College isn't the problem. It's everything else.

The Trump Administration is warring against the idea of college being the surest pathway to jobs, doing so in a way that will worsen the problems America’s over-emphasis on college created for people from low-income backgrounds.1

The Administration has not been subtle that an executive order issued last week is the first step to dramatically shrinking and remaking America’s federally funded suite of workforce development programs.

In framing these initial steps, the Trump Administration made it crystal clear what it thinks is the problem with the American workforce.

There is some truth here. College has become a way of gatekeeping between the people society thinks deserve a decent job and the people it doesn’t, even when college isn’t really needed for that job.2 But by focusing on the institution of college—not how we treat college and who gets to go to it—and slashing away at alternative programs, the Administration is likely going to make this gatekeeping worse.

Let’s be clear about one thing: students of color and kids from low-income backgrounds kick ass in the most elite of higher-education settings. The problem of “college for all”3 was that its ambition didn’t come with a magical trove of public resources that could actually ensure there was college, for all. Instead, that focus—and the high standard for who could “make it” in college—taught administrators and teachers to sort those who were “college material” into one pile and those who weren’t into another.

The “college” pile of kids went to college. The “not college” pile went… somewhere else.

As college has become more expensive and less certain of a career payoff, that sorting has gotten worse, in ways all too familiar for workforce programs. To say a hard truth, many programs deal with young people discarded for being too hard to “fix” using the limited resources available to public schools.

These young people’s experience of being discarded stays with them because

When you are low income, you tell yourself a lot of stories about how the world works and who gets ahead. Because you don’t know that many people who ever got ahead, very often those stories aren’t true. And if you have no one else who went to college in your family, you or your people sort you away from that pathway because it costs money and you won’t make it. If you don’t do that on your own, the people who control the limited resources that touch your life—especially people in the public school system—will do it for you. Often for arbitrary (or fixable) reasons.

That sorting—and that feeling you’re never good enough—doesn’t go away for the people who have heard it. Believe me, as a first-generation college student and socioeconomic interloper, I know from personal experience.

It was a recurring theme last year when I talked to workers who could trace their career success to Biden-Harris Administration investments meant to create good jobs. They were waiting for the other shoe to drop because work wasn’t supposed to be that good for people like them, who had made “mistakes.”

You can’t say you’re going to make up for the damage of “college for all” while absolutely slaughtering the underfunded suite of workforce programs set up as an alternative or new entrypoint to college. Which is very much the Trump Administration’s intent.

Fewer resources means more scarcity thinking, which means more sorting out of those who are not a “safe” enough bet for a workforce programs to admit. This already happens now. During my time at the Department of Labor, I intervened more than once in situations where a grantee or provider unfairly screened out participants the grantee thought would fail programs because they were a “risk.”

Their reason? “Risky” people risk cost too much money without enough payoff, even when the program was designed explicitly for those “risky” people.4

Shortly after last week’s order, DOL issued a “transparency report” on the average spending per student for the Job Corps program, the largest residential training program in the country, which serves low-income members of populations who fall into the “not college” pile .5 The between-the-lines of the report was that it is time to significantly remake or end Job Corps, something I now very much expect to come out of last week’s executive order.

I have questions about the numbers here, which are missing key details that I would look for as a former policy director of Job Corps.6 Acknowledging Job Corps has its own special history, the report still highlighted to me how Job Corps is a worst-case scenario for what could happen to other programs if there are much fewer federal workforce options available.

Political leaders have long seen Job Corps as a “fix” for a population of young people with disabilities, behavioral health challenges, and learning difficulties that they don’t know how to deal with. Paradoxically, to get more from the program, Congress has pressured Job Corps to take the right kind of student and more of them, as well as move its students into the first jobs available, which tend to be lower-paying ones.

The Hill did this while not keeping up spending on the program, meaning that as a result of normal and increased inflation, the program has been cut over a time when it was supposed to serve more people. Making the job even harder? Following two homicides a decade ago, Congress pressured Job Corps to boot out as many students as needed to honor zero-tolerance disciplinary enforcement techniques that can be… overzealous, let’s say.7

Now, Job Corps could be eliminated for costing too much and not doing enough, when all it had to do was everything.

At the same time it is shrinking non-college workforce options, the Administration’s policies will make college that much more out of reach for more people. The Administration, itself stacked with elite college graduates,8 has taken aim at equity programs that helped low-income kids—including white kids like your author—get an opportunity within higher education. The Administration’s efforts include reinforcing admissions offices’ use of standardized testing,9 which gauge your family’s ability to pay for test prep courses that unlock higher scores much more than your potential as a student.

In sum, all these policy changes, if enacted, mean there could be more of at least one thing for the college and not-college students of the future:

Less.

Greetings, coincidentally, from beautiful Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where I have been doing some alumni stuff at my alma mater. I presume I’m the visitor from D.C. people are talking about, but I’ve been busy, so I’m not sure.

I might be back in this space before Friday with more stuff on the executive orders, depending on travel and any other hilarity that ensues in the interim.

FRIDAY: Markup time on reconciliation. Where is this money coming from, and what is the effect of the changes proposed on student loans?

NEXT TUESDAY: The killer app for workforce that helps employers and workers.