Workforce Pell and Textbook Costs: Why OER Matters

The Workforce Pell Grant is a new federal program that extends Pell Grant eligibility to students enrolled in short-term workforce training programs for the first time. Created through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed in July 2025, the program takes effect with the 2026-27 school year, and institutions across the country are building eligible programs now.

The program comes with a significant accountability requirement. Each eligible workforce program's published tuition and fees cannot exceed its "value-added earnings," a measure of whether graduates earn enough to justify the cost of the program. Programs that fail this test lose eligibility for Pell funding.

How course materials fit into that test is an open question. The Department of Education's proposed rule defines "tuition and fees" but does not address books and supplies, even though existing regulations allow institutions to bill course materials as part of tuition and fees under certain conditions. Whether those costs count toward the cap could depend on how individual institutions structure their billing.

This matters because course material costs are one of the few program costs that institutions can directly control through their choice of content. In traditional degree programs, the shift to open educational resources (OER) has saved students billions of dollars. Workforce programs present a similar opportunity, and in some ways a larger one: many institutions are selecting materials for these programs for the first time. Institutions that invest in openly licensed materials now can keep course material costs predictable, rather than getting locked into commercial pricing that could rise without notice.

The Open Education Association submitted a public comment on the proposed rule urging the Department of Education to clarify the treatment of books and supplies in the value-added earnings test, improve transparency about the cost, and recommend the use of openly licensed materials in its implementation guidance.

Faculty and institutions have already produced openly licensed materials for many of the workforce fields these programs will serve, including healthcare, manufacturing, and the skilled trades. Collections of workforce-specific OER are freely available through repositories like SkillsCommons.org, and the Department of Education's Open Textbook Pilot program has funded multiple projects to build high-quality OER in professional and technical fields, including Washington Open ProfTech and WisTechOpen. Institutions building eligible workforce programs can adopt these materials today—and thanks to the open license, adapt them freely to meet local needs.

As new workforce programs take shape across the country, the choices institutions make about course materials will have lasting consequences for what students pay. Openly licensed materials offer a path to lower costs, better-fit content, and long-term sustainability.