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Resources
Randall Wilson, April 2010
Health care reform engaged the nation in intense debate about increasing coverage, lowering costs, and improving quality. Largely missing from the conversation over the legislation was the need for a skilled health care workforce, particularly on the front lines of care—among the men and women who provide a great deal of the nation’s direct patient care and public health services, yet who earn low wages and have limited opportunities for advancement.
In this report, JFF’s Randall Wilson describes what is needed to match the demands of a reformed health care system with a supply of skilled professionals and supporting occupations. Wilson draws on promising models from several JFF initiatives, including Breaking Through, Jobs to Careers, and the National Fund for Workforce Solutions. He prepared the report for a March 2010 JFF convening that brought together health care policymakers, funders, workforce experts and practitioners, and industry leaders committed to expanding access, lowering costs, and improving the quality of health care.
How can states help working adults bolster pre-collegiate skills that restrain them from taking full advantage of college credit-level career and technical programs? Better Together offers examples of a better way to meet this challenge through the alignment of two distinct systems for strengthening pre-collegiate skills: adult education and developmental education.
Better Together is part of a series of state policy reports from Breaking Through, a multiyear initiative of Jobs for the Future and the National Council for Workforce Education. Breaking Through is helping community colleges identify and develop institutional strategies that can enable low-skilled adult students to enter into and succeed in occupational and technical degree programs at community colleges.
 Pushing the Envelope, part of a series of Breaking Through policy reports, profiles 12 states that have amended or created student aid programs to better serve adult students. States typically have done so based on the proposition that investing in the education and skills of the workforce produces a return not only to individuals but also to businesses and the state. These states are leading innovators that have begun to push the policy envelope by expanding, changing, or creating programs that work for working adults.
Just as American business and industry need workers with higher skills to compete in a global economy, workers need higher skills to get ahead. This convergence presents an opportunity for states to work with their community colleges and other key partners to help business and industry compete and entry-level workers advance to higher-paying jobs. However, many challenges exist. Many adults entering community colleges lack college-level reading, writing, and math skills, so they must enroll in remedial courses where progress is slow and attrition high. Others, especially those who lack even a high school diploma or GED, never make it as far as the doors of the college.
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