Reconnect America

More Skills for America’s Recovery

APRIL 2020
Reconnect America
More Skills for America’s Recovery
The America that emerges from the Coronavirus pandemic will be markedly different from the country that
entered this crisis. The challenge is how to make sure this post-crisis America is one with more opportunity
and prosperity for our workers and businesses, all of which will be faced with a radically disrupted
economy: businesses that must radically restructure to survive; old jobs irrevocably lost; old skills no
longer in demand; and new jobs that not enough people are qualified to fill.

Rebuilding our human capital infrastructure has to be at the top of our to-do list if Americans are to have
more, not fewer, opportunities and businesses are to secure the talent they need after the pandemic has
ebbed. Women and men who aren’t able to get their old jobs back and need new skills to get better jobs
will require fast access to education and training.

Fortunately, there is a proven way to close industry skill gaps and quickly provide adults career
educational opportunities in a period of severe economic dislocation. A number of states, led by
Tennessee, have pioneered tuition-free access to public colleges for adults needing associate degrees or
industry recognized occupational credentials to secure the skills required to meet new demands in their
local labor markets. These programs to “reconnect” those already in the workforce to new education
opportunities have become central elements in these states’ economic development plans.

Congress should take advantage of this exciting innovation to help all Americans pursue better jobs and
bigger paychecks in the new normal of post-virus America — an initiative that would also help both
businesses confronting skills shortages and public higher education institutions that will be struggling to
overcome the impact of extended shutdowns.

Our Reconnect America (RA) proposal would provide states with a block grant, distributed based on
population, to provide tuition-free access to higher education for the purpose of earning an associate
degree or industry recognized occupational certificate for any adult 25 years or older who has earned
a high school diploma or its equivalent. It would be a last dollar program, funding tuition after a student
had claimed available Pell funds, and be available with the following conditions:
• Colleges and local businesses would first need to agree on a list of skills in current demand in their
local labor market that the higher education institution would provide to area adult students
before the college could accept RA students.
• Colleges would have to agree to cap their tuition at current levels, unless they exceeded the Pell
Grant maximum payment of $6,000. In those cases, colleges would have to reduce tuition to $6,000
for RA students to ensure access would be tuition free.
• Students would have to take at least a half-time credit load each semester and complete their
degree or certificate in no more than three years. Students would have to maintain at least a 2.0
GPA while in the program.

Based on the experience of the Tennessee Reconnect program that offers similar tuition-free benefits to all
adults, this program would cost a total of $5-6B over four years depending on enrollment and completion
rates. That level of funding would be enough to provide for two cohorts of adult students, one enrolling in
the fall of this year and another in 2021. This relatively small investment in our country’s human capital
would provide our economy with the skills we will need to help restore full employment as quickly as
possible.

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Tennessee Reconnect At-a-Glance
• New adult enrollees at Tennessee community colleges increased 96% from Fall 2017 to Fall
2018.
• Reconnecting students (those returning to college after at least a semester away), rose 53%
during the same period, representing an influx of nearly 3,000 students.
• Sixty-three percent (63%) of Tennessee Reconnect students enrolling in the Fall of 2018
received funding with an average award of $1,431. For the remaining students, tuition and
mandatory fee were covered by other sources of federal/state aid.

Tennessee Reconnect is the State of Tennessee’s initiative to help adults enter higher education so that
they may gain new skills, advance in the workplace, and fulfill lifelong dreams of completing a degree or
credential. The cornerstone of the program is a Reconnect Grant which provides last dollar scholarships to
attend a community college tuition-free.

To be eligible for the Tennessee Reconnect grant, an applicant must: be a Tennessee resident for at least
one year; be a U.S. citizen or eligible non-citizen; complete the FAFSA and be deemed an independent
student; not already have an associate or baccalaureate degree; be admitted to an eligible institution and
enroll in a degree or certificate program at least part-time (6 semester hours), and; participate in an
advising program.

Tennessee Reconnect enrolled 18,217 Tennesseans in its first cohort (2018-19). These students, on average,
were 33 years old and 70 percent female. They attempted and earned more hours, on average, than non-
and pre-Reconnect adults. First year Tennessee Reconnect students achieved a 62 percent success rate
with 11.8 percent graduating in 2018-19 and the rest retuning to community college in the Fall of 2019.

According to a January 2018 State Higher Education Executive Officer Association (SHEEO) presentation
that drew extensively from a 2016 Education Commission of the States (ECS) report arguing for adult
inclusive state free college programs, over half of all states cannot meet their attainment goals without
adult students. To this end, states are turning to “Adult Promise Programs,” such as Tennessee Reconnect,
to increase adult student enrollment and retention. According to SHEEO’s definition, Adult Promise
Programs: promote a simple, transparent message that postsecondary education is affordable for adult
learners; make a financial commitment to adult students through leveraging aid from all available sources
and committing to fill in the gaps where needed to cover tuition and fees, and; establishing and supporting
programs and services that are tailored to the unique needs of adult students and will help them succeed
in postsecondary education.

SHEEO, with financial support from the Lumina Foundation, is currently supporting Adult Promise Program
development and implementation in five states — Indiana, Maine, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Washington.
Additional information can be found at https://sheeo.org/project/adult-promise/.

In 2020, Michigan established the framework for an Adult Promise Program, Michigan Reconnect. However,
funding for Michigan’s program remains uncertain as the state addresses COVID-19. Additionally,
Maryland’s legislature unanimously passed a bill removing language restricting the Maryland Community
College Scholarship to recent high school graduates.

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 RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS

Retraining Workers in the Post-COVID-19 Economy

Michelle Miller-Adams — April 17, 2020

Among everything upended by the COVID-19 crisis, the nation’s unemployment picture is arguably the most dramatic.
In February 2020, the unemployment rate stood at 3.5 percent, a 50-year low. A month later, more than 10 million
people filed for unemployment with another 11 million filing in the first half of April. Uncertainty about the course of
the public health crisis makes it difficult to predict when and how the nation will reopen for business, but there is no
doubt that some of the jobs lost as a result of the virus will not return. And when the economy does eventually recover,
new skills and industries may play a part.

States that just a few months ago were devising strategies to address historically tight labor markets now must grapple
with the opposite problem—how to retrain and employ laid-off workers in a recessionary climate that could last for
years. States will also have to examine how they can develop job skills that will support their future economic
development in a changed landscape. After this crisis, for example, the nation is likely to see growth in health-related
industries, including the manufacture of medical instruments and supplies. Growth also seems likely in industries that
can support remote work and education, such as broadband installation and remote communications software. States
will confront these challenges while facing a fiscal crisis of unimaginable depth, as tax revenues fall and the need for
public services increases.

Two things have not changed. First, workers with postsecondary credentials will fare better in the post-coronavirus
economy than those without, just as they did before the crisis. Second, states that move quickly to meet their evolving
skill needs will achieve faster economic growth than those that do not. Prior to the pandemic, one strategy states
pursued to address the tight labor market was to provide tuition-free college to adults without degrees. This strategy
can also help meet the needs of the post crisis economy with one important difference: funding should come not from
the states, as initially planned, but from the federal government as part of its coronavirus relief efforts.

The model for most states’ adult free-college initiatives is Tennessee Reconnect, a program implemented in 2018 that
allows any adult in the state to earn a certificate or associate degree tuition-free. In its first year, 42,000 adults applied
for Reconnect, and 18,000 ultimately received funding. The initiative was a response to employer concerns about a
shortage of skilled workers. In the Nashville region, for example, employers had predicted they would be hiring 60,000
IT workers in the coming years for jobs that would pay well and offer a family-supporting wage. These jobs do not call
for four-year degrees, but rather shorter-term credentials. Reconnect was designed to meet this kind of need.

Last year, Michigan, New Mexico, Virginia, and Washington all announced tuition-free college initiatives that would
serve adults without degrees, with several other states in the planning stage for Reconnect-type programs. All these
efforts were connected to statewide higher education attainment goals and driven by the need to expand the pool of
educated workers in a tight labor market.

The world has changed, but a Reconnect program funded as part of a federal stimulus bill and administered by the
states could rapidly support unemployed workers in training and retraining for jobs that will become available as the
economy recovers. A slow recovery will mean demand for IT workers in Nashville may fall well short of 60,000, but IT
workers will still be needed, and workers laid off from lower-wage jobs would benefit from the opportunity to train for
these positions. A credential in a high-demand field will be the surest ticket to reemployment at a living wage as the
economy moves forward. Such training will also help ensure that state and local economies continue to grow in a

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world that will be significantly changed by this pandemic.

Any federally funded plan to retrain adult workers should insist on the following provisions, informed by best practices
from existing Reconnect programs:

• Adults should enter postsecondary education with a designated major and career path, ideally in a field
where local demand is strong and growing.
• Postsecondary institutions must be prepared (and funded) to provide support services to adult learners. Good
ideas have been piloted in Tennessee and elsewhere, including Reconnect Cafes and the training of
Reconnect Ambassadors, and “high-touch” coaching models involving person-to-person counseling found in
many community college settings.
• Postsecondary institutions must be prepared to address the barriers adults face when returning to college,
such as child care, food insecurity, or financial aid issues that prevent reenrollment. Innovation on campus or
in the community, including some federal policy changes, can help.
• Postsecondary institutions should partner with local businesses to identify high-demand fields. Business
engagement in Reconnect programs is essential to create employment pathways for adult learners, and this
should include new and growing industries, not just those already well established.

Why should the federal government take on the role of paying for such an initiative?

• Federal resources are the only viable support stream for Reconnect programs in light of the fiscal hardship
states will be facing in the years ahead. Programs already in place and those in the works will struggle for
funding in an environment of budget cuts; a recent example is Michigan, where $35 million was authorized for
a new Reconnect program on March 10, only to be zeroed out 20 days later when all available resources were
wrapped into the state’s coronavirus emergency response effort.
• Reconnect programs are an excellent investment. The simple promise of a tuition-free education is a powerful
driver to move people onto a degree path, and they do so largely with money already provided by the federal
government through the Pell Grant program. Tennessee, for example, leads the nation in FAFSA filing rates as
residents claim record-high levels of Pell Grants, spurred on by the state’s free-college programs. Adults who
go back to college also tend to be highly motivated; the “success” rate for Tennessee Reconnect enrollees
(those who complete degrees or remain enrolled) was 61 percent in the program’s first year, far higher than
that for non-Reconnect students at the same institutions.
• A national Reconnect program will be good for workers, especially low-wage workers, who are more likely to
lack college degrees. The livelihoods of these workers have been severely damaged by the COVID-19 crisis
through layoffs, furloughs, or the loss of health insurance. The opportunity to obtain a degree tuition-free
would provide a promising pathway out of dead-end jobs. It makes especially good sense for workers to
return to school at a time when employment opportunities are limited.
• Reconnect programs are also good for business. Focusing on short-term associate and certificate programs,
they feed trained workers into the economy quickly, helping businesses meet demand as it returns. These
programs are even more effective when training opportunities are connected to local business needs, which is
why it is best to organize and operate them at the state rather than federal level, even while the federal
government picks up the tab.

What is that tab? Rough estimates show that a nationwide Reconnect program would cost $1.5 billion in its first year
and $4 billion over four years, even with an increase in enrollment along the lines of what took place in Tennessee. In
the context of a multitrillion-dollar recovery effort, this is a small price to pay for a strategy that serves both workers
and businesses. As the U.S. economy recovers from the crisis, states can take on the funding of adult tuition-free
college programs themselves, but for now the federal government should consider including Reconnect programs as
eligible uses of current and future recovery funds.

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 Contact Us

Morley Winograd
President, The Campaign for Free College Tuition

morley@freecollegenow.org
(213) 448-8884

www.freecollegenow.org