that may move us closer to a well-funded and supported sector, let us not forget what we have learned from our friends in the elder/disabled care sector.

Care decisions are personal and based on trust. Families deserve to have their babies and young children cared for in their preferred setting by the people that love them. Build Back Better can provide a rising tide of compassionate and commonsense funding to lift all boats. Let’s make sure it lifts home-based providers, including relatives and neighbors, as much as other caregivers.

Natalie Renew is the director of Home Grown, a national initiative committed to improving the quality of and access to home-based child care.

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When Roma Ouk moved from Southern California to Scottsdale, Arizona, to get a fresh start, he decided to go back to school. The first thing he had to do was scrape together $270 and fill out an eight-question assessment online.

When he passed with a perfect score, he got into a three-credit boot camp at Mesa Community College run in partnership with Boeing, the aerospace giant.

The nine-day, 36-hour course,taught by Boeing employees, teaches students how to assemble, modify, repair and test the cables and other equipment that create the “central nervous system” of Boeing’s airplanes, helicopters and drones.

Ouk, 33, emerged with an industry-recognized credential known as acable and wire harness assembly certification and an earning potential about 15 percent above what he was making as nurse’s assistant in his hometown of Long Beach, California.

Mesa Community College’s partnership with Boeing is one of several models that could be replicatedif a bipartisan bill to help finance community college workforce training for short-term credentials makes it through Congress. 

The Assisting Community Colleges in Educating Skilled Students to Careers Act — or ACCESS to Careers Act — is designed to increase the number of students who earn these types of credentials and the number of colleges meeting the needs of local employers. It could provide states with up to $2.5 million a year for up to four years to develop policies around this type of workforce training and provide community colleges with grants of up to $1.5 million each to carry out the programs. Its sponsors, Sens. Todd Young, a Republican from Indiana, and Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, are both staunch advocates of short-term workforce training programs; they reintroduced the bill in May, after a February 2020 version languished without success. 

The combination of students changing the way they consume postsecondary education and businesses desperate for skilled employees has led to a new wave of strategic business partnerships — with or without the proposed federal grants. Rachel Vilsack, a senior fellow at the National Skills Coalition, said she’s seen an increase in partnerships that allow businesses to signal their needs and work directly with community colleges to meet them. The increase has also been sped up by the pandemic, she said. 

“These partnerships have become the real-time data source that are creating that skilled pipeline and pathway of workers to make this economic recovery better and faster and more inclusive,” Vilsack said. 

Anticipated changes to the future of work, she added, have come faster than expected, and colleges and businesses have no choice but to adapt.

In New York City, the Harvard Business School Club of New York and the regional healthcare groups Weill Cornell Medicine and Mount Sinai Health System have partnered with LaGuardia Community College in Queens on a program that trains students in medical billing. At more than 200 colleges in the United States, Amazon Web Services has established business partnerships to train students in cloud computing technology. A host of other programs, including some that use virtual reality headsets to train students, are cropping up across the country.

Related: Proposed changes to Pell Grant program could transform it 

The research on short-term credential programs is mixed. Advocates praise their ability to provide quick training to adults who don’t have the time or resources to seek longer degrees, but opponents worry about tracking students of color, low-income students and women into jobs with little upward mobility and lower wages than their counterparts. Many experts believe that if theshort-term programs are designed in tandem with businesses to address specific needs in the workforce,they lead to better success for the students. 

LaGuardia’s nine-credit medical billing program has a completion rate of almost 90 percent, and about 80 percent of the students who complete the program are hired into medical billing or equivalent jobs at an average starting wage of $39,500, according to data provided by the college. 

It’s hard to say how many other programs have had the same level of success placing students in jobs, because records are not widely kept.

“I think employers should have some skin in the game. And I think especially the big corporations that have a lot of money, they should have a lot of skin in the game.” 

Wesley Whistle, senior policy advisor, New America think tank

In pre-pandemic times, Ouk’s completion of the wire harness assembly certificate would have landed him an interview for a full-time job at Boeing; it led to job offers for about 87 percent of students who applied before March 2020, the college said. But the aerospace industry is still struggling under the weight of COVID-19 disruptions, and hiring has stalled indefinitely.

Wesley Whistle, a senior policy adviser at the progressive think tank New America, said Kaine and Young’s proposal for investment in workforce training is reminiscent of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training program that Congress established to help the country recover from the 2008 recession. And while any support for community colleges is good, Whistle said, he believes employers ought to invest directly in these programs because they stand to benefit from them.

“I think employers should have some skin in the game,” he said. “And I think especially the big corporations that have a lot of money, they should have a lot of skin in the game.” 

Jordan Tyler, a manufacturing manager at Boeing, said the company has been hiring some students from the Mesa Community College program as contractors and will resume interviews for full-time jobs as the industry perks up post-pandemic. He declined to give a timeline for when interviews would resume.

Without the pipeline straight to a job at Boeing, Ouk tried his luck at other manufacturing companies in the area. He was hired by General Dynamics, an aerospace and defense company, as a senior manufacturing and production operator, where he will be soldering and desoldering military defense equipment when he starts in early July. He said he will be able to use his wire harness assembly skills periodically in the new role.

Related: To those who lost jobs in the pandemic, workforce retraining can be baffling 

Community colleges partnering with businesses is not new, said Rita T. Karam, a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation, but the nature of the relationships is shifting and in many cases becoming more focused on developing career pathways.

Colleges often open their doors for job fairs with local industry partners or invite professionals from different fields to speak to classes. And most career and technical programs are guided by an advisory board combining faculty and leaders from the relevant local field. Though important, she said, these types of business partnerships are piecemeal measures.

“A community college might tell you, ‘We have 1,000 partnerships,’ and they might actually have 1,000 partnerships, but those are loosely coupled,” Karam said. “Like, your faculty knows this business, the dean knows this other business, career services might know other businesses for specific activities — important activities, but they are specific activities that might not lead to this transformational change.”

Martha Parham, a spokesperson for the American Association of Community Colleges, said the shift might reflect the changing way that students are consuming higher education: “It’s not necessarily linear.”

She said students are veering from the four-year path toward a model where they learn a skill or get a credential, go out into the workforce and then come back later to pursue a degree or further advance their workplace skills.

Related: How career and technical education shuts out Black and Latino students 

Maureen Conway, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Economic Opportunities Program, said community colleges represent untapped potential for businesses looking to build a well-equipped workforce.

Because community colleges often enroll students from low-income and underrepresented backgrounds, she said, these business partnerships can help companies hire people who will diversify their workforce. Companies can also take advantage of the opportunity to get workers with the skill sets they need without the cost of training them. 

She said colleges should be encouraged to ask questions of companies about employment practices, so they are not only creating skilled workers, but are also sending them into good jobs “where they can support themselves and live with dignity.”

Related: “Microcredentials” gain new momentum due to urgency to get back to work 

When Jonathan Aguirre, 37, decided to return to school in early 2019 after nearly two decades of working as a plumber and, more recently, picking up gigs for TaskRabbit, he said he asked himself, “What’s hot right now?”

A resident of Van Nuys, California, Aguirre perused the websites of nearby community colleges and discovered some were offering an Amazon Web Services program in cloud computing,  which gives users access to computer power, storage and database services over the internet without relying on a traditional physical data centerin a home or office.

Aguirre enrolled at Los Angeles Mission College, part of a consortium of community colleges in Southern California offering the short-term credential program in cloud computing.

Having gone on to earn an associate degree in cybersecurity, Aguirre is now dreaming up app security projects with his cybersecurity club while searching for a job in the field. He was making between $40,000 and $50,000 annually with the plumbers’ union — roughly the starting wage for many of the tech jobs he’s looking at now. 

But he expects his earning potential to grow as he advances in the field, and as it does, he said he hopes to help support his mother and his son, who took a cloud computing class at his high school after Aguirre completed his coursework. Aguirre’s son graduated from high school in early June.

Patricia Ramos, the dean of workforce and economic development at Santa Monica College, said that as the region became a breeding ground for tech startups over the past few decades, college leaders were left wondering how they could create better inroads into the job market for their students. That’s how they initially decided to “cloudify the curriculum,” Ramos said.

The college began working with Amazon to develop a credit-bearing curriculum for cloud computing in 2017, and received a $15,000 boost from Amazon at the outset, Ramos said. Amazon said the money wasn’t technically a grant so it’s not renewable, and a spokesperson declined to comment on whether other partner schools received startup money.

The college’s existing instructors were trained to teach the course through an educational arm of Amazon, and the 15-unit program began about a year later.

“With Amazon “promoting more businesses to get onto their platform, they need to ensure that there’s a skilled workforce out there for businesses to be able to hire from.”

Patricia Ramos, dean of workforce and economic development, Santa Monica College

At Santa Monica College and the 18 other schools in the region that offer the program,the goal isn’t to get every student who completes the program a job at Amazon, Ramos said, but to equip students to work at any companies that use Amazon Web Services and the cloud. 

Even if graduates find jobs at other companies, Ramos thinks it’s a beneficial setup for Amazon, because, she said, “as they are promoting more businesses to get onto their platform, they need to ensure that there’s a skilled workforce out there for businesses to be able to hire from.”

Kim Majerus, who leads Amazon Web Services’ education and government initiatives, said building technical talent through associate or certificate programs is critical for the company. 

“These partnerships have become the real-time data source that are creating that skilled pipeline and pathway of workers to make this economic recovery better and faster and more inclusive.”

Rachel Vilsack, senior fellow, National Skills Coalition

And students who might not otherwise get this training or “upskilling” — such as those who live near community colleges in underserved rural areas or cities — can also benefit, she said. 

Jennifer Worth, the senior vice president for workforce and economic development at the American Association of Community Colleges, said the best of these programs work because they equip students with skills that are portable and transferable. For her, it’s a red flag if a program is so specialized that it prepares students only for a job at one company.

“A really innovative community college and industry partnership would think not just about servicing the one employer only, but actually the wider world,” Worth said. 

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The American economy is in dire need of life support, and federal stimulus efforts have been critical to limiting the economic damage. But cash infusions aren’t nearly enough. We need to do more than get Americans back to work; we need to prepare them for a future of work that looks very, very different.

That means investing in the U.S. workforce development system — which has been described by policymakers on both sides of the aisle as fragmented, uncoordinated and not agile enough to keep up with the pace of change. As higher education leaders, we’ve had front-row seats to the ways in which the relationship between education and work is broken — and we also see how government can play a role in fixing it.

A one-size-fits-all path that goes from high school to a four-year college degree to a lifelong career in one field simply isn’t the reality for most American workers anymore. In the wake of the pandemic, our obligation is not just to go “back to normal,” but to build a new workforce development system designed to meet the needs of today’s dynamic economy. What would such a program look like? How can federal and state governments augment existing efforts with other policy changes to help build a better, more resilient future of work?

The crisis we currently face demands a robust, long-term strategy for workforce investment and labor market recovery.

We may have seen our first hints of fresh thinking this summer, with President Trump’s recent executive order to prioritize skills over degrees in federal hiring. But that’s only the beginning. To keep pace with the 21st century workplace, workforce development programs must provide better advocacy, choices and career pathway guidance for every American. As federal lawmakers consider what the next stimulus package should include, what might a forward-thinking workforce agenda look like?

It would promote lifelong learning. We can no longer expect two or four years of education to last throughout a career. Today’s workers increasingly need portable education accounts, which they can own, control and take from job to job. As the Committee for Economic Development has argued, such accounts can enable low- and middle-income workers to access debt-free education opportunities at any point in their career trajectories, extending access to affordable, job-oriented learning experiences throughout workers’ careers.

It would facilitate learning while earning. A growing body of evidence suggests that apprenticeship programs can reduce the cost of employee churn, boost retention and help businesses build more diverse talent pipelines. They can also help workers build skills that are vital to employability, resilience and income mobility. In the wake of the pandemic, there is an urgent need to expand federal support for short-term paid internships and apprenticeships, coupled with robust employer incentives to help take such programs to scale.

It would prioritize skills, not just degrees. So-called degree inflation (requiring degrees for jobs that haven’t historically called for them) is locking millions of Americans, especially workers of color, out of economic mobility. To address both talent and equity gaps, employers must look beyond the four-year degree. The federal government should invest in a skills “marketplace” that facilitates the articulation and exchange of skills between workers and employers. Opportunity@Work’s recently launched marketplace is one such example.

It would be affordable, with companies paying. Many employers offer up to $5,250 per year in tax-free education assistance to their employees—an amount that (shockingly) has not changed in nearly 35 years. A bill to raise the limit to $12,000, roughly equivalent to the inflation-adjusted amount of the original tax exclusion, was recently introduced by Sens. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire,  and Todd Young, a Republican from Indiana.

It would provide credentials that businesses actually need. Bipartisan momentum is building for a policy shift to allow low-income Americans to use Pell Grants for high-quality, career-relevant, short-form credentials (for example, medical assistant, IT certification or post-bachelor’s STEM teaching credential). This would represent a critical reapplication of higher education funding for workforce development at a time when accessible, skills-focused job training is needed more urgently than ever.

To be sure, a full-scale reimagining of the workforce development ecosystem will take time. But the crisis we currently face demands a robust, long-term strategy for workforce investment and labor market recovery. The scale of the challenge is as intimidating as its urgency: Research suggests, and workers themselves know, that tens of millions of people need to learn new skills. But times of crisis can accelerate the pace of innovation. Federal, state and local policymakers, employers and universities must seize this moment in order to create a better equipped and more equitable workforce.

Scott Pulsipher is the president of Western Governors University and serves on the U.S. Commerce Department’s American Workforce Policy Advisory Board. Frank Britt is the CEO of Penn Foster, a company that provides training and reskilling programs for job seekers and working learners.

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As the days of a national shutdown stretched on, Aliya Johnson-Roberts knew she would have to start cutting employees’ hours and laying off some of her staff. When her child care center in northeast Philadelphia closed its doors in mid-March due to the coronavirus, she immediately started to lose out on a large portion of her revenue: $7,000 a month in tuition from private-paying families, co-pays from families who receive state support, and money she would normally receive through a federal food program. Johnson-Roberts, who has 35 employees to support and $20,000 a month in rent for the building that houses Bustleton Learning Center, estimated she would likely run out of money by early June.

But in late April, Johnson-Roberts received hopeful news: her center was the recipient of a $20,000 grant from a new emergency fund for Philadelphia child care centers, funded by the William Penn Foundation, Vanguard and the Reinvestment Fund, a community development financial institution. “It was a huge relief,” Johnson-Roberts said. “It was a way to allow us to breathe for a moment.” With the help of the grant and a discount from her landlord, Johnson-Roberts used the funds to pay rent, and cover her payroll and other expenses. 

An estimated 50 percent of licensed child care centers in the nation are at risk of closing permanently, a loss of more than 4.4 million child care slots, according to a report by the Center for American Progress. 

Efforts like this one in Philadelphia have emerged across the country as local foundations, organizations and city officials have stepped up to try to give child care centers a temporary boost as the federal government has failed to take sufficient action. In San Mateo, California, the city council recently allotted $120,000 in rent relief to home-based child care providers, many of whom have been unable to obtain funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, an aid package passed by Congress in March. In Nebraska, the Sidney Community Donor-Advised Fund recently provided five grants totaling more than $184,000 to local child care centers. And some organizations are stepping in to provide critical materials: In Alameda County, California, the nonprofit First Five Alameda has provided masks, thermometers, books and educational materials to centers that are open and providing services for the children of essential workers.

In its first round of funding, the Philadelphia Emergency Fund for Stabilization of Early Education (PEFSEE) awarded a total of $1.2 million in grants to 89 childcare providers, including Johnson-Roberts, with plans to continue awarding grants until they have depleted $7 million in emergency funds. The need has been overwhelming: Those 89 recipients were chosen from more than 400 applicants.  Bevin Parker-Cerkez, who oversees the Reinvestment Fund’s early childhood loans and grants, said the goal of the emergency fund is to make sure child care centers are not forced to close permanently, especially in low-income areas where families already lack access to high-quality childcare. Among the first round of grantees, 85 percent of the centers are led by women and 71 percent are owned or led by people of color. Ideally, Parker-Cerkez said, the financial assistance will help centers stay afloat so that they will be ready to open when it is time. “We want to be opening [centers] that are serving our most vulnerable populations and we want to make sure staff is there and ready to be there.”

Nationwide, the coronavirus pandemic has devastated the child care industry: an estimated 50 percent of licensed child care centers in the nation are at risk of closing permanently, a loss of more than 4.4 million child care slots, according to a report by the Center for American Progress.  Even before the coronavirus, child care centers were running on thin margins: tuition and government funded tuition reimbursement for low-income children fall short of covering the actual costs to care for children. Experts and child care centers say there’s a desperate need for federal funds to keep struggling centers afloat. “It’s going to be decimating to our overall recovery if [child care] is not addressed,” said Mark Shriver, president of the Save the Children Action Network, or SCAN.

“It’s going to be decimating to our overall recovery if [child care] is not addressed.”

Mark Shriver, president of the Save the Children Action Network, or SCAN.

A recent poll of 1200 registered voters by SCAN and Child Care Aware of America found 87 percent of those polled support providing enough federal assistance to child care centers during the coronavirus crisis to make sure centers can make payroll and pay their expenses. Shriver said this rare bipartisan support is a sign that the public understands how dire the situation is for the nation’s child care system. “I think it shows that people realize that if they’re going to go back to work their kids have got to be in a safe place.”

There have been some federal efforts to help child care centers, but those efforts fall far short of what is needed. The CARES Act includes initiatives like the Paycheck Protection Program, which provides loans that are converted to grants if small businesses meet all requirements. But some child care centers have found the requirements for the application difficult to meet and banks have been overwhelmed by applications. The aid package also provided $750 million for Head Start programs and $3.5 billion for the Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG), the program that provides states with funding to pay or supplement the child care tuition for low-income families. This week, Democrats in the House of Representatives introduced another aid package that if passed, would provide an additional $7 billion for the CCDBG. That came after more than 30 senators signed a letter in April calling for Congress to pass a legislative package that would include at least $50 billion in emergency funding for child care centers. But experts say even that would be a drop in the bucket. “Our estimates show that $50 billion is actually far less than what the system needs if the crisis lasts longer than a few months,” said Rebecca Ullrich, senior policy analyst for child care & early education at The Center for Law and Policy (CLASP) in a statement. At least $9.6 billion in public funding is needed each month to avoid permanent closure of child care centers and preserve the child care system during the coronavirus pandemic, according to an analysis by CLASP. 

In Philadelphia, Johnson-Roberts never heard back from her bank about her application for the Paycheck Protection Program. Nervous about how much longer the center could survive, she reapplied for the program through the Reinvestment Fund and received $170,000 one week later. Johnson-Roberts said she is now much more confident that she will be able and ready to open her doors for the center’s 180 students when deemed safe, something that is critical for many families. “We do know the economy needs people to get back to work,” Johnson-Roberts said. “But they can’t go back to work if they don’t have childcare.” 

Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Early Childhood newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about early learning. Subscribe today!

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When Steve Thorsett crunched the numbers, things looked grim.

Business was flagging. His flow of customers had fallen to a 10-year low, down more than 20 percent since 2015. By 2016, annual expenses had begun outpacing operating revenues by $14 million.

In an increasingly unforgiving market, Thorsett needed to do more than chip away at the margins of this problem. He could make cuts, but that was complicated in his industry, and would likely only speed the downward spiral. To differentiate himself from his competitors, this chief executive determined that his operation needed to grow bigger, not smaller.

So Thorsett took a classic shortcut to expansion. He found a partner that was on even shakier ground. The resulting acquisition will bring with it several hundred new consumers, allowing efficiencies of scale.

The move has other strategic advantages. Rather than duplicating what he does already, the organization he procured will help Thorsett broaden his offerings in ways that many of his rivals can’t, and at a speed that most can’t match.

Now Thorsett radiates optimism about the future — something rare these days among his counterparts, many of whom face challenges as bad as or worse than his.

Thorsett is the president of Willamette University at a time the higher education sector is grappling with a historic enrollment decline and financial challenges that cry out not for incremental change, but for radical solutions. Colleges and universities that don’t adapt risk joining the average of 11 per year the bond-rating firm Moody’s says have shut down in the last five years.

With low unemployment luring potential students straight into the workforce and a decline in the number of 18-year-olds, among other reasons, enrollment is down by more than 2.9 million since the last peak, in the fall of 2011, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. More than 400 colleges and universities still had seats available for freshmen and transfer students after the traditional May 1 deadline to enroll for this fall, the National Association for College Admission Counseling reports.

More are likely to go under; Moody’s projects that the pace of college closings will soon reach 15 per year. Yet some campus leaders, asked what steps they’re taking to avoid this fate, responded like the president of one small private liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. His school, he said, would “continue to graduate students who will make a tangible and constructive difference in the world.”

Related: The students disappearing fastest from American campuses? Middle-class ones
The crisis has advanced beyond the point where those sorts of good intentions are enough, said Thorsett. He and others in higher education have been actively searching for concrete ways to rebuild enrollment and produce much-needed revenue.

“This is a business,” Thorsett said. “It’s not for profit, but we have to keep the lights on. We have to build a model that’s sustainable.”

One way is through acquisitions like the one his university made of the Claremont School of Theology in California, or CST, which is being moved to the Salem, Oregon, campus of Willamette, just as private companies consolidate to increase their size and cost-effectiveness.

The pace of mergers and acquisitions has given rise to the self-described first full-service university and college merger consulting firm, Higher Ed Consolidation Solutions. “Will there be more? Yeah, we’re betting on it,” said its founder, Brian Weinblatt.

Colleges are also working to reduce their numbers of dropouts on the principle that it’s cheaper to provide the kind of support required to keep tuition-paying students than to recruit more. A few colleges are pushing job and on-time graduation guarantees as selling points. Several are getting into the business of corporate training, which is lucrative because employers foot the bill for workers who don’t need financial aid or fitness centers.

Many institutions are adding programs tied to real-time workplace demand, including online courses that appeal to people who are balancing their educations with families and work. Some are even squeezing small amounts of money from such things as renting out their dorm rooms in the summers on Airbnb, catering weddings and licensing their logos for products (including, in the case of 48 universities and colleges, caskets and urns).

“You have to be thinking beyond the current business model, whoever you are,” said Stephen Spinelli Jr., president of Babson College, whose Academy for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurial Learning makes money for the business university by training educators worldwide how to teach entrepreneurship. “That’s what higher education is going to have to do if it’s going to survive.”

Willamette has been particularly aggressive in its strategy of acquiring the 134-year-old CST, which was suffering multimillion-dollar annual shortfalls that it couldn’t make up from its endowment.

Among the institutions Willamette considers as its competitors are small liberal arts colleges such as Reed and Whitman. But it has something they don’t: several graduate divisions (Reed offers one master’s degree in liberal studies) and a goal of increasing its enrollment from its current 2,700 to 4,000 over the next 10 years, starting with about 400 from the theology school.

“ ‘Midsize university’ is a sweet spot,” said Thorsett, who is working to position his school as being small enough to promise personal attention but big enough to offer lots of choice, while not coincidentally lowering per-unit costs by serving a larger student body. “The university nature of our institution lets us do things our competitors can’t do.”

These include accelerated programs that can save students money, such as a five-year combined B.A. and MBA. Willamette now may add a joint B.A. and master’s of divinity degree with CST.

“Those kinds of synergies are really distinctive,” Thorsett said. “And they’re something that is really hard for the competition to match.”

Related: Colleges provide misleading information about their costs

Other institutions are also trying to cash in on students’ and their parents’ growing impatience with how long it takes to earn degrees. Only 41 percent of undergraduates now finish in four years, federal figures show, with the extra time adding substantial costs.

Speeding this up has become a promotional tool. Howard University, for instance — which suffered a nearly 28 percent drop in enrollment last year, according to figures provided by the university — is guaranteeing rebates equal to half the cost of their final semester to students who graduate on time or early.

“We sell that to the parents and students when we’re recruiting,” said Wayne Frederick, president of the university, which reports a 25 percent rebound in enrollment this fall. “The goal here is for your parents to come back in four years and pick you up.”

Or maybe three years. That’s how quickly Frederick thinks as many as 10 percent of his students can finish by increasing the number of credits they can take at one time. He also plans to add a three-credit “mini-mester” during the otherwise unproductive winter break.

“As students and their parents become more sophisticated as consumers, these are the kinds of things they’re looking at,” said Frederick.

A few universities and colleges are offering employment guarantees as an inducement to prospective students. DePauw University last year started promising job placement or a free additional semester to graduates who meet certain guidelines but don’t have a job within six months. Davenport University graduates who can’t find jobs in their fields of study within six months get up to 48 additional credit hours free.

Even colleges that don’t guarantee jobs are scrambling to add subjects that connect with real-world demand. Higher education institutions nationwide added 55,416 new programs in the five years ending in 2017, the last period for which the federal government has figures. Nearly 400 now offer credentials in cybersecurity, for example, for which demand is growing three times faster than for other IT jobs, according to the labor market analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies.

“Employability and a school’s ability to provide students with access to successful employment is now the key factor in our programming,” said John LaBrie, dean of the School of Professional Studies at Clark University, which, among other subjects, just began offering a graduate certificate in the timely area of regulating legalized marijuana.

Lehigh University has started hiring faculty for a new college of health, part of a plan to add 1,800 students. Other universities are forming partnerships with private, for-profit coding boot camps to which they worried they were losing customers. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in August became the latest to team up with the coding school Thinkful. Rice University in September added a financial technology program to the data analytics and cybersecurity boot camps it launched last year with Trilogy Education Services.

“Those are the kinds of places you can pick up dollars,” said Paul Freedman, cofounder and CEO of the innovation strategy firm the Entangled Group. “A lot of the focus has been on picking up pennies, like by making sure that students stick around longer.”

If it seems odd for colleges and universities to try to attract more customers by promising results that people might have been expecting anyway — degrees within four years, with jobs at the end — some of their strategies underscore the magnitude of the challenges they face.

Related: Already stretched grad students rebel against rising and often surreptitious fees

Not all of those tens of thousands of new programs, for instance, are likely to attract enough students to pay off. Nationwide, fifteen that were added in casino management turned out an average of two graduates apiece, the consulting firm Eduventures found. “That’s a philosophy of ‘Let’s throw something at the wall and see if it sticks,’ ” Miles Davis, the president of Linfield College, said with a laugh.

The number of programs being offered online has nearly doubled since 2012 as institutions try to get in on the one-third of students who now take at least some of their courses that way. Many may be too late, however; the top 1 percent of established online providers have already cornered 21 percent of enrollment, according to the Babson Survey Research Group, which tracks this. “Very little of the growth is from new people coming in,” said Jeff Seaman, the research group’s co-director.

Even what online growth there is may be slowing; Purdue University, which in 2017 bought the former for-profit Kaplan University and turned it into the online Purdue Global, has seen double-digit increases in enrollment, the university says, but Purdue President Mitch Daniels has publicly raised caution flags. “What we did not expect was for the market to slow down, which it has,” a spokeswoman for Daniels said

Those job guarantees, meanwhile, come with lots of fine print; at Davenport, for instance, they apply only to certain majors in high-demand fields. And for all of the work it’s done to reduce the number of dropouts, the higher education industry has so far barely moved the needle. Twenty-six percent of freshmen each year fail to return as sophomores, just 2 percentage points better than in 2009, with almost no improvement in the last few years, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found.

A few colleges have taken yet another lesson from the business world and responded to decreased demand in the most dramatic way of all: by lowering their prices. Central College in Iowa announced in September that it would cut its tuition by $20,000 starting next fall, to $18,600, after years of enrollment declines. St. John’s College, which has about 750 undergraduates on campuses in New Mexico and Maryland, reduced its tuition by $17,000 this fall, to $35,000. Applications went up, and the size of the entering class rose slightly.

But some colleges that cut prices have seen their numbers go down, not up. That speaks to Americans’ conviction that things that cost more must automatically be worth more, said Mark Roosevelt, president of St. John’s Santa Fe campus.

Related: Spotlight swings to for-profit middlemen that may be driving up the cost of online higher education

“Most of the gains were pretty short-lived if they existed at all,” said Alex Bloom, a pricing expert at the enrollment management-consulting firm EAB, who has studied what happened to colleges that cut tuition in the last two decades.

Colleges and universities are also pushing more students into graduate school, since this is typically a money-maker for them, and graduate enrollment has been a bright spot, but there are signs that it’s beginning to flatten out, too. That includes international graduate enrollment, long an important source of revenue for universities in the United States.

Another move for colleges struggling for students is to look for them in new places and in different ways.

While the supply of 18-year-olds overall is falling, for example, the number of Hispanics 18 and under will nearly double nationwide by 2060, the Census Bureau projects.

Linfield, which suffered five years of declining enrollment and resulting budget deficits that forced a buyout of 13 faculty and staff, now has full-time admissions officers who are bilingual, four Spanish-speaking “student ambassadors” and new scholarships for students who are the first in their families to go to college.

“It seems like a simple thing” to make a sales pitch to customers who haven’t gotten one before, said Davis. “But now we can have that conversation with parents who may or may not speak English.”

Linfield, which had 1,240 students last year, says it’s seen a 38 percent jump in the size of its entering class this fall, and more than 40 percent of freshmen are first-generation.

“The world that existed 35 or 40 years ago, where there was an unlimited number of people applying to school, is diminishing,” said Davis. “And the smaller you are, the more difficult that battle is.”

If it takes more work to find traditional-age freshmen, there’s one very big supply of prospective students available to colleges: older adults who never went, started but didn’t finish or want to get advanced degrees. Those who have some credits but never graduated number more than 35 million, according to the Census Bureau.

Many institutions are attempting for the first time to recruit these students, but it can be a hard sell; often these adults were left with debt but not degrees and are understandably skeptical about risking that again, or are now juggling careers and children. “If you are not already serving adults in some capacity, trying to make that pivot can be difficult,” said Marie Cini, president of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning.

Related: College students are increasingly forgoing summers off to save money, stay on track

A faster way in is by selling corporate training to their employers, who pay full price without requiring the colleges to give discounts or financial aid. Pace University, for example, has a deal with AT&T, Verizon and a coalition of other companies to train network technicians in the telecommunications industry.

“The corporation makes it easy,” said Patrick O’Keefe, a business reorganization and turnaround expert. “That’s a good reach-out by the universities, no question. You’re dealing with a deep-pocketed customer. Why wouldn’t you tap into that?”

Now smaller institutions are getting into the estimated $88 billion-a-year corporate training business. Starting this fall, Husson University is providing an MBA program to employees of the outdoors retailer L.L.Bean, which hired it to offer the degrees at the company’s headquarters in Freeport, Maine.

“This broadens our product range from an 18- to 21-year-old market to a multiple-age range,” said Husson President Robert Clark. “You couldn’t have a better model as part of a portfolio. And being associated with a brand like that doesn’t hurt.”

If Clark talks like a certified financial analyst with an MBA, it’s because he is one. Many of the campus leaders who are trying innovative strategies to stay afloat have taken unconventional paths to their jobs.

“What a president does these days has very little to do with academic programs. It has a lot to do with business, finance, labor law, marketing, fundraising,” said Davis, who before taking over last year at Linfield was a business-school dean and a managing consultant and principal at EDS, now part of Hewlett-Packard. “You need people who can think entrepreneurially.”

Spinelli, who started in July at Babson, co-founded Jiffy Lube before becoming president of Philadelphia University and overseeing its merger with Thomas Jefferson University in 2017. Howard’s Frederick is a medical doctor who also has an MBA. An astronomer, Thorsett managed $125 million spacecraft missions.

Even for them, it isn’t easy, in an academic setting, to talk about such things as mergers and markets, strategy and synergies, Davis said.

“But what’s more difficult than having this conversation is having the conversation that they’re having in places where institutions are shutting down,” he said. He’d rather be discussing allocation of resources and prioritization of programs, Davis said, “than stand in front of students and say we’re closing.”

 This story about college enrollment was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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Most federal work-study jobs don’t prepare students for life after graduation, according to a March report from the Urban Institute. But any efforts to improve the program could be made more difficult if the Department of Education’s 2020 budget proposal goes through.

“In today’s economy, where there is a strong focus on the role of relevant work experience in easing the transition from college to the workforce, there is good reason to focus on the nature of the jobs FWS provides and the marketable skills these jobs foster,” wrote Sandy Baum, the report’s author. According to her report, titled “Rethinking Work Study: Incremental Reform is Not Enough,” just 32 percent of work-study jobs are related to students’ coursework.

It was published three days after the White House released its proposals for reforming the Higher Education Act. The third proposal echoes Baum’s point: “Congress should reform the Federal Work Study (FWS) program to support workforce and career-oriented opportunities for low income undergraduate students, not just subsidized employment as a means of financial aid.” And Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos applauded the proposals. “There are 7.3 million unfilled jobs in the United States, yet too many Americans remain out of the workforce because they lack the skills necessary to seize these opportunities,” she said in a statement.

But Donald Trump’s administration is calling for the Federal Work-Study program to improve with far less money than the program has traditionally had. The 2019 budget for the program is $1.13 billion, but the Department is requesting just $500 million for it in 2020 – cutting it almost in half.

To be fair, the program, which started in the mid-1960s, began as a way to help lower-income undergraduate and graduate students with their educational costs, not as a career-training program. In the 1965-1966 school year, 1,095 schools took part in the program. By 2013-2014, there were more than 3,000 participating. Colleges receive grants that cover up to 75 percent of a student’s pay for a work-study job. How much each institution receives is based on a historical formula that critics say disadvantages those whose students typically have more financial need, such as community colleges.

Related: Task force proposes changes in federal work-study financial-aid program

During the 2016-2017 school year, for example, City University of New York schools together received the largest Federal Work-Study disbursement – $9,801,495 for about 4,800 students. But they were followed by a host of top-tier universities with wealthier student bodies than found on most campuses. New York University, second on the list, received $7,553,690 for 3,434 students. It was followed by Columbia University, the University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles, in that order. Cornell was No. 12 and the University of Pennsylvania was No. 14.

The program may have been designed solely to help students cover all the costs that come with going to college, such as books, transportation and food. But times have changed.

“We know that when students graduate from college and go into the labor market, that having some kind of work experience that is relevant to their future employers is very important,” Baum said earlier this week.

According to a 2017 report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 65 percent of employers said they prefer to hire candidates with relevant work experience; only 26 percent said they prefer candidates with any type of work experience, even if it’s not relevant.

Some argue that virtually any job can offer relevant skills for future employment.

“Students in work-study jobs and even in non-work-study jobs develop all sorts of competencies, whether it’s professionalism and work ethic, or teamwork, collaboration, written skills, customer service skills,” Jenny Heller, president of the National Student Employment Association, said. These types of skills will serve them well for getting an internship or post-graduate job, she said.

And for many schools, it’s also not realistic to make sure that all work-study jobs connect with students’ coursework.

“We have about 500 students on work-study. It’s just not possible to find all 500 students jobs in their majors,” said Heller, who’s also associate director of financial aid for student employment at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Wheaton has about 1,600 students.

Heller isn’t sure the federal government should focus on the work-study program when reauthorizing the HEA, which determines how federal aid is distributed to students and schools. Many colleges, including Wheaton, are already looking into enhancing their student employment programs, she said, to make sure students understand the skills they’re developing.

But Baum said putting less money into Federal Work-Study, won’t help.

“This amount of money is not going to solve the problem,” she said. “It’s lip service to something that is, in fact, important.”

This story about the federal work study program was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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