The Working Poor Families Project released a policy brief that explores ways to connect young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 years old to education and training programs borne out of state level policies and interventions.

The Center for Community College Student Engagement released a report that explores college graduation achievement gaps by race and ethnicity. According to the authors, Black and Latino male students enroll in community colleges with higher aspirations than their White male counterparts; however, men of color complete community college degrees at a much lower rate than their white male counterparts. The report maintains that these disparities are embedded in the structure of existing programs, and community colleges should actively address this inequity by reimagining their programs.

The Health Profession Opportunity Grants (HPOG) Program, established by the Affordable Care Act of 2010, funds training programs in high-demand healthcare professions, targeted to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients and other low-income individuals. In 2010, the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded 32 HPOG grantees in 23 states with five-year grants. This Annual Report provides an overview of HPOG grantees, characteristics of participants, activities in which participants were engaged, training and employment outcomes, and how grantee programs continued to evolve in the second year of the program. (author abstract)

There is longstanding interest among policy makers and program operators in finding ways to increase the skill levels of low-income individuals, improve their enrollment in and completion of post-secondary education, and improve their economic prospects. The career pathways approach is gaining steady acceptance as a promising strategy to address these challenges and improve post-secondary education and training for low-income and low-skilled adults.

This brief focuses on the Innovative Strategies for Increasing Self-Sufficiency project; a major national effort to evaluate the effectiveness of nine career pathways programs using an experimental design. It summarizes the framework used to describe the career pathways approach and the theory of change that guides the evaluation. It then describes the nine programs in the evaluation, and concludes with the study’s research questions and data sources. Later reports and briefs will present findings from the evaluation and will be posted on the project website. (author abstract)

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released this report that states that, as of Fall 2012, more than 50 million U.S. adults (about 25 percent of the adult population) had received a professional certification, license, or educational certificate that was not a degree awarded by a college or university. Of the awardees, some 34 million had a professional certification of license, 7 million had an educational certificate, and 12 million had received both a professional certification or license and an educational certificate.

A substantial skills gap exists between the education and training of the labor force and the needs of employers in many high growth industries, including healthcare and manufacturing. This gap results in unemployment while good paying jobs go unfilled. At the same time, many low-skilled adults persist in low wage work with little opportunity for advancement.

Career pathways programs, like the Pima Community College (PCC) Pathways to Healthcare HPOG programs, are an approach to fill a vital need for skilled workers in the economy and offer low-wage workers the opportunity to obtain occupational and other skills and advance into the middle class.

This brief was produced by Abt Associates as part of the Innovative Strategies to Increase Self-Sufficiency (ISIS) project, a random assignment evaluation of nine promising career pathways programs that aim to improve employment and self-sufficiency outcomes for low-income, low-skilled individuals. (author abstract) 

This practice brief from the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) comes out of the ongoing evaluation of the five Tribal HPOG grantees, each of which was awarded a demonstration grant for a period of five years. Within the Tribal HPOG programs, supportive services are offered alongside the career pathways model used to train students for careers in the health care field. These services are a key component of the programs, as students often face multiple barriers to completing their training. This brief highlights the supports offered by the five programs and examines the similarities and differences among programs.

This Jobs for the Future report highlights the findings from a Breaking Through partnership facilitated by Jobs for the Future, the National Council for Workforce Education, and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. This eighteen-month initiative focused on piloting workforce and education strategies to better serve low-skilled students at Tribal colleges and universities.