Included in President Obama’s FY 2013 budget is a new program, called “The Community College to Career Fund.” The new fund would spend $8 billion with a goal of training two million workers for a new career. Details are very sketchy at this point, but the general premise is to have community colleges partner with employers to train skilled workers for unfilled jobs. The goal is certainly a noble one, but questions certainly persist. The two prominent ones among them are “how will this be accomplished?” and “is it even feasible?” 

The first question will likely be answered at some point in the future when the administration drops legislation. The second, however, certainly caught my attention. To achieve the goal of this fund, the program would have to spend no more than $4,000 per worker trained to reach two million skilled workers with $8 billion. This should be a reasonable expectation, but how does this square with the current reality?

According to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, the 4,440 public institutions that confer either Associate’s degrees or certificates produced a grand total of approximately 1.36 million awards during the 2008-2009 academic year at a cost of nearly $49 billion. That comes to $35,925 per award—nearly nine times the President’s proposed rate of $4,000 per award. 

Granted, this figure isn’t entirely fair, since a decent number of community college students transfer to four-year institutions, and thus, these schools are paying money towards completions somewhere else. However, in order to reach the goal of spending $4,000 per award, $43.5 billion of the $49 billion spent would have had to be used for transferring students. One doesn’t need to dive into the numbers any further to confidently determine that this did not happen. And for the record, the 2,705 for-profit institutions that also fall under this universe yielded more than 400,000 completions at a total expense of approximately $18,000 per student. The private sector is literally twice as efficient as the public sector in this regard.

However, one could argue that this program will presumably focus on certificate programs, and since it stands to reason that associate’s degrees cost more to produce than certificates, this isn’t necessarily the proper analysis. Therefore, perhaps it would be instructive to find out how public institutions that specialize solely in certificate programs fare. These 382 non-degree granting public institutions spent a combined $1.3 billion during the 2008-2009 academic year to produce 72,223 certificates. That comes to a price tag of more than $18,000 per certificate—still nearly quintupling the rate that would have to be achieved for the President to reach his goal under this program. 

The bottom line is that the details of the Community College to Career Fund are going to have to present a different business model than the one current in place within our higher education system if it has any chance of being successful. This is also to say nothing of the question of whether or not community colleges even have the capacity to serve another two million students at a time when many of them have reported waitlists for certain programs. There is nothing in our recent history that suggests that our current higher education or workforce development systems can be anywhere near this productive or efficient. With or without the new program, this level of inefficiency will simply not get the job done.