President Trump’s funding battle with the nation’s research universities has made headlines for months. But the federal government is also looking to reshape a less-talked-about component of higher education that serves over a million students.
The Trump administration has proposed cutting funding for adult education, a suite of programs that includes English-language learning and high-school equivalency training, which can confer GEDs.
“Adult ed is like a little secret — nobody really knows what we do,” said Dian Organ, director of adult education at Colby Community College, in Kansas. “We serve the population that nobody wants to see.”
Given that the federal government has also said it wants “to address the work-force needs of American companies” and “develop alternatives to four-year college degrees,” leaders of community colleges and adult-education programs say they are confused.
“There doesn’t seem to be an understanding about the value of adult education as the talent pipeline of the work force,” said Sharon Bonney, chief executive of the Coalition on Adult Basic Education, or COABE.
The Trump administration has already canceled some individual grants for adult education, and its budget proposal for this fiscal year included cutting all $729 million within Title II of the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act (WIOA) — the main source of federal money for adult education. While presidential budget blueprints aren’t the final word, they are a statement of an administration’s priorities.
The government cited adult education’s “dismal” results. “In the most recent reported year, only 43 percent of participants had any measurable skills gains,” the budget proposal states. An adult-education student has a measurable skill gain when they receive a secondary-school diploma or improve their educational functioning level, similar to moving up a grade.
Organ, whose experience includes teaching incarcerated people and others who have been dealt a challenging hand in life, said such metrics don’t fully capture the value of adult education, because some of the skills she teaches are not measured by educational level.
“We’re getting people who come in who don’t have the ability to get up in the morning — no one’s ever taught them social skills, verbal skills, or how to communicate,” she said.
Trump’s budget proposal also includes repackaging all work-force preparation programs into a single “Make America Skilled Again” grant of just under $3 billion — a reduction compared to the $3.9 billion of Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act money that Congress approved last fiscal year. One aim of this revamped grant system would be to stop “funneling taxpayer dollars to progressive nonprofits finding work for illegal immigrants,” according to Trump’s proposal.
DeRionne Pollard, president and chief executive of the American Association of Community Colleges, said certain Trump-backed changes are intended to bring adult education more in line with work-force preparation.
“I understand that the administration is really asking us to take a more integrated and strategic approach to adult education,” she said. “They want to see adult education embedded into the sector, partnerships or apprenticeships or career pathways, rather than having it siloed off.”
But the money question looms large. In July, $715.5 million in funding for adult education was held up by the Office of Management and Budget for nearly a month.
And even though that money went out eventually, not knowing how much is coming for the 2026-27 academic year is throwing a wrench in planning. Federal appropriations remain up in the air amid the government shutdown: The current House appropriations bill reflects Trump’s proposal to cut adult-education funding, while the current Senate bill would keep the allocation flat.
“In the 11 years that I’ve done this I’ve never seen so much uncertainty,” said Seth Carter, president of Colby Community College. “I don’t think anyone knows how this is fully going to shake out right now.”
Hannah Callahan, Colby’s adult education data coordinator, put it bluntly: “If we have teachers who we’ve hired, will we have money to pay them for the whole year?”
A ‘Haphazard’ Approach
Community colleges, which account for over 40 percent of U.S. undergraduate students, play a large role in providing adult education, though school districts and four-year colleges also run such programs. Of the 1,668 adult-education programs in 2022-23, community colleges administered 451.
Community colleges offer their adult-education programs tuition-free when they can. Federal and state grants and local and industry funding make up the difference.
The July funding delay already forced some adult-education programs to lay off staff and cut programs, according to Bonney, of COABE.
Since Trump took office, Hudson County Community College, in New Jersey, has lost over $1 million in two separate federal grants that were going to go toward work-force training for nearly 200 students in either clean water and environmental justice or cybersecurity.
Lori Margolin, vice president for strategic initiatives, continuing education and work-force development at Hudson County Community College, said the funding cuts have been counterproductive.
“It seems kind of haphazard the way things are being done now, where a priority is adult education, but you want to cut the funding to it,” she said. “It just doesn’t seem to be aligned.”
Francisco Suarez, dean of noncredit and adult education at Pasadena City College, in California, says that adult-education courses give his students the opportunity to improve their lives in a way that has lasting impacts. “The parents are learning English, they’re helping their kids in school,” he said. “We’re not [only] impacting the current generation, we’re impacting subsequent generations.”
Not all leaders of community colleges are pessimistic about potential changes to adult education. Vincent June, chancellor of South Louisiana Community College, said that although a huge chunk of his institution’s funding comes from the federal government, he is confident that the college would be able to adapt to cuts.
“I’m not panicking,” he said. “I’ll take whatever they give us, or take whatever the state gives up, and then I will look at other grant opportunities, other funding sources, to replace that [funding] in a way that allows us to continue our mission.”
June is also hopeful that a new funding system for adult education could deliver the same, or better, results.
“I think we have to be really careful about solely focusing on the fact that there could be a potential cut under the current design,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that other programs won’t evolve that would allow us to still service that population.”
Suarez worries that a new version of adult education that is more focused on work-force preparation wouldn’t continue to fund programs teaching English as a second language and life skills for students with disabilities — both of which are partially funded by the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act.
Organ, of Colby Community College, thinks that an overhaul of the adult-education system might dismantle the good parts of the system that she has spent nearly two decades working to build.
“When you wipe it all clean and then you rebuild and start over, you lose so much of what’s been happening,” she said. “If adult ed is taken away, I don’t know where this population of people will go.”
