Community Colleges Ask Legislature for Roughly $41.5 Million to Fund Training by Job Placements, Not Enrollment
Mississippi's community colleges are asking the Legislature to change how the state pays for workforce training, tying new money to the number of students who complete programs and go to work rather than to enrollment counts.
The Mississippi Association of Community Colleges has approved the Jobs Promise Performance Program as part of its legislative agenda for the 2027 session of the Mississippi Legislature. Under the proposal, the state would invest approximately $41.5 million to prepare an estimated 5,500 additional workers a year for occupations the colleges identify as high priority.
The proposal would add an Economic Development Priority component to the community college funding formula, so that workforce production counts as a measure of what the public investment has bought. Colleges would be rewarded on the basis of students completing workforce programs that lead to employment in occupations experiencing labor shortages, rather than on enrollment alone.
The industries named in the proposal are construction, advanced manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, aerospace, transportation, public safety and information technology.
“Mississippi's Jobs Promise Performance Program shows our commitment to give our students the tools they need for the current workforce,” said Dr. Ricky G. Ford, chair of the Mississippi Association of Community Colleges and president of Northeast Mississippi Community College. “By aligning education with workforce demands, we are helping improve job prospects for our graduates and facilitate economic development in our communities.”
Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College President Dr. Mary Graham said the constraint her college faces is capacity rather than demand. “So, we'll look at everything from shipbuilding to automated manufacturing,” she said. “The energy industry has a huge demand right now with linemen training and data logistics. A lot of those different things that we're already doing, but the challenge for us is a lot of those programs are full, and so we want to expand those offerings.”
Graham said local employer demand for nurses alone runs into the hundreds. “Every employer that we work with has such a demand right now. We could have over three or 400 nurses could be employed locally, and so we're cranking them out as quickly as we can,” she said. “But this will allow us to enhance what we're already doing, add some more short-term programming to get people, you know, in the workforce very quickly. People who need to reskill or upskill.”
The proposal is an agenda item, not a bill. It will require approval by lawmakers in the 2027 session before any money moves, and no legislative sponsor has been announced.
The request follows a run of manufacturing announcements that depend on trained labor. Since the start of June, the Mississippi Development Authority has announced projects including Jabil in Marshall County, Keytronic in Corinth, Aluminum Dynamics in Lowndes County, SIP Manufacturing in Southaven and Griesson – de Beukelaer in Madison County. Mississippi also began accepting applications this month under the new federal Workforce Pell program, which extends Pell grant eligibility to shorter-term job training.