How Can States Better Align Statewide Economic and Workforce Programs to Boost Their Impact? Lessons From Virginia
By Richard Kazis, Pascale Mevs, and Maria Cormier
As the Commonwealth of Virginia has recovered from the pandemic, executive and legislative leaders have focused on how economic and workforce development initiatives can do more to promote regional growth, the expansion of industries that create high-wage jobs, and greater access to opportunity for adults seeking to improve their skills.
One high-visibility state-funded workforce program, created in 2021 by the General Assembly, is Get a Skill, Get a Job, Get Ahead (G3), a last-dollar scholarship program for students enrolling in one of five high-demand occupational fields within the Virginia Community College System (VCCS). G3 aims to increase enrollment, persistence, completion, and labor market success for low-to-middle-income adults. In the 2022-23 academic year, G3 distributed $20.5 million to 12,594 students enrolled at Virginia’s 23 community colleges.
An equally touted economic development initiative, Growth and Opportunity Virginia (GO Virginia), was legislated in 2016 to promote regional collaboration and to grow and diversify regional economies. In fiscal year 2023, GO Virginia allocated $30 million for workforce and economic development projects across nine regional councils. Forty-four percent of the funding went to workforce projects, and the remainder was used to develop industrial sites, spur entrepreneurship, and scale up industry clusters.
How well do these distinct state-funded workforce and economic development investments align with and leverage each other? Could more intentional collaboration generate better outcomes for individuals and communities? To explore these questions, researchers from CCRC examined current and potential alignment between these two initiatives as part of a three-year research project on G3 implementation and outcomes conducted with VCCS and the University of Pennsylvania. Through interviews with GO Virginia regional council directors in six of the state’s nine council regions and through document analysis, we explored community college involvement in GO Virginia and ways in which more—and more strategic—coordination between G3 efforts at VCCS institutions and regional GO Virginia investments can promote both more high-wage jobs and greater access for lower income adults to those opportunities.
Through this analysis, we learned that community college presidents typically serve on GO Virginia regional councils and college workforce administrators commonly work with regional council staff on training projects involving occupational fields in which the college has credential programs. We also learned that community colleges have been initiators or lead partners in GO Virginia projects. In the 2022-23 academic year, five of nine regions received grants for projects led by community colleges. Some of these workforce projects were small, such as a program at Mountain Empire Community College preparing adults returning from prison to earn a level-1 welding certificate. Others were larger, such as a program at Brightpoint Community College in advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing that was awarded $482,000. In the Hampton Roads area, Paul D. Camp, Tidewater, and Virginia Peninsula Community Colleges—collaborating as the Community College Workforce Cooperative—joined the region’s workforce council to win an $11 million federal Good Jobs Challenge grant with support from GO Virginia.
Our analysis illustrates the overlap in purpose and in industries targeted by G3 and GO Virginia and their common focus on expanding access to workforce training for adults. At the same time, these programs invest in different aspects of the workforce development ecosystem. G3 funds focus on increasing access to training for good jobs for eligible low- and moderate-income Virginians, whereas GO Virginia invests in regional collaboration to support the creation of more high-wage jobs in the state. As community colleges participate in or advance GO Virginia workforce projects, they can simultaneously expand G3-eligible training programs and use G3 funds to reduce financial barriers to participation for lower income adults. To the extent that collaboration is built in early, incentives can be aligned in ways that address the state’s workforce and economic development goals more effectively. More proactive collaboration can also identify challenges that are shared by both efforts: For example, neither G3 nor GO Virginia is designed to invest in wraparound services for individuals participating in their training programs, but together they might be able to find regional solutions that can benefit both.
As we continue our research on G3, CCRC will explore further the statewide workforce development context in which colleges implement G3. We will look at how various workforce and economic development policies and programs in Virginia interact with colleges’ G3 initiatives and investments. Many states have made similar ambitious, cross-sector investments in workforce development in recent years, especially coming out of the pandemic. Lessons from Virginia may shed new light on how these investments can work together to generate improved and more equitable college attainment and labor market outcomes.
Richard Kazis is a research affiliate with the Community College Research Center (CCRC), Pascale Mevs is a senior research assistant at CCRC and a PEAR fellow at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Maria Cormier is a senior research associate at CCRC.
This project is supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305X220024 and Grant R305B200017 to Teachers College, Columbia University. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.
