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Weekly Update
A newsletter from The Hechinger Report |
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A student in a welding training program. Credit: Molly Haley for The Hechinger Report
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The biggest expansion of federal scholarship money in 50 years |
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At a time when polls show two-thirds of Americans think a higher education is no longer worth the price, Forsyth Technical Community College has a message for them.
“College,” it says, “could cost you nothing.”
The planned marketing slogan is a reference to the most dramatic expansion in more than 50 years of federal grants for education after high school — and the reality that few consumers know they could benefit from the kinds of programs for which hundreds of millions of dollars will be available as soon as this summer.
The lack of awareness is made worse by the fact that many states whose job it is to put the policy into place aren’t yet ready, meaning only a comparatively limited number of consumers will initially be able to use the money for a relatively small number of programs.
“There’s a huge awareness gap with people not understanding what it is, what programs are eligible and how much they can get,” said Devin Purgason, associate vice president of student experience, marketing and outreach at Forsyth Tech, which is in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The new policy, known as Workforce Pell, widens the scope of federal Pell Grants by helping lower-income learners pay not just for associate or bachelor’s degrees, but for nondegree job training as short as eight weeks, which was previously not covered, in high-demand fields including nursing, phlebotomy, child care, truck-driving, welding, car repair and HVAC. This at a time when two-thirds of registered voters think a four-year degree is no longer worth the cost.
Passed less than a year ago as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Workforce Pell has had to be set up so quickly that the National Governors Association calls it “one of the most consequential near-term policy challenges” states have faced.
While the provisions formally take effect July 20, states and institutions are allowed to get started as early as July 1. But most are still scrambling to figure out which training programs will satisfy the dozens of pages of eligibility requirements.
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This week's newsletter is sponsored by: |
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Join the FullScale Symposium, along with 1,000+ educators, leaders, and changemakers, to advance personalized, competency-based, whole-child learning. More than a conference, it's an experience designed to move real work forward. Connect with others doing the hard work, get unstuck, and help shape the future of public education.
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Lessons from the first state in the nation to offer universal child care
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New Mexico garnered a wave of attention when Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced in September that all of the state’s families would be eligible for child care assistance. “Child care is essential to family stability, workforce participation, and New Mexico’s future prosperity,” she said at the time.
In March 2026, requirements for the program shifted. Families earning up to 600 percent of the federal poverty line are now eligible for free child care without copays, the equivalent of a four-person family earning $198,000 annually. Copays beyond that threshold are also contingent on if the price of oil decreases. Participating families can choose from a wide range of options, including center-based care, home-based providers, before- and after-school care, and faith-based centers. On average, the universal program is expected to save participating families $12,000 a year. (Private providers still have the option to not serve families receiving child care assistance and continue to charge tuition.)
What has received less attention outside New Mexico, however, is the state’s attempt to fairly compensate the long underappreciated and underpaid early childhood workforce.
Because the state is now in charge of early education through the universal program, it has also stepped into the role of being responsible for child care wages. It has had to decide questions such as how to weigh experience against education in child care wages, how to financially incentivize centers to adopt rigorous measures of quality and a whole host of issues that have typically been left to the market.
But the child care “market,” as it currently exists in other states, has primarily produced poverty wages for workers and exorbitant costs for families. There’s a hope that if New Mexico can iron out these issues, it can lead the way for other places that might want to implement a universal program, such as New York City. Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced earlier this year that the city will create 2,000 free child care slots for 2-year-olds in the city on its way to scaling up a universal and free program for all young children, but the city would need 30,000 new child care workers to make that work. |
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In California’s ‘Lithium Valley,’ students are training for jobs that haven’t yet materialized
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In the southeastern corner of the state, colleges quickly created workforce training programs in response to a promised new lithium industry. Years later, they’re still waiting for jobs to arrive. |
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