Jobseekers and workforce professionals may be familiar with the landscape of community college noncredit workforce training within their communities, but many are surprised and even bewildered to learn how differently this growing field of education operates across college district boundaries or state lines.  

Michelle Van Noy, of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, knows this well, having led a yearlong study about how noncredit workforce classes are funded, structured and recorded across the country.

Through surveying and interviews in all 50 states and case studies at 20 individual schools, her research team found that about half of states fund noncredit workforce education at community colleges directly, that most require some type of reporting on students enrolled in these classes and that few states prescribe whether or how these classes are reflected on student transcripts.

“Everything in this world is complex, but the community college is one of those institutions that is highly complex, and the field of noncredit workforce education really illustrates that,” Van Noy told MII.

The study was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The American Association of Community Colleges published its findings in Non-credit Enrollment in Workforce Education: State Policies and Community College Practices.

Through interviews with local and state officials for the study, and feedback from their peers after its release, Van Noy said a theme has struck her that speaks to the importance of understanding the topography of this area of the education world.

There is great interest in the community college field in raising the profile of workforce education and creating ladders from these offerings into for-credit programs, but as practitioners look around for best practices, they find the differences in factors affecting this work a bit confusing.

“It’s a potentially pretty interesting trend that is occurring in some colleges and some states,” she said, of the desire to better integrate workforce education wi t h for-credit community college programing.

The report makes no judgments on the way a state or community college should conduct business, but it does describe in detail the wide variety in the way things work, starting with funding.

More than half of states provide general funds to community colleges for noncredit workforce education, though how those funds are delivered varies considerably, the study found.

Eleven states distribute funding for noncredit workforce programming using formulas that are typically based on enrollments or seat time.

While this is similar to the way most states provide institutional aid to community colleges for credit-bearing programs, only Maryland, Oregon and Texas were found to be formula-funding noncredit instruction at the same rate as credit instruction.

State formula-funding rates for noncredit enrollments ranged from half of the for-credit enrollment rate in Nebraska to three-quarters of the for-credit rate in New Jersey and North Carolina.

Even though workforce programs get second-tier funding in some states that use enrollment-based formula allocation, “this type of funding strategy provides the most clearly defined and dependable source of funding for non-credit workforce education, which could encourage programs to become more institutionalized at the colleges,” the authors write…

—Read this article in its entirely, courtesy of Employment & Training Reporter, by clicking on the PDF icon below.