The advantage college still has over many workforce programs.

There’s too much choice and not enough predictability in non-degree workforce programs. The way the federal government often funds workforce programs in the United States doesn’t help.

I have heard a lot in the past year from political leaders and policymakers here in D.C. that they see workforce programs—a thing that broadly seems to mean “Anything other than the typical college-degree program”—as a much better choice for workers than, well, a typical college-degree program. Some of that is because college can be an expensive and increasingly less bankable option for getting a job. While college isn’t built to be a jobs training program, that is why a lot of people end up going.

What I don’t hear appreciated in the anti-college talk, though, is that college is much more predictable and much easier to find than many workforce programs in the United States. That’s before you get into the pedigree issue that keeps cropping up. Recently, the Lumina Foundation and Gallup surveyed employers and found that three quarters of them preferred degree holders, even in jobs that don’t require degrees.

All things considered, it’s not that hard to figure out what college is like or what you get from it. You get a degree that has some value (however suspect in fact), and the amount of time it takes to get that degree (two years, four years, etc.) is baked into the general consciousness. It’s also decently clear with a few searches online or phone calls as to how you get into a college and what’s involved. Colleges can be a lot of things, but one of them is not “Being hard to find.”

With many workforce programs, the product is not nearly as well-defined to someone who is coming in without a lot of knowledge of what they do and how they work. First, there are quite a few of them—around 1.5 million non-degree programs out there, per a 2025 Credential Engine report. In contrast to college, how to access non-degree workforce programs isn’t nearly as well defined as, say, “Stopping by that place with the interstate sign.”

Regardless of whether it’s accurate, there’s a century’s worth of buildup of the value of a college degree, as well as a lot of college degree-holders making hiring decisions. In contrast, sorting whether a particular credential actually means something in hiring is a work in progress.

Or to put all this another way: most Americans think they know what type of product they’re getting from college. Fair or not, non-degree programs just don’t have that advantage right now.