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The Aspen Institute's Economic Strategy Group released a series of policy papers Monday that focus on increasing Americans' work-force skills and expanding private-sector wage growth among low- and middle-income workers.
One report examines reinvesting in community colleges to increase graduation rates and ensure students don't fail their degree programs within six years. The group proposes creating a new federal grant program that awards $22 billion a year to community colleges based on their institutional outcomes. The report compares the influx in funding to the Morrill land-grant program, which expanded access to state colleges and universities for working-class people in the 19th century.
The proposal includes some benchmarks that colleges would have to meet by 2030, such as closing completion gaps between two-year college students aged 18 to 24 and their peers at four-year institutions and increasing the percentage of Americans with a college degree or credential from 46.9 percent to 65 percent.
The group includes Margaret Spellings, a former U.S. secretary of education and now president of the University of North Carolina System; Austan Goolsbee, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration and now an economics professor at the University of Chicago; Glenn Hubbard, former dean of Columbia University's business school; Ruth Porat, the chief financial officer of Alphabet Inc. and Google; Penny Pritzker, a former U.S. secretary of commerce and founder of PSP Capital Partners, a private investment firm; Melissa Kearney, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, College Park; American University president Sylvia Burwell, and Purdue University president Mitch Daniels.
