Labor Market Insights to Help Rural and Tribal Community Colleges Secure More Funding

With support from WestEd’s Center for Economic Mobility, community college researchers learned how to use labor market data to make better institutional plans when working with their fundraising and development teams—all with a focus on ways to grow local economies.

The Challenge

Rural and Tribal colleges are lifelines for their communities, connecting learners and employers. But they struggle to update or create new programs because most funding is designed for big schools. Here’s what contributes to the problem:

State and federal funding is based on how many students are enrolled, not how large an area a college serves—and rural colleges often cover huge distances with fewer students.
These colleges have small staff levels, so they rarely have someone whose role is to write grants or study what jobs are available in their area.

As federal funding for colleges shrinks, institutions need to compete for specialized grants to survive. Because rural regions often have just one or two colleges, it is particularly important that they be able to write strong grant applications using local labor market data. Without this ability, they risk closing and leaving their communities without pathways to better paying careers.

How We’re Taking Action

We partnered with Ascendium to help rural and Tribal colleges get better at responding to specific grant opportunities and using labor market data to make the case for funding.

As grant opportunities were announced by the federal government, we invited the colleges to participate in online training sessions where they learned about the specific opportunity and got hands-on help writing proposals, such as describing theories of change, creating logic models, and using labor market data to strengthen their applications.

The Center also developed custom labor market reports for each college and taught institutional research staff how to understand and use this data. To help even more schools, we built online dashboards and presentation templates with state and county-level information that any college can access.

As the colleges built their capacity to bring in new resources, the Center worked with them to expand their resource development strategies beyond grants, such as identifying opportunities to advance local industries and support entrepreneurship.

The results? These colleges now have much stronger skills in analyzing labor markets, securing funding, and planning for their future.

Resources

In addition to working on the grant identified for the training, we are actively using the labor information in other grants and for internal planning.

Lake Area Technical College participant

What Makes Us Different

Customized labor market information – Our team understands how to produce information that reflects the unique economic characteristics of rural and Tribal communities.

Immediate and long-term capacity building – Colleges develop competitive proposals they can immediately submit while building internal capacity for future funding opportunities.

Role-specific resources – We offer information in formats that fit different roles in the college, making it easier to integrate information into common college processes.