Attending community college for some of Virginia’s poorest residents will be entirely free as a result of funding approved by Gov. Ralph Northam this week.
The legislation — backed with $36 million for year one and dubbed “Get Skilled, Get a Job, Give Back,” or “G3” — promises to pay for expenses students might have after they’ve used federal aid and other state resources. It’ll cover tuition, fees and textbooks. For those in most need, it’ll provide grants toward transportation, food and child care, according to an announcement from the governor’s office.
For Northern Virginia Community College, the state’s largest higher education institution, it’ll likely mean an enrollment bump in a number of high-demand degrees. And the school is already looking at ways increase applications.
It’s landmark legislation and not just for students and the school, but also for Greater Washington’s employers, said NOVA President Anne Kress in an interview.
“We still see large numbers of IT jobs going unfilled because of lack of workforce talent,” Kress said. “This is a critical workforce pipeline that companies need in order to grow.”
To receive funding, an applicant’s household income must be no more than four times the federal poverty line. That comes out to be about $69,000 for a two-person household and $124,000 for a family of five.
Roughly 12% of NOVA’s student body, upward of 6,200 students, fall squarely in this income threshold — more students than the total enrollment of many of Virginia’s other two-year institutions, according to the school’s estimates. That count only looks at NOVA’s current student population. It doesn’t track the people who may have put their college aspirations on hold, Kress said.
“That’s what we will be focusing on right now, helping individuals in Northern Virginia understand that there are dollars waiting for them if they are interested in going into a career pathway of cybersecurity, information technology or cloud computing,” she said.
The program only funds degrees in specific fields that are considered both well paying and in high demand. For NOVA, most of those degrees are in tech, like a cloud computing degree developed in partnership with Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc. There are some 37,000 tech or tech-adjacent job openings expected to come to the region over the next 10 years, and as many as 60% of them may go unfilled if degrees production does not increase, according to an analysis by the Greater Washington Partnership’s CoLAB and McKinsey & Co.
Virginia lawmakers have approved a number of measures to address this, including a $1 billion computer science effort to create 31,000 bachelors and graduate degrees in the next two decades. A month after that became law, Northam announced a plan to spend $145 million on the G3 effort, but the Covid-19 pandemic caused Virginia to shelve education plans as they dealt with some 1.4 million residents who filed for unemployment.
While NOVA has gone mostly virtual due to the health crisis, it is one of a handful of school’s in the region that was able to increase enrollment during the pandemic. It reached 52,869 students in fall 2020, a 2% increase from the previous year.
