特朗普颠覆社区大学的鲜为人知的方式

President Trump’s funding battle with the nation’s research universities has made headlines for months.但联邦政府也在寻求重塑高等教育中一个鲜为人知的组成部分，该组成部分为超过一百万学生提供服务。

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.

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.