CRANSTON, R.I. — Before he landed in prison three years ago for selling drugs, Joe worked on and off as a construction laborer. In his free time, he’d do little projects around the house, his youngest daughter by his side.
“I always liked working with my hands,” said Joe, whose last name is being withheld at the request of prison leadership in order to protect his privacy. “And she liked to help.”
So when prison leaders offered him a spot in a construction preapprenticeship program earlier this year, Joe, who is in his 40s, didn’t hesitate. The program was a chance to learn skills that could lead to an apprenticeship on the outside, and eventually to a family-sustaining job.
He just wasn’t prepared for all the math. “We’re doing things I haven’t done in 30 years, like fractions,” said Joe. “It takes a while for it to kick back in.” When he needs a refresher, he calls one of his four teenagers for help.
Joe’s program is run by the Rhode Island nonprofit Building Futures, one of the first beneficiaries of a $50 million investment in local workforce development that Brown University committed to make over the next 10 years as part of a July settlement with the Trump administration.
That agreement resolved a trio of reviews by federal agencies into Brown’s compliance with federal antidiscrimination law and restored the university’s access to hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds.
Unlike settlements signed by Columbia and Cornell universities, Brown’s deal with the White House doesn’t include any direct payments to the federal government. While the university declined to say if the grants-in-lieu-of-fines approach originated with the college or the Trump administration, Brian Clark, vice president for news and strategic campus communications, said in a statement that the university wanted to “make clear that our agreement was not the result of any determination of fault” and ensure that any payment reflected both parties’ priorities.
“The agreement to provide $50 million in grants to workforce organizations aligns with Brown’s service mission while also meeting a workforce goal for higher education institutions articulated by the federal government,” Clark said. (The U.S. Department of Education, Department of Justice, and Department of Health and Human Services, the three federal agencies to sign the agreement with Brown, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
President Trump, an Ivy League graduate himself, has been a harsh critic of elite colleges, accusing the institutions of ideological bias and an indifference to labor market needs. In speeches and on social media, he frequently pits higher education against workforce development, portraying college as elitist and expensive and job training as practical and affordable.
That framing fits within a broader narrative, popular among many conservatives, that a four-year degree has become out of reach for ordinary Americans and no longer provides a good return on investment.
But while the president’s complaints about higher ed may resonate with some working-class voters, critics say his support for vocational education is superficial and has yet to yield any significant investment in job training programs.
Though the Trump administration has steered some existing funding to apprenticeship programs, its budget proposal for the current fiscal year would have reduced future spending on workforce programs by $1.6 billion. (Congress rejected the cuts.) The administration also canceled millions of dollars in federal grants for workforce development — including $40 million for the Department of Justice program that helped launch Building Futures’ prison preapprenticeship five years ago.
If Brown hadn’t come forward with its offer of $1.5 million for Building Futures, the preapprenticeship might have ended with Joe’s cohort, said Andrew Cortes, the organization’s president and CEO.
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Cortes founded Building Futures almost two decades ago, in an effort to solve two problems: a shortage of skilled labor in the construction industry and high unemployment rates in Providence’s poorer neighborhoods.
To grow the construction workforce and ease unemployment, he built a preapprenticeship program that would let workers learn the basic skills they’d need to advance to union apprenticeships.
Cortes also worked with large employers, including Brown, to secure commitments that a portion of the work on their ongoing construction projects would go to new apprentices. In Brown’s case, 15 percent of the hours on projects valued over $5 million are filled by Building Futures graduates.
That agreement, formalized more than a decade ago, made Building Futures an obvious choice for the first round of grants, according to Mary Jo Callan, Brown’s vice president for community engagement. The nonprofit will split $3 million with the Community College of Rhode Island, which has long worked with Brown on transfer options for local students, she added.
“We really wanted to start with two proven providers,” she said.
While future grants will be awarded competitively, only Building Futures and CCRI were invited to submit proposals for the first round. The community college will use its share of the money to expand its programs for early educators, while Building Futures will use its portion to continue the prison preapprenticeships as well as a “contractor incentive program” that offers subsidies to contractors who hire new apprentices. It will also help employers start new apprenticeships in a variety of nontraditional fields, including education and health care.
The city of Providence has a poverty rate of 22 percent — double the state average — and Rhode Island’s highest incarceration rate, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. It is home to 17 percent of the state’s population, but 38 percent of its incarcerated population.
Preparing those individuals for life after prison is in everyone’s best interest, said Rhode Island Department of Corrections Lt. Brian Carvalho, who runs the Building Futures preapprenticeship program at the state minimum security prison where Joe is incarcerated. When people can’t find jobs upon release due to a lack of education or skills, they’re more likely to commit another crime and return to jail.
“These individuals are going to be moving into our neighborhoods,” Carvalho said. Teaching them the fundamentals of a trade helps them “go out and become productive members of society.”
Carvalho said that most prisoners “don’t even know how to read a ruler when they start” the construction preapprenticeship. But by the end of the 120-hour program, they’ve acquired enough basic skills to transition into Building Futures’ five-week preapprenticeship program when they’re released. And when they finish that program, they can go straight into a union apprenticeship.
On a recent weekday, participants were completing their final assessment, a series of tasks that required hammering, drilling, sawing, and fitting drywall and piping onto frames. The noise inside the shop was deafening.
“This is like our SAT,” said Ian Chase, chief program officer at Building Futures. Only instead of measuring college readiness, it’s measuring apprenticeship readiness.
Kevin, who is in his 30s, said he’d tried college after high school, but dropped out when the bills began piling up. He said the preapprenticeship program showed him that there are other pathways to a career.
“It’s a good opportunity to learn something and not go back to selling drugs,” said Kevin, whose surname is being withheld at the request of prison leadership to protect his privacy.
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President Trump’s praise for vocational education isn’t new. During his first term in office, he frequently talked up apprenticeships and other alternatives to a four-year degree.
But Trump didn’t treat college and vocational training as competing priorities until his 2024 presidential campaign, when he began casting “trade schools” as a counterweight and corrective to a higher education system he argued was out of touch with employers’ needs.
Trump carried that message into his second term in office, issuing an executive order last spring that promised to redirect federal dollars toward programs that train workers for in-demand skilled trades.
“After years of shuffling Americans through an economically unproductive postsecondary system, President Trump will refocus young Americans on career preparation,” the White House said in a fact sheet accompanying the order.
That fact sheet accused prior administrations of promoting a “college for all” agenda and pledged to “restore focus on sectors and programs that Made the American Economy Great in the first place.”
A month later, Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social that he was “considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across the land.”
Harvard — which the Trump administration has accused of antisemitism, discriminatory admissions policies, misuse of federal funds, and failing to disclose foreign funding — has yet to settle with the White House, with mutual lawsuits still underway. But two months before announcing its agreement with Brown University, the Trump administration said that Harvard was prepared to spend $500 million to build and operate a network of trade schools. (Harvard has not confirmed this claim, and did not respond to a request for comment.)
Yet even as he has positioned himself as a defender of the working class against moneyed elite institutions, President Trump has also tried to strip millions in workforce training dollars from the community and technical colleges that educate the vast majority of working-class Americans.
The most glaring example is the $1.4 billion Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act program, which sends money to the states to allocate to high schools and colleges as they choose. Last year, states spent 38 percent of their allocation — roughly $400 million — on postsecondary programs, most of them at community colleges.
But in his budget for the current fiscal year, Trump called for cutting colleges out of the program, reiterating his complaint about “an economically unproductive postsecondary system.”
The president’s plan also tried to end programs that award about $300 million a year to community colleges to help them train workers in high-demand industries and to educate adults without a high school credential and English language learners.
It’s unclear if the president considers community and technical colleges to be “trade schools,” or if he is only referring to vocational high schools. But the administration has also canceled grants for career-oriented high schools, saying they were “not in the best interest of the federal government.”
Braden Goetz, a longtime Education Department staffer who left the agency in late 2024, said he doesn’t see the settlement as part of a larger strategy to transfer money from elite colleges to vocational programs.
“Extorting money from Brown and other universities for workforce development is just a sideshow meant to distract from the Trump administration’s efforts to cut federal funding for community colleges, including for their workforce development programs,” said Goetz, who now serves as a senior policy advisor in the Center on Education and Labor at New America, a center-left think tank.
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Still, the Brown money is helping individual programs. One March day, in a preschool classroom outside Providence, teacher Poonam Katoch was being observed by one of her professors at the Community College of Rhode Island.
It was story time, and Katoch was reading aloud from the picture book “Caps for Sale.” She showed the children the cover and asked them what the peddler was doing.
“Sleeping in a tree!” they shouted in unison.
“Do you sleep in a tree?” she asked, a note of mischief in her voice.
“Noooooo!” they all shouted.
“It’s not safe; it’s not comfy,” explained one girl.
“You’d fall off,” added a boy.
Katoch, who has worked for the Academy for Little Children in West Warwick, Rhode Island, for three years, is finishing up a 24-credit certificate in early childhood education. When she completes the program this spring, she’ll be eligible for a raise.
Early childhood educators are in short supply in Rhode Island and around the country. Turnover rates are high, and hiring is difficult, according to Joelle Beyer, the academy’s director. Certificate programs like CCRI’s “help staff stay committed,” Beyer said.
CCRI currently enrolls roughly 250 students across its early education programs; the grant from Brown will allow it to educate an additional 180 teachers over the next three years.
“Having a stable early education workforce is critical to Rhode Island’s economy,” said Madeline Burke, CCRI’s associate vice president for career, technical and continuing education. “If folks don’t have child care, they can’t go to work.”
So far, Congress hasn’t gone along with the president’s proposed cuts to workforce development programs at two-year colleges. But the president hasn’t given up. His budget plan for fiscal 2027, released last week, calls for cutting spending on such programs by roughly $800 million, according to Megan Evans, senior government affairs manager for The National Skills Coalition.
Meanwhile, Brown University has begun reviewing applications for another $5 million in workforce development grants — the second installment in its $50 million deal with the Trump administration.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965 or preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story about Brown University was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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