Colorado to spend over $38 million on free tuition to solve worker shortage
Colorado House Bill 23-1246 provides $38.6 million of first-come, first-served subsidies for free occupational education.
School and state officials detail Colorado’s worsening shortage of construction workers, firefighters, nurses, etc.
A new program in Colorado allocates $38.6 million to free tuition for certain students in the state. Come the start of the 2023-2024 school year, Colorado is set to offer free community and technical college educations for those seeking degrees in high-demand occupations.
The program, Career Advance Colorado (CAC), comes as the state suffers from a labor shortage in various positions that “have a positive return on public investment,” according to House Bill 23-1246, which provides $38.6 million to support the program.
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The labor shortage isn’t a recent development. Since 2015, Colorado has had more jobs to offer than laborers to take them (with the exception of 2020, which was the beginning of a pandemic anyway), according to data published in the 2022 Talent Pipeline Report by the Colorado Workforce Development Council (CWDC). Nevertheless, the report illustrated that the years since 2020 saw a sudden and sharp worsening of the labor deficit.
“Relative to June 2020,” the report reads, “openings have increased by 117 percent while hires have diminished by 21.7 percent.”
The reason, CWDC Managing Director Lee Wheeler-Berliner explained in an email to Campus Reform, is that 2015 “marked the turning point where recovery from the 2008 recession was accomplished and the economy overall entered a growth phase.”
“At times,” Wheeler-Berliner wrote, “the reality is that there is a skills mismatch between the people looking for work and the jobs that need to be filled.”
Among the industries that need workers are construction, education, firefighting, forestry, law enforcement, and nursing, emailed Lindsay Sandoval, Communications Manager for the Colorado Community College System, to Campus Reform.
A report by Forbes offered data to suggest that the shortage reflects a paradigm shift since remote work dominated the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“A staggering 98% of workers expressed the desire to work remotely, at least part of the time,” the report read. “This overwhelming figure reflects the workforce’s growing affinity towards the flexibility, autonomy and work-life balance that remote work offers.”
Meanwhile, occupations such as nursing or construction, which cannot easily, if at all, be conducted remotely, could be falling out of favor among Americans, especially since, Forbes added, “remote workers … make an average of $19,000 more [per year] than those in the office.”
“According to August’s National Federation for Independent Business (NFIB) Report, nearly half of employers are raising compensation to attract/retain staff and mitigate losses spurred by staffing shortages,” Wheeler-Berliner wrote.
Career Advance Colorado will provide funds for “tuition, fees, course materials and other costs,” Sandoval wrote. Funding will be available on a first-come, first-served basis for those who have applied for state or federal financial aid. Neither officials nor the CAC homepage specified whether out-of-state students would be excluded from the program.
“The program hopes to train 20,000 Coloradans for high-skill careers,” Sandoval added, “while responding to the state’s most critical workforce shortages.”
