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Republicans on the House Education and Workforce Committee, as part of their budget reconciliation bill, are seeking to cut at least $330 billion in federal higher education spending in order to fund tax breaks for billionaires.

They've put entire federal loan programs on the chopping block and are trying to whittle down the number of repayment options. And they've floated changing eligibility for federal Pell Grants, making it much less likely moderate-income families could land that money to help afford college.

Yet even with all these cuts, they slipped in a pet priority that will cost money. The provision would extend Pell Grants to very-short-term programs as short as 8 weeks long, providing as few as 150 hours of training. For years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have floated versions of this idea. Last year, we saw bipartisan support for so-called “short-term” Pell, despite the fact that Pell Grants already go to programs considered short-term, as brief as 15 weeks long. Those programs already have such poor outcomes that we should question the logic of extending the Pell Grant to even shorter-term programs.

The version of very-short-term Pell in the House reconciliation bill is one of the most concerning to date. It comes with barely any meaningful guardrails and opens the door for for-profit and new, unaccredited providers—ones that are not even colleges—to get a piece of the Pell program. In fact, the short-term Pell provision in the House Republican bill is one of the weakest we’ve ever seen when it comes to accountability and quality.

And now the Republicans are only a simple majority vote away from enacting this into law.

Very-short-term Pell is often championed as helping students “skill up” quickly for in-demand jobs. And we support that aim: we do need better, faster, and more affordable ways to help students and workers adapt in a changing economy to get and keep good jobs. But the House reconciliation bill results in much less aid overall for students pursuing postsecondary education, and promotes funneling low-income students with busy lives into very-short-term vocational credentials, usually with the promise of a quick way to land a middle-class job. Low-income students are much more likely to be women and students of color, and research has shown very short-term credentials would not help boost them up the social mobility ladder, and will further stratify our higher education system.

Research on short-term education and training programs—particularly those shorter than 15 weeks or 600 clock hours—suggests their economic value is often overstated. While these programs are frequently billed as efficient pathways to employment, research shows that they tend to offer limited labor market returns, especially for students without prior college experience.

Å·²©ÌåÓýͶע's review of the literature shows that individuals who completed very short-term programs earned no more than peers who didn’t pursue any postsecondary education—raising serious concerns about whether these credentials actually deliver a return on investment, particularly when offered by for-profit institutions. Another Å·²©ÌåÓýͶע study found that half of short-term certificate holders earned poverty-level wages.

Shortcomings of short-term programs are evident in the outcomes of programs currently eligible for federal aid. Programs as short as 10 weeks, providing 300 hours of training, are eligible for federal student loans. found, however, that the median wage of those programs’ graduates was just $12 an hour, less than the average high school graduate. of federal data showed that the average certificate program that received federal student aid had a median salary of less than $25,000. The U.S. Department of Education has also already tested Pell Grants in programs as short as eight weeks and "boosting program completion, offering these experimental Pell Grants did not increase employment or earnings."

House Republicans will argue they’ve added many guardrails to this bill that ensures that taxpayer dollars will only flow to programs with good outcomes. That just isn’t true.

Unaccredited providers

The proposal would allow providers who are not colleges to access federal financial aid. This is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the proposal because it means Pell dollars—federal aid meant to help low-income students afford college—could flow to unaccredited bootcamps, pop-up training programs, or other entities that would operate under minimal oversight and no track record of student success. These providers will likely use slick marketing to make . Without the guardrails that come with accreditation, quality assurance, or student protections, this provision invites a wave of low-quality, high-cost operators into the financial aid system. Even proponents of short-term Pell oppose this particular provision. The American Association of Community Colleges released a , calling the provision “a dramatic and unexpected change from previous workforce Pell bills” and a “significant concern.”

Median earnings must exceed the total program price

Students pursue postsecondary education to land high-quality jobs and wages, and they should at least expect to make more than they would if they only had a high school degree—that should be the absolute minimum earnings floor that these credentials are held to. Other proposals, including the , acknowledge that and would require that short-term Pell programs’ graduates exceed the earnings of those with only a high school diploma.

This bill instead ties programs’ Pell Grant eligibility to a measure that compares the “value-added earnings” of the program to its cost. To be eligible, a program’s costs must be less than the value-added earnings, which is the program’s median graduate earnings minus . That means a program with a median salary of $25,000, which is barely above the poverty threshold, could be deemed successful so long as the program cost was approximately $1,500 or less. Not only is that wage barely above the federal poverty guidelines, it is almost $20,000 lower than the median of what someone aged 25-34 would make with only a high school diploma (). Pell shouldn’t benefit programs that just barely lift students out of poverty, they should at least help them get further than they would have with only their high school degree.

Furthermore, seeking a very-short credential not only comes with financial costs, but also important opportunity costs. People's time is valuable, and low-income people's time and working adults’ time even more so. They're taking off time to take classes, find child care, and manage their busy lives, all with the hopes of a better life. But if they’re not getting that better life, they’ve lost that time: time out of the labor market and time that could’ve been spent in a program that would’ve yielded better results.

“High-skill, high-wage, or in-demand”

The bill’s standard requiring that programs train students for high-skill, high-wage, or in-demand jobs, sounds impressive, but is functionally meaningless. The biggest flaw of this language is the word “or.” . In fact, it often means the opposite. A job can be in-demand because it has high turnover, not high wages. For example, nursing assistants are in-demand, but their wages are . Furthermore, there’s no enforcement mechanism to ensure these programs actually lead to “high-skill” or “high-wage” outcomes, making the provision toothless.

Completion and job placement

Like many previous short-term Pell proposals, the House Republican bill would require that programs have completion and job placement rates of at least 70 percent. These thresholds might sound like strong quality indicators, but the devil is in the data.

For example, meeting a 70 percent completion rate may not be meaningful, as the time to earn a credential is so short, that the shorter the credential, the higher the completion rate.

The job placement rate requirement also sounds good on paper, but means little. The requirement isn’t that graduates are employed in the field or occupation for which the program trained them. Graduates just have to find a job—any job, not a good job. And these programs don’t lead to good jobs. Data from the existing short-term loan program—which already requires meeting completion and job placement thresholds— between job placement and earnings.

Leaving aside the ease with which most programs will meet these low-bar measures, they can also be easily gamed or manipulated. The California Attorney General and the U.S. Department of Education that Corinthian College, a large for-profit chain that has closed, inflated their job placement rates by as much as 80 percentage points.

Stackable pathways

Proponents often claim that short-term credentials will “stack” into longer-term degrees, allowing students to build toward higher qualifications over time. This vision rarely plays out in reality. Research shows that most students who complete a short-term program don’t return for further education—especially if that initial program wasn’t offered by a traditional college. Many, if not most, short-term programs lack clear articulation into associate or bachelor’s degree pathways, and the credits often don’t transfer. One showed that only 8 percent of workforce credential earners return and complete another degree in the same field within 3 years.

Even when students do return, it’s often across unrelated fields. In many cases, these credentials are terminal, not transitional. For instance, think of a commercial driver’s license training program—this is not easily stacked. And other programs that may seem like they can lead to high-level degrees in the same field often end up being terminal. For example, has found that only 3 percent of Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) ever become Licensed Practical Nurses (LPNs) or Registered Nurses (RNs), and just 1 percent ever earn an associate degree. That means those students who aspired to become an LPN or RN, occupations that pay substantially more than CNAs, are stuck in low-quality jobs with wages near the poverty level.

The reconciliation bill pays lip service to stackability—but doesn’t deliver it. It only requires that programs “prepare” students to pursue a certificate or degree at “one or more institutions,” which could just mean continuing at the same provider. That won’t ensure portability or credit transfer.

And because the bill allows non-credit programs to qualify for Pell—programs that normally wouldn’t be eligible—it includes a weak provision that students must receive academic credit for their short-term program that counts toward a future certificate or degree. This supposed guardrail quickly falls apart under scrutiny. Unaccredited providers can’t offer credit-bearing courses in the first place, and they have no authority over what an accredited college—or its accreditor—will accept. Even within community colleges, moving from non-credit to credit programs is challenging. For example, as , the vocational, or non-credit and academic, or credit divisions, often operate in silos, with different faculty, governance structures, and standards. For non-credit programs to count toward a degree, the academic side must agree on curriculum alignment and ensure compliance with accreditation standards, particularly because most accreditors don’t even evaluate non-credit programs.

This raises serious questions about how the Education Department could enforce this requirement after students have completed the program and seek to get credit for it in a degree or credit-bearing certificate program. A post-hoc review of whether students received usable credit offers little protection for either students or taxpayers. To ensure true stackability, non-credit programs would need to be explicitly aligned with credit-bearing programs from the outset, and the only way to guarantee this is for the bill to require formal articulation agreements. That alignment must be in place before students enroll, not promised afterward. And these agreements shouldn’t just exist within a single institution; they must include at least one other college to ensure transferability. Otherwise, even if students do receive credit, it may only count as electives—offering little progress toward a meaningful credential. Other supports are also needed to ensure that students persist into other programs, either upon completion, while they are working in the field, or if they want to return to postsecondary education full-time.

Even with these systemic alignments and upfront legwork, stackability often remains more buzzword than benefit. This weak guardrail does nothing to ensure that students aren’t wasting their time and effort—while using up their limited Pell lifetime eligibility—in a program that doesn’t help them earn a higher-level credential. In other words, short-term Pell could leave students short-changed and stuck.

Not only are the included guardrails weak, but Republicans missed some key protections entirely in their bill. The most important missing guardrail is a mechanism ensuring programs result in sufficient earnings. This and other provisions are critical to rein in explosive growth of programs with poor outcomes and predatory recruitment practices, and to make sure students are getting what they are paying for—a real opportunity to get the skills necessary to get good jobs.

No exclusion for for-profits or online programs

For-profit colleges have a long and well-documented history of preying on low-income students, veterans, and students of color. They often offer low-value programs that lead to debt without a degree or a decent-paying job. And very-short-term, fully online programs often yield poor outcomes, including lower student performance and completion rates, particularly among marginalized groups. Allowing short-term Pell Grants to apply to online programs could also expose low-income students to exploitative practices by for-profit companies, and it may incentivize institutions to prioritize profit over educational quality, leading to poor student outcomes and increased student debt. It also doesn’t make sense, given that these programs are supposed to be the kind of “hands-on” career training programs.

Allowing for-profit and online-only programs to access Pell Grants would invite fraud, just as some of the worst actors are already readying a comeback and companies are champing at the bit to get a hold of those federal dollars. This provision all but guarantees institutions more interested in profits than in outcomes will target vulnerable students once again. By allowing both unaccredited providers and online-only programs to access short-term Pell under this bill, there is a huge risk for rapid growth, enrolling substantial numbers of students and increasing the cost estimates of the program while not understanding the outcomes. Once money starts flowing, even if it goes to bad programs, it takes time to turn the spigot off. If anything, we should be tightening access to federal dollars—being smart when we turn the water on.

No elimination of the short-term loan program

Another troubling aspect of the short-term Pell proposal is that it doesn’t eliminate the short-term loan program for programs as short as 10 weeks. That means students could not only spend their limited Pell eligibility on a low-value credential, but also go into debt for it. And once loans are on the table, there’s a clear incentive for institutions—especially for-profit colleges—to raise tuition and fees, knowing federal dollars will follow. Allowing both Pell and loans to flow to eight-week programs with limited oversight is a recipe for exploitation, not opportunity.

No prohibition for those with Bachelor’s degrees

The earnings bar is too low for programs to qualify for short-term Pell, but the bill fails to include an important guardrail that will make it even easier for programs to surpass the low standard. While cutting eligibility for Pell in other parts of the bill, the short-term Pell provision would allow Pell to go to students who already have bachelor’s degrees. Someone who already holds a bachelor’s degree has a much higher median income (about $66,000 in 2022), is far more likely to complete the program, land a job, and earn more afterwards, but because of the bachelor’s degree, not the short-term Pell program. These bachelor’s degree holders’ earnings will go into the data, skewing the results to look better than they actually are for those who have no postsecondary credential—the supposed exact target audience for these programs.

This could also lead to another unintended consequence: opening the door for institutions—particularly predatory ones trying to make more money—recruiting newly minted bachelor’s degree holders who received Pell and offering them a bootcamp that purports to provide some specific skill that will make them more “employable” in the labor market. Not only would those students likely not benefit from the program, but it also costs them time out of the labor market, all while costing taxpayers more. And for those who pursue such a program, they could afford to pay for it, instead of taking limited Pell dollars from students who need the grant to earn their first credential.

What makes this version of short-term Pell even more egregious is that it’s being sold as a way to expand access—when, in truth, it redirects funding toward programs with weak outcomes while shrinking access to the core Pell program for traditional degree-seeking students. Low-income students, students of color, and working adults will be steered into low-return programs, wasting their precious Pell lifetime eligibility dollars, all while the broader promise of Pell is undermined. This will continue what economist Anthony Carnevale has called “.”

The bottom line? This isn’t about expanding access—it’s about lowering the floor. While cutting aid for students pursuing associate and bachelor’s degrees, this bill steers working-class students toward low-return programs that look quick and cheap, but often lead nowhere. It reinforces the idea that some students deserve a full college education, while others should settle for a certificate. And again, it only needs a simple majority with no bipartisan support to pass.