Q&A
...
A New Deal for
Dislocated Workers
T
Labor’s $2B grant focuses on career retraining
he U.S. Department of Labor this month will begin
soliciting grant applications for its long-awaited Community
College and Career Training Program (CCCTP), a massive
$2 billion, multiyear effort that encourages colleges to
create job-training courses for dislocated workers.
Administrators say the program, an offshoot of President Obama’s
ambitious and ultimately stalled American Graduation Initiative (AGI),
will help put Americans back to work while contributing to the presi-
dent’s goal of increasing the number of U.S. postsecondary degree and
certificate holders.
Under the agreement, institutions of higher education, including community
colleges, are asked to submit proposals for job-training programs aimed at workers
eligible for federal Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA)—namely, those unemployed
who lost their jobs as a result of international trade.
COMMUNITY COLLEGE JOURNAL December 2010/January 2011 20
U.S. Labor Department Assistant Secretary
for Employment and Training Jane Oates
(left) meets with workers as part of a
federal job-training program.
Grants will be awarded over a three-year period with minimum grants of
$2.5 million a year. Originally part
of the 2009 American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act, but not funded,
the CCCTP found its way into the
health care reconciliation bill, where it
survived despite the same fierce budget
negotiations that eventually sealed
AGI’s fate.
To help colleges better understand
the program and how students can
benefit from it, Labor Department
Assistant Secretary for Employment
and Training Jane Oates talked with
Journal Managing Editor Corey Murray.
What follows is an excerpt of that
conversation.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
