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

Short on time? Here are the highlights:

• Workforce Pell, a federal aid program for short-term credential programs, took effect July 1.

• Nothing in the regulations prevents incarcerated students from accessing Workforce Pell, but several features of the program make it much harder to use in prison than on a traditional campus.

• Work-release and reentry programs — where students are still incarcerated but already transitioning toward employment — look like the likeliest starting point.

• Experts say strong employer partnerships, locked in before a program launches, may matter more to success than data or compliance alone.

A new kind of Pell, still finding its footing

Workforce Pell officially took effect July 1, opening a new stream of federal aid to students in short-term credential programs. For prison education, though, the deadline has come and gone without much change. The program's basic design — focused on fast completion and quick job placement — wasn't built with incarcerated students in mind.

None of that means Workforce Pell is off-limits for prison education. But a stack of structural barriers, some specific to corrections settings and some due to the general requirements, mean it will likely take much longer to reach students inside prisons.

For people coming out of incarceration, a pathway to a paycheck can be the difference between staying out and going back — a challenge Workforce Pell's short-term, employment-focused design is theoretically well-suited to address. But that logic only holds for people close to release; Workforce Pell isn't built for people far out from their release date, a population whom we've reported before are often excluded from prison education entirely.

The program, created under the federal budget reconciliation law passed last year, funds credential programs as short as eight weeks, covering fields from welding to dental assisting. Programs don't have to be credit-bearing to qualify — non-credit, clock-hour programs are eligible too, as long as they lead to a recognized postsecondary credential and meet a state's criteria for in-demand, high-wage work.

Workforce Pell programs generally also have to clear approval from a state's governor before the federal Department of Education will consider them. That requirement applies to any college seeking Workforce Pell funding, according to an explainer from the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison. For prison education programs, that's an added layer of political sign-off stacked on top of the existing approval process.

It follows the 2023 restoration of Pell eligibility for incarcerated students nationwide, ending the ban imposed by the 1994 crime bill. That restoration fueled rapid growth in prison bachelor's and associate degree programs across the country. Workforce Pell is a different kind of expansion — not of who can receive Pell, but of what it can pay for, opening the program to short-term, non-degree credentials for the first time.

For higher education generally, the rollout is already underway. The Congressional Budget Office estimates about 100,000 students will receive Workforce Pell dollars this year, averaging roughly $2,200 each. But only 13 states have an approval process up and running so far, and even there, most community college programs don't yet qualify.

Prison education programs likely wouldn't be able to apply for Workforce Pell yet either. As of late June, the federal application used to become an approved prison education program was not yet updated to allow programs to apply for Workforce Pell. That's according to Sheila Meiman, a longtime practitioner, policy advocate and technical assistance provider on financial aid for prison education programs — meaning it's unlikely colleges could have formally applied yet.

Why prisons are still waiting

Meiman, who retired at the end of May, spent decades in the field, where she administered programs at Raritan Valley Community College in New Jersey before advising colleges directly on navigating Pell for incarcerated students.

Workforce Pell layers a second, unfamiliar bureaucracy on top of one colleges are already struggling with, Meiman said. Programs that want to serve incarcerated students still have to go through the federal approval process for prison education programs, known as PEP. Now they'd also need separate approval as a Workforce Pell program, meeting a state's definition of a high-skill, high-wage occupation and reporting against a distinct set of completion and job-placement targets, which under the federal rules must reach at least 70 percent on each.

Workforce Pell funding comes from Washington D.C., but each state decides which occupations qualify and how to measure success. "There won't be federally selected priorities for programs — it's going to be locally selected," Meiman said. "This isn't a national conversation. It's 50 conversations."

Wesley Whistle, a fellow at New America who writes the newsletter Workforce Pell Watch, said the accountability measures behind Workforce Pell — completion and job-placement rates that must hit at least 70 percent — exist as real safeguards, protecting students from the kind of low-quality, sometimes predatory short-term programs that have shown up in federal aid before. The deeper issue, he said, is that the law simply wasn't built with incarcerated students in mind. His fix isn't weakening those safeguards, but building a separate mechanism for this population rather than retrofitting Workforce Pell to accommodate it.

That mismatch points toward a narrower use case than a typical campus program: people in work-release and pre-release settings, who are already transitioning toward employment. "Employability is life for them," Meiman said.

Read more.

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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