The federally funded Good Jobs Challenge launched amid the pandemic with $500M in grants and a topline goal of helping 50K Americans break into jobs that were both in-demand and could sustain a family. It was one of the earliest in a series of initiatives by the Biden administration that have paired economic recovery for communities with economic advancement for individuals.
Now two years in, nearly 30K people have enrolled in job training through the Good Jobs Challenge, with 8,700 already placed into “good jobs.” According to data reported by the grantees, most are making at least $15 an hour—nearly double what the median wage was for participants before entering the program. Some are earning more than $40 an hour in industries like construction, IT, cybersecurity, and forestry.
The Big Idea: The full impact of the Good Jobs Challenge won’t be known until at least next year, but preliminary data shows it is making a difference in communities around the country. One reason for the early success is the project’s emphasis on collaboration. Individual projects involve workforce agencies, employers, and higher education institutions.
While each project is different, community colleges have emerged as key factors in driving economic mobility among underserved populations—a main goal of the challenge. Several of the 32 grantee coalitions are led by community colleges. Given the short timeline for the grant—two to four years—these institutions are well-positioned to address the need in the community right away.
“Community colleges are really good at reaching people where they are,” says Patrick Bourke, program lead for the Good Jobs Challenge at the U.S. Economic Development Administration. “They’re able to meet students’ needs and provide wraparound services or supportive services in a way that’s designed to be individualized.”
“They also think about recruitment in a different way than some of the other entities do because these are people in their community.”
The Details: The initial funding for the challenge was part of the American Rescue Plan, and it was aimed at spurring economic recovery and long-term growth. Grantees submitted proposals that focused especially on helping women, people of color, and those in rural areas skill up and get good local jobs that offer career growth. Proposals also included plans for wraparound supports, like child care, transportation, and counseling.
“That’s what this is about—real jobs, family-sustaining jobs that everybody can get,” Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in 2022. Among the industries of focus are IT, energy, healthcare, manufacturing, and biotech.
Closing the Opportunity Gap
On the Ground: In the region around Peoria, Illinois, three hours southwest of Chicago, only 40% of the population has an academic credential past high school. But 60% of the nearby jobs require it. Sheila Quirk-Bailey, president of Illinois Central College, says the workforce gap was a known problem, but no one had the resources to tackle it. Then she found out about the Good Jobs Challenge.
“Most major grants go to major markets, like Miami Dade,” Quirk-Bailey says. (Miami Dade College is also a grantee focused on IT.) “We thought, if the feds are going to spend that money, why don’t we work on turning this community around? The grant really became a rallying point.”
Almost immediately, ICC launched the IT Workforce Accelerator to help people in their community earn IT certificates for free. As of June 30, more than 800 credentials have been completed. Their goal is to get 1K people into IT jobs, and they’re over one-third of the way there. The college is also working with four-year universities and hundreds of employers, but ICC is the lead bringing everyone together.
The IT Workforce Accelerator is targeting different groups of people to help upskill them and fill available jobs at companies like Accenture, JP Morgan Chase, and OSF Healthcare. The targets include everyone from recent high school graduates to people who are in the workforce already but want to move up. Many of them live below the poverty line, and over half are Black.
In their first job post-certificate completion, many are earning at least $40K a year. If they’re unemployed or underemployed, the college reaches out and puts them back in touch with a career counselor.
Reaching Underserved Communities: On the West Coast, another grantee is the Foundation for California Community Colleges. Their project is focused on building resilient careers in forestry.
One of the foundation’s goals was to partner with tribal organizations across the state to train people in wildfire fighting and prevention. They quickly found, however, that most organizations did not have the capacity to hire out a consultant. So instead, the foundation turned to other partners, like California State University Chico, which has a designated tribal liaison on their staff.
Like ICC, the foundation has created a central website—the first of its kind in the state—for people in California to see what training programs and career pathways are available in the forestry sector. Community colleges provide different pathways, from certificate programs in vegetation management, which involves clearing vegetation around electrical lines, and heavy equipment training for the logging industry. Traditional associate’s degrees that focus on ecosystem restoration are available as well.
“These positions have historically been filled primarily by white males,” says Courtney Cagle, manager of Resilient Careers in Forestry at the foundation. “In addition to tribal members and getting more of those folks involved in the training and placed into these good jobs, our focus has also been on increasing the number of women in these occupations, the Latinx/Hispanic population, veterans, and folks from low socioeconomic backgrounds.”
An Opportunity for Growth
One challenge faced by community college grantees has been tracking students after they’ve completed certification and are in the job market—something workforce boards have a better track record of—Bourke says. In order for community colleges to be hubs for economic mobility, they’ll need to have a better handle on where students are going and how well they’re doing.
The Foundation for California Community Colleges has struggled with this as well, but they are using the grant to put more creativity and energy into tracking completers. Cagle says they’ve tried multiple methods, including text messaging campaigns and talking with instructors who often stay in touch with former students.
At ICC, Quirk-Bailey also realized just how important it is to partner with employers, who can provide insights that educators simply don’t have. One of the first decisions they made was to bring former bank executive Donald Shafer on board as executive director of the IT Workforce Accelerator. With Shafer’s help, the college has connected with more than 250 businesses and surveyed CEOs to see what their biggest hiring needs are.
“Another growth point for community colleges is to realize we need the Dons, we need the people with those connections and that point of view,” Quirk-Bailey says. “We love degrees because we’re in education, but sometimes it’s not a PhD candidate with a background in computer science who is the right person to work with the community.”
What’s Next
First-round grantees must spend all their funding by 2027. The EDA recently closed applications for the second round, which will be much smaller—only $25M instead of $500M. Bourke says he’s seeing many current grantees finding ways to make their projects sustainable beyond the grant period, however.
In Oregon, for example, the state has shown interest in continuing to invest in the workforce investment board’s project in truck driver training. Another grantee, Dallas College, has launched a sector partnership to grow the biotech workforce in north Texas, with plans to keep it going after the grant ends.
Thanks to the grant money, Dallas College also relaunched an associate’s degree program in biotech after sunsetting it a few years before because of low enrollment. While their program is mostly focused on issuing certificates, the college is seeing interest in continuing on to the associate degree and the college wants to keep that pathway open for students, says Benjamin Magill, associate vice chancellor of economic opportunity at Dallas College.
“We’re kind of creating our own pipeline for that associate’s degree program,” he says.
Nine years ago, Magill helped start the college’s Labor Market Intelligence Center, which conducts research on the local labor market and socioeconomic barriers. He believes the partnerships they’ve created through the Good Jobs Challenge and other projects are helping the college play an ever bigger role in helping people move up the economic ladder.
“Community colleges are the glue, not only between secondary education and higher education, but also between students and jobs,” Magill says. “There’s such a huge gap between ‘I’ve got my degree and now I want to get a job’ and employers saying, ‘I’ve got these jobs and I need people for them.’ They still do not find each other at the level of efficiency that we would all like in order to create and sustain economic growth.”