NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee’s 13 community colleges will split a $7.6 million federal grant to build the kind of quick-turnaround career certificates that students can now pay for with Pell Grants.
The U.S. Department of Labor is paying it out over four years through a community college training grant program. The Tennessee group is one of seven state consortiums sharing $65 million in the program’s sixth round, and every one of those grants targets programs that can qualify for Workforce Pell.
Workforce Pell opens federal Pell money to short training programs for the first time. Rules from the U.S. Department of Education let colleges begin offering eligible programs on July 1, 2026. To qualify, a program has to run eight to 15 weeks with 150 to 599 clock hours of instruction, come from an accredited school that has operated at least a year, and line up with high-wage or in-demand fields. Each program also needs sign-off from the governor, and federal law says at least 70 percent of completers must be verified as employed 180 days out.
Because the option is so new, Tennessee has few programs that fit and enrollment is thin. Most of the grant, about $7.2 million, goes to a piece called TalentTN that will create certificates in five fields the state has flagged as priorities: health care, factory work and advanced manufacturing, warehousing and logistics, nuclear and sustainable energy, and tech jobs that include artificial intelligence.
Smaller slices will expand a first-semester career exploration and advising effort known as Reimagining the Community College Experience, and widen use of free, public-domain course materials that replace pricey textbooks.
TBR, the College System of Tennessee, will run the grant, with Pellissippi State Community College as fiscal agent. The proposal was drafted with input from several state agencies and 17 major employers and workforce partners. Roughly 170,000 students attend the system’s schools, a network that also takes in TN eCampus online plus 22 applied technology colleges.
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