As the Biden administration prepares to leave office, the president and first lady are touting their workforce-development efforts—announcing today that students in 34 states and the District of Columbia now have access to a tuition-free community college education.
The announcement, made jointly by President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden, came as part of an address to a roomful of K-12 and university administrators, business leaders, teachers’ union leaders, and philanthropists, who had gathered at the White House to promote the smooth transition from classrooms to career opportunities. Biden gave his remarks shortly before he met with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office to commit to a smooth transfer of power.
The federal push to create a bridge between the classroom and careers started 10 years ago—during the Obama administration—with a focus on community colleges, said Jill Biden, who made the issue one of her priorities as both second lady and now first lady. Biden teaches English at a community college in northern Virginia.
“I knew they deserved to be seen and celebrated and championed at every level of government,” she said. “Part of that meant pushing to make them tuition free.”
Now, she added: “Community colleges are no longer America’s best-kept secret. ... We’re on our way to making them America’s best-kept promise.”
Joe Biden said that during his presidency, more than $80 billion in pandemic-relief dollars had gone toward “strengthening and expanding the workforce.”
“That includes supporting free community college programs so students and workers can train for good jobs without the burden of student debt,” he said.
The administration created “workforce hubs"—local collaborations between businesses, unions, and community colleges in cities like Phoenix, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh—to help train and employ more than a million apprentices, including 100,000 female apprentices.
Nearly 60 percent of high school graduates don’t go directly into four-year colleges, Jill Biden added. Some choose to go to community colleges or career-technical institutes, while others aren’t sure about their future. She said high schools need to keep transforming education to “bridge the gap between what students learn and the careers that they can enter.”
The first lady also highlighted that 46 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico now have registered K-12 teacher apprenticeships, a new initiative of the administration in which prospective teachers undergo training while they work in schools and earn a paycheck. Programs—which are run by school districts, colleges and universities, state education departments, and other groups—receive federal funding to pay for tuition assistance, wages, and other supportive services. Teacher apprenticeships have been one way for states to battle the acute staff shortages they faced after the pandemic.
The classroom-to-career pathway can’t be a siloed effort, officials say
More than 400 colleges, cities, and states now offer tuition-free college and job training, up from about 50 programs when then-Vice President Biden took office, according to a statement released by the White House after the event.
Biden stressed the connection between an improved economy, a better unemployment outlook, and lower inflation to a reliable and trained workforce. For instance, 80 colleges in 22 states have introduced or expanded their workforce training programs to train semiconductor workers for advanced manufacturing jobs created by the CHIPS and Science Act that passed in 2022. (The federal law is expected to survive the transition to the Trump administration.)
In a panel discussion that followed the president’s comments, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said the CHIPS program is about to create a million high-paying jobs.
With supply chain jobs in manufacturing “coming back” to the United States, Raimondo said there’s a need for a skilled workforce to take up these jobs. Companies need to connect with colleges to create training programs that guarantee students a job at the end, she said.
It’s important to break through the “four years or bust mentality,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, and for experts in different silos like industry and education to come together to build solutions for the workforce.
“We recognized that students should graduate with options” beyond four-year colleges, Cardona said.
Instead, Cardona stressed, STEM programs in K-12 schools should prepare students with the skills they need to get jobs: “That should be the norm, not the exception.”
The panel also stressed the importance of creating more inclusive spaces for workers from diverse backgrounds, which include child-care options and transportation to work sites.
