A biweekly newsletter about education and employment during and after incarceration. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here are the highlights:

• New research from the University of Utah's Prison Education Action Research Lab shows how much the postsecondary-in-prison landscape has grown — and how much we still don't know. Read the full report.

• States are rolling out Workforce Pell approval processes, but prison education programs still can't formally apply, as we reported last issue. Open Campus is also running a free, six-part briefing on Workforce Pell — how it works and how to take advantage of it. Sign up here.

Three takeaways from the 2025 Higher Education in Prison Census

New research from the University of Utah's Prison Education Action Research Lab (PEARL) shows how much the postsecondary-in-prison landscape has grown across the country — and how much we still don't know. The full report is available here.

1. Growth in institutions doesn't mean growth in access. Nationwide, the number of colleges and universities formally involved in prison higher education has grown dramatically — from fewer than 100 in 2015 to at least 548 identified in 2025. But the report is explicit that most currently incarcerated people still do not have access to postsecondary education of any kind, and that growth has occurred unevenly across regions, leaving access unequal. More institutions on a list isn't the same as more people actually getting an education.

2. Community colleges do the heavy lifting. Public two-year institutions make up nearly half of all colleges and universities formally affiliated with prison higher education and campus-based reentry programs — reinforcing the central role that community colleges play in the system as the largest institutional sector represented in the census.

3. We still don't really know everything that’s being offered, or to whom. Even with the expanded institutional count, researchers say they still lack reliable national data on what credentials are offered, where programs operate, who has access, and student outcomes such as enrollment and completion. The researchers call for a far more coordinated, collaborative effort to track this. In their words, the growth is promising, but "we must be careful to infer what greater numbers of postsecondary institutions mean."

Workforce Pell update

As we detailed in the last issue of College Inside, Workforce Pell took effect July 1, opening federal aid to short-term credential programs — but prison education programs still can't formally apply, since the federal application for Prison Education Programs (PEP) hasn't been updated to include it. As Sheila Meiman, a longtime prison education financial aid practitioner and policy advocate who retired earlier this year, put it: "This isn't a national conversation. It's 50 conversations." As of our last report, only 13 states had an approval process up and running, and even there, most community college programs didn't yet qualify.

Work-release and pre-release settings look like the most likely starting point, since students there are already transitioning toward employment. One Boston-area college shows how that might unfold. Franklin Cummings Tech already runs a non-credit facilities maintenance program for people with records who are no longer incarcerated, built around lining up employers before students even finish training, according to Gary Chin, who oversees workforce and reentry programs there. The college is considering applying to get an expanded version of that program, with more hours and an industry credential, approved for Workforce Pell. If that comes through, the eventual goal, Chin said, is to extend the model to students still incarcerated through its partnership with the Boston Pre-Release Center's School of Reentry.

Workforce Pell still appears less likely to expand prison education broadly than to carve out a narrow new pathway for people already preparing to reenter the workforce — and if it gains traction inside prisons at all, experts expect it to happen first on campus.

Read the full story. 

Curious about Workforce Pell? Open Campus is running a free, six-part briefing on what it means and how to take advantage of it. Sign up here.

Let’s connect

Please connect if you have story ideas or just want to share your experience with prison education programs as a student or educator. You can always reach me at [email protected] or on Bluesky, LinkedIn, or Instagram. To reach me via snail mail, you can write to: Open Campus, 2460 17th Avenue #1015, Santa Cruz, CA 95062.

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