For decades, higher education’s relationship with workforce development has been characterized by a kind of polite distance. Universities offered degrees. Employers hired graduates. And the space between credential and career was left to the margins of institutional life: scattered across units, underresourced relative to its importance and rarely treated as central to the academic mission.
That arrangement is ending. The pace of change in labor markets, driven in no small part by artificial intelligence, has made it untenable. And the passage of Workforce Pell may be the clearest signal yet that the terms of engagement between universities, employers and learners are changing.
It was not long ago that words like “skills” and “workforce” were rarely heard in the hallways of research universities, at least not without a hint of discomfort. Today, those terms are showing up in strategic plans, leadership addresses and faculty-led communities of practice in ways that would have been difficult to imagine a decade ago. The shift is real, even if the average institutional response has not yet caught up.
How we respond to that shift matters. We should not read Workforce Pell as a stimulus to compete for new dollars. It is an invitation to re-engage with our mission and to discover that serving learners across a lifetime, in partnership with community colleges, employers and one another, is not a departure from what research universities are for but the fullest expression of it.
A Structural Shift, Not a Policy Tweak
Workforce Pell, signed into law as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025, extends Pell Grant eligibility to students enrolled in shorter-term, workforce-aligned programs—those lasting at least eight but fewer than 15 weeks or between 150 and 599 clock hours. Implementation is set for July 1, 2026. Workforce Pell is the most robust federal need-based financial aid program specifically targeted at nondegree, short-term pathways at accredited institutions.
This is not an incremental expansion. It is a structural change in how the federal government defines postsecondary value, and it arrives after more than a decade of failed attempts. There were various iterations of the JOBS Act starting in 2014, the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act in 2023 and numerous other proposals that never reached the finish line despite having bipartisan support. The fact that it finally passed reflects a growing consensus that our financial aid infrastructure was designed for a world that no longer exists.
Understandably, most of the early conversation about Workforce Pell has centered on community colleges. They are the institutions most likely to offer programs in the eligible range, and they serve the highest concentrations of Pell-eligible students.
But four-year institutions, including research universities, cannot afford to watch from the sidelines. Not because they should compete with community colleges for these dollars, but because Workforce Pell reshapes a landscape in which all institutions operate. The best results from this policy will come not from institutions acting as a set of territories but as an ecosystem, with learners, not organizational boundaries, at the center.
Why Research Universities Should Pay Attention
On its surface, Workforce Pell may seem like an awkward fit for research universities. While some of what it funds will align naturally with programs we already offer or are developing, much of it will not. The temptation is to conclude that this policy is mostly about other parts of the postsecondary sector.
That conclusion would be a mistake. The policy represents a broader federal commitment to shorter, skills-aligned credentials as legitimate pathways—not alternatives to degrees, but complements to them. It changes how employers think about hiring, how learners think about educational investment and how the entire credentialing landscape is evolving. For institutions whose mission is life-changing education, the question is whether that mission extends across the full arc of a learner’s career or fades into something far more passive after commencement.
Three dimensions of Workforce Pell are particularly relevant for institutions like ours.
- Reach. First, the eligibility provisions reach our learners, extending not only to current undergraduates but also, in some cases, to alumni. Major research universities collectively serve millions of living alumni, many navigating career transitions accelerated by AI and automation. That reach opens a meaningful new pathway for the kind of lifelong learning relationship our institutions have been building toward.
Consider a Pell-eligible alumna five years out from graduation. Her degree gave her a strong foundation and launched her career. But the environment around her has shifted. AI now performs tasks that once filled her workday, and advancement requires skills that simply did not exist when she was a student. Workforce Pell means she may be able to afford the credential she needs to keep pace. The deeper question is whether her university still sees her—not as a former student but as a learner whose success remains part of its mission.
- Quality. Second, the policy creates an opportunity and an obligation to define quality. The stakes for learners are high: Workforce Pell dollars count against a student’s lifetime Pell eligibility. A student who uses limited federal aid on a credential that doesn’t meaningfully improve their economic prospects has lost something they cannot get back. This risk is compounded in an AI era, when the skills a credential validates may shift faster than the programs designed to teach them. Existing data show that most adults with short-term certificates earn modest wages and there are significant racial disparities in outcomes.
Research universities can contribute here in at least two ways. First, they can leverage their research capacity to track long-term labor market outcomes, wage trajectories and demographic equity across credential programs. This produces the kind of evidence the entire sector needs to improve program design and delivery. Second, they can draw on deep disciplinary expertise and learning design capabilities to build high-quality credential programs themselves. This sets a standard that lifts the broader ecosystem rather than leaving quality to chance.
To be clear, quality in education has never and should never be reducible to earnings data alone. But for credentials that are explicitly designed to advance careers and that draw on limited federal financial aid to do so, economic outcomes are a legitimate and necessary measure. If research universities sit this out, those standards will be shaped without the rigor and evidence these institutions are uniquely positioned to contribute.
- Infrastructure. Third, research universities have been building the infrastructure this moment requires, even if they didn’t build it with Workforce Pell in mind. Across the sector, institutions are investing in unified online learning platforms, industry credential partnerships, CRM systems that nurture learner relationships over time and intentional pathways that connect noncredit exploration to for-credit engagement. At the University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, Arizona State, the University of Texas system and many others, this work is well underway. Institutions are developing new ways to link advanced technology capabilities with learner-centered design to create coherent pathways rather than disconnected catalogs.
The architecture of lifelong learning is also the architecture that enables workforce-aligned credentialing to work. The question is whether enough institutions are building it with the intentionality and scale this moment demands, and whether they are building it in ways that connect across institutions, not just within them. Learners will increasingly move between community colleges, research universities and employer-based training. If the systems that track their progress, recognize their credentials and support their transitions cannot talk to each other, the ecosystem we describe will remain an aspiration. The same AI capabilities reshaping the labor market also offer tools to help build this infrastructure: personalized learning pathways, predictive analytics for learner support and more adaptive approaches to credentialing. Interoperability is not a technical detail. It is a precondition.
Partnerships, Not Transactions
If Workforce Pell changes the funding landscape, the harder question is what universities and employers will actually build together. And here, the distinction between a transaction and a partnership becomes critical.
Too often, university–employer relationships are organized around a narrow exchange: One side licenses content or enrolls employees; the other delivers a course and issues a certificate. These vendor relationships can be useful, but they rarely transform either organization. They meet immediate needs without changing how either side thinks or grows. Over time, they tend to narrow rather than expand opportunity.
The partnerships that will matter most in the Workforce Pell era look different. They are built on co-design, where employers help shape learning outcomes from the start. This is fundamentally different than the act of endorsement after the fact. They prioritize stackability, ensuring that short-term credentials serve as on-ramps to longer pathways rather than dead ends. And they solve what many think of as the “last mile” problem: The strongest partnerships build employer commitment to interview, hire or promote completers into the program architecture itself. When federal financial aid is flowing to these programs, the accountability dynamic changes. Completion rates, placement outcomes and wage gains will be federally tracked and reported. Partners on both sides will share responsibility for results that are no longer internal metrics but public commitments.
While Workforce Pell is sure to further popularize these types of collaborations, we are already beginning to see what this looks like in practice. Partnerships between universities and companies like Google, Amazon, IBM and others are placing industry-recognized credentials inside university ecosystems. Credentials are connected to academic advising, career services and degree pathways in ways stand-alone training providers cannot replicate. At Michigan, our partnership with Google now provides students, faculty, staff and alumni with free access to career certificates and AI training. But the model is not unique to us. What makes these collaborations promising is that they treat credentials as part of a learning relationship, not the entirety of one.
This is not easy work. It requires sustained attention from both sides. It demands ongoing conversation about what value looks like, how it is created and how it is shared. But it is the only kind of work that will produce credentials learners can trust and employers will recognize.
The Institutional Challenge
Workforce Pell removes the financial excuse for inaction. The labor market removes the strategic excuse. What remains is cultural and organizational.
For too long, workforce development has lived in the institutional periphery. Related activities are distributed across units without clear ownership, disconnected from academic governance and often invisible to university leadership and boards. That arrangement may have been sustainable when shorter-form credentials carried little federal funding and modest institutional consequence. It is no longer sustainable. Not when AI is reshaping entire professions, not when employers are rethinking what skills they value and not when federal policy is actively incentivizing institutions to respond. Implementation begins in less than five months. The institutions that are not already preparing will find themselves reacting rather than leading.
The institutions that respond well to this moment will be those that treat workforce-aligned credentialing not as a side project but as a dimension of their core educational mission. That means engaging faculty in program design, building data infrastructure to rigorously track outcomes and investing in the staffing, systems and partnerships that allow new directions to endure.
And it means doing all of this in genuine collaboration with community colleges and other providers, not in competition with them. The ecosystem works only if different institutions play to their strengths. Research universities bring disciplinary depth, industry research relationships and the ability to connect short-term learning to longer academic pathways. Community colleges bring proximity, flexibility and deep expertise in serving the populations Workforce Pell is designed to reach. Both are essential.
Questions for the Campus of the Future
Later this week at the University Network Summit during ACEx2026 in Washington, D.C., I will be joining a panel on this very topic. We will explore how universities and employers can build more effective partnerships as Workforce Pell reshapes the landscape. In preparation, I have been sitting with a set of questions I think institutional leaders will need to confront. They do not have easy answers, but they are the ones that matter.
Research universities already serve a far wider range of learners than our public narratives often suggest—the 35-year-old alumna returning for a credential that leads to a promotion, the 50-year-old career changer from the surrounding community, the working professional fitting a course around caregiving responsibilities. The question worth asking is not whether we serve them but whether our infrastructure has kept pace with their needs. Have our advising systems, academic calendar, faculty roles, instructional teams, enabling technology and definitions of student success been designed with their lives in mind, or are they built primarily around a residential undergraduate experience that represents only part of what we do?
What if we measured institutional success not only by graduation rates and research expenditures but by the economic mobility of learners who engage with us across their lifetimes, including those who never pursue a degree? And what if that ambition led us to rewrite the social contract with our alumni entirely so that commencement marked not the end of an institution’s obligation but the beginning of a different kind of relationship, one in which the university committed to supporting learning across a lifetime and alumni understood that coming back was not a sign of insufficiency or episodic nostalgia but an expected part of a life well lived? We have learned how to scale content and curriculum to reach learners at different points in their lives. The harder question, and the one this new social contract would demand we answer, is whether we can also scale community and coaching to support them throughout.
What if the most important partnerships between universities and employers were not about placing graduates into jobs but about co-creating the learning itself, with shared accountability for whether it works? What would it take for an employer to invest not just in tuition benefits but in program design, mentorship and hiring commitments?
What if short-term credentials earned at a research university became genuine on-ramps to deeper learning, not because we mandated it, but because the experience was designed so well that learners chose to continue? What would stackability look like if it were driven by learner aspiration rather than institutional architecture?
And what if the institutions that moved first on these questions did not do so alone but built regional and national coalitions with community colleges, employers, workforce boards and one another? What if collaboration, rather than competition, became the defining characteristic of how higher education responded to this moment?
These are speculative questions. But they point toward a version of the research university that takes its public mission seriously—not by becoming something it is not, but by extending its reach into a part of the learning continuum where it has not yet been fully present. Workforce Pell does not answer these questions for us. It simply makes them harder to avoid.
The bridges between credentials and careers will not build themselves. They require intentional design, sustained investment and a willingness to work across boundaries that have traditionally defined our institutions. The good news is that the foundations exist and that many of our institutions are already building them. The question now is whether we will build together, with the learners and communities who stand to benefit most clearly in mind. Workforce Pell is not asking research universities to become something else. It is asking whether we are willing to become what we already claim to be.