As recovery dollars began flowing from the federal government during the Great Recession, community colleges across California—like much of the country—began investing in workforce training programs in solar energy. But when some of those jobs never materialized, the colleges and students felt burned.
“The industry wasn’t ripe yet, and the labor market wasn’t there,” says Jeffrey Clary, senior director of climate strategies at the Foundation for California Community Colleges. “Today, you’re not going to see programs that are pipelines for one job. Instead we’re training students to be mobile and adaptive, especially when you layer in AI. You want students to have that flexibility to move across sectors.”
The Big Idea: Community colleges in California and across the country haven’t moved away from so-called “green job” training—far from it. They’re investing more and more every year. But they’ve moved beyond the niche focus, in part because of lessons learned about the risk of overspecialization and in part because the nature of climate and sustainability work has shifted.
It’s less a “green” industry unto itself and more just another part of every business. Auto mechanics, for example, now need to know about repairing electric vehicles. Welders in some states need to know how to work on renewable energy equipment, like windmills. In California, community colleges are even incorporating green job training elements into fields like agriculture and forestry.
Even five years ago, Clary says, it was common for community colleges to join the climate cause by focusing on making their own campuses eco-friendly. Today, the conversation has shifted to something much more practical for students and employers, as clean energy jobs have become a disproportionate source of both growth and labor shortages. Work that was once sold as a societal good, even if it slowed growth, is now actually a major engine of economic development.
“We’re moving from more of a mitigation focus to an adaptation and resilience one,” Clary says. “A lot of colleges I work with are talking about things in an economic development and good jobs framework, rather than going out the door with the green or climate framing.”
The Biden administration’s post-pandemic economic development work played a significant role in this mindset shift. Programs like the Build Back Better Regional Challenge and the Good Jobs Challenge, along with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, invested in many projects with a renewable energy and climate resilience focus.
Jessie HF Hammerling, co-director of the Green Economy Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, says these Biden-era programs marked a major change from Obama-era investments in green energy job training that focused on specialized skills for specific jobs that didn’t always materialize.
“What was really smart about the Biden policies is that they took an urgent need that we have, to address our energy challenges, and turned it into a real economic opportunity for the country’s economy as a whole and in a way that also supports good job quality and worker outcomes and addresses inequities,” Hammerling says.
The transition to renewable energy, she adds, “is a massive economic opportunity if done right.”
What’s New: The Trump administration has sought to put a stop to parts of this transition, targeting offshore wind, in particular, and the clean energy supply chain. It also worked with Republicans in Congress to end tax credits for electric vehicle purchases and has rolled back fuel economy standards. But for the most part, community colleges, with the support of state governments and employers, continue offering and even ramping up their training programs.
What has changed is how colleges talk about them. While on the surface, it may appear that colleges are backing off from the “green” framing the way that many did with DEI language in order to continue receiving federal funding, the college officials who spoke with Work Shift say the change was already happening before the 2024 election because “green jobs” are becoming ubiquitous.
A January report from Brookings urges workforce development leaders to emphasize “infrastructure skills” over “green skills.” In education, that means broader training that includes green jobs, but also general infrastructure jobs. The report advocates for a “whole building” approach in job training.
Rachel Rosen, director of MDRC’s Center for Effective Career and Technical Education, says this debate isn’t new with the Trump administration.
“There’s a whole discussion about whether or not these are skills that really cover the full gamut of different types of workforce opportunities, or whether they are specialized skills or pathways,” Rosen says. “There’s been some pushback on the idea of calling things ‘green jobs’ because it tends to conjure up wind and solar, and that’s it.
“It’s actually much more expansive and really impacts almost every job you can think of when you start digging into it.”
False Starts, New Approach
In Iowa, where nearly two-thirds of the state’s energy comes from wind, Des Moines Area Community College has seen its own wind power training change over time. Over a decade ago, the college began offering wind technician training as an add-on in a two-year applied engineering program. But enrollment was low in the wind technician classes. Next, the college created a two-year renewable energy degree, but faced the same enrollment problem.
Andrew Neuendorf, associate dean of manufacturing, engineering, trades, and transportation at the college, says the main issue was that wind technicians don’t need two years of college, so the programs were essentially overskilling students. Another problem the college faced was that there aren’t actually that many new wind technician positions available, about 20 a year, despite the fact that there are turbines almost everywhere in the state outside of the Des Moines area.
The college ultimately decided that the skills that wind technicians needed—mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic, among others—were being taught in other programs, including a one-year industrial technician diploma. Programs in robotics and electrical trades also offered many of these skills. The more specific industry skills, like climbing the turbines, are often taught by the companies that hire employees. The same can be said for job training in solar energy, another industry Iowa is exploring.
“If a student can complete a year and earn some certification and have those basic skills, they could become a wind turbine technician, or they could work in an automated facility or go into robotics,” Neuendorf says. “Narrowing it down to a fine point might defeat the purpose of what we’re doing.”
Another area where community colleges are ramping up training is in electric vehicles. Despite the Trump administration’s rollback of tax credits for electric vehicles, many states have continued their own policies supporting the transition. California has set a goal for all new cars and trucks to be zero-emission by 2035. In Illinois last year, Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced more than $18M in grants to build electric vehicle charging stations throughout the state. By 2030, the goal is to have 1M registered electric vehicles.
David Husemoller leads the Illinois Green Economy Network, which was created in 2012 to connect Illinois community colleges to each other to develop job training programs for the green economy. The network creates curriculum and facilitates faculty training. This included bringing in instructors from New Zealand, which has seen a surge in electric vehicle usage thanks to government incentives. The network also helps colleges with marketing and student recruitment.
Husemoller says the majority of programs the network is involved in are state funded, including through the Climate Equity Jobs Act, leaving them mostly untouched by what’s happening at the federal level.
One area where green jobs may be threatened is in offshore wind. Trump has repeatedly attacked the nascent industry, claiming it’s a national security threat. The CUNY Offshore Wind Advisory Network, consisting of Kingsborough Community College, LaGuardia Community College, College of Staten Island, and New York City College of Technology, is forging ahead for now with efforts to raise awareness about future jobs and create training programs.
“Gov. Pritzker has been very proactive in wanting to grow the economy in Illinois,” Husemoller says. “We’re meeting important statewide goals for economic development, and community colleges are there to help support the workforce and to help foster a sense of innovation and readiness.”
Robert Zandi, director for the network, says they haven’t seen interest in their programs decline, but students are asking more questions.
“We have received a lot of feedback during the training programs about people’s concerns for the viability of offshore wind,” Zandi says. “There’s a lot of propaganda out there, too, about how offshore wind is killing whales and how it is not an efficient or viable option for energy production. We just have to counter that with data, science, and information from reputable sources.”
Like other colleges across the U.S., CUNY is emphasizing job training with transferable skills. The offshore wind industry will need workers in all kinds of fields, and the training is often included in more general programs like welding and deckhand training.
“I anticipate that there will continue to be a lot of renewable energy and sustainable technology training programs in all sectors,” Zandi says. “With everything from AI data centers requiring a lot of energy to populations rising and requiring more energy, we need the infrastructure and resources of renewable energy if we’re going to function sustainably as a society down the road.”