Strong Workforce Program: California Community Colleges Initiative to Help More Career Education Students Get Living Wage Jobs

WestEd’s Center for Economic Mobility supported the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office to design and implement the Strong Workforce Program, a multiyear initiative resulting in stronger regional and sector-based strategies for career education.

The Challenge

Is the largest system of public education in the United States, with 116 colleges helping to train the workforce for the world’s fourth largest economy. Coming out of the Great Recession, state budgets were lean, and the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office was looking for ways to help the colleges expand their career education programs, despite the higher cost of delivery compared with other majors.

The Chancellor’s Office brought together a task force with representatives from education, industry, government, and community organizations. This group found several ways to better align programs with living wage job opportunities, including the following:

  • creating visibility into the earnings outcomes of each program
  • strengthening regional infrastructure
  • implementing sector-based strategies
  • revising funding incentives

How We’re Taking Action

In response to the task force recommendation, WestEd supported the Chancellor’s Office to design and implement the Strong Workforce Program, which created a clear roadmap for how to strengthen offerings within priority sectors and enhance regional collaboration. In 2016, the program secured $248 million in annual state funding, which was expanded by $150 million 2 years later to build stronger career pathways from K–12 to community colleges.

WestEd supported the development of the Strong Workforce Program in the following ways:

  • identifying metrics for both the community college and K–14 programs so that outcomes could be reliably tracked using statewide data sets
  • leading a practitioner team to develop local and regional performance-based funding formulas to incentivize program goals
  • developing dashboards that track the metrics associated with Strong Workforce Program funding and showing postsecondary outcomes for students enrolled in K–12 career education courses
  • designing and providing training for practitioners and technical assistance providers to ensure interested groups knew how to use the dashboards and incentive funding for local and regional planning
  • evaluating high-value third-party credentials that could be incentivized through the Strong Workforce Program
  • supporting a recognition that highlighted career education programs with exceptionally strong employment outcomes and writing case studies documenting key characteristics for more than 100 programs
  • summarizing policy developments and student outcomes for annual reports to the legislature and presenting results to legislative staff and policy committees

What Makes Us Different

Depth of experience – Because our team is made up of people who have spent years working in state agencies, we can design solutions that address regulatory requirements and support innovation.

Data solutions – We build data tools that show the economic outcomes of programs and understand the metrics that can incentivize change.

Connecting education to careers – We have practical experience working with educators to make sense of earnings and labor market information so that redesign efforts enable all students to advance in their chosen career.