Postsecondary Education and Training As We Know It Is Not Enough Why We Need to Leaven Postsecondary Strategy with More Attention to Employment Policy, Social Policy, and Career and Technical Education in High School Anthony P. Carnevale Paper Prepared for The Georgetown University and Urban Institute Conference on Reducing Poverty and Economic Distress after ARRA January 15, 2010 April, 2010 Copyright © March 2010. Permission is granted for reproduction of this file, with attribution to the author. The Urban Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy research and educational organization that examines the social, economic, and governance problems facing the nation. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. Contents Summary v Introduction 1 The Stimulus and Beyond 4 If Postsecondary Education and Training Policy Is to Become Our Principal Domestic Initiative, Then It Needs to Be Aligned with Employment Policy and Social Policy Goals 6 As Many As 11 Million Adults from Low-Income Families Could Benefit from Postsecondary Education and Training 9 Benefits of Providing Postsecondary Education and Training for Low-Income Adults Are Powerful and Growing, but So Are Barriers to Access 10 Providing Access for Low-Income Adults Will Not Happen without Major Policy Interventions and Reversals 11 Conclusion 14 References 14 Notes 16 vSummary The Obama stimulus package (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA) and the American Graduation Initiative1 emphasize Pell grant funding as well as focusing on community colleges and sub-baccalaureate degrees and awards. As a result, the administration’s unprecedented postsecondary strategy shifts postsecondary resources to the least advantaged students and to the two-year and less selective four-year institutions where they are concentrated. The Obama postsecondary emphasis is also part of a longer-term policy trend toward a reliance on postsecondary education as the arbiter of individual opportunity in labor markets. Education policy has gradually become our core employment policy and social policy, shifting agency leadership on domestic employment and social policy from federal agencies like the U.S. departments of Labor (DOL) and Health and Human Services (HHS) toward the U.S. Department of Education (DOE). The Obama policies represent a new peak in the broad economic and political consensus around the idea that some form of postsecondary education or training is the keystone for both employment policy and social policy. While the shift toward education policy as the primary element in domestic employment and social policy squares with general labor market realities, mainstream education institutions are poorly suited to serving the particular needs of the least advantaged youth or adults. The mainstream education system provides upward mobility, but, absent compensatory policy goals, it also acts as intergenerational sorting mechanism that reproduces racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages. In addition, because the education system is positioned in the front end of the life cycle it is less useful as a tool to help disadvantaged adults. Postsecondary institutions tend to focus on traditional 18–24-year-old students as the preferred client. It seems doubtful that, as presently constructed, an emphasis on college-age youth and postsecondary institutions can deliver fully on traditional employment policy and social policy goals. The trend toward serving traditional 18–24-year-old students is likely to increase; the 18–24-year-old postsecondary participation rates are not growing commensurately, and virtually all the growth in enrollments is occurring in community colleges. As postsecondary institutions become overcrowded, they squeeze out nontraditional students, concentrating them in under-resourced two-year colleges. In addition, as the emphasis on completion rates increase and budgets tighten, colleges will naturally prefer traditional full-tuition full-time students. Postsecondary connection to labor markets, retraining, and labor market services are relatively weak. And social policy purposes in postsecondary institutions have fallen off since welfare reform and “work first” policies were enacted. The shift to postsecondary education in current federal policy follows a decline in federal commitments in three other policy domains: adult employment and training policy, social policy, and high school career and technical education (CTE) policy. 1. ARRA and subsequent legislation reflect a shift in the center of gravity between employment and training policy (overseen by the Department of Labor) and education policy (overseen by the Department of Education) that began after the 1980–81 recession.2 In the 1970s , the signature programmatic response to the jobs problem was the Comprehensive Employment and viTraining Act (CETA), which wa