Dismantling the Dept. of Education could steer more people to nontraditional career paths

If the Department of Education ceases to exist as planned, college financial aid could potentially face disruption for millions of current and incoming college students. 

The Trump administration’s ongoing dismantling of the Department of Education, also known as the DOE, could spur a shift away from traditional four-year degrees and toward education that prepares students for specific jobs. Increasingly, those jobs are in tech, are high-paying and increase social equity.

Whether changes to the DOE will mean influxes of students who are on a traditional college path will look toward non-college options is unclear, but the conversation shines a light on existing issues with the US education system’s status quo.

Building wealth outside of the system

The potential financial aid disruption isn’t expected to have much impact on non-college postsecondary education, which relies less on traditional student aid. For education professionals working in the equity space on the postsecondary level, dismantling the DOE may not amount to much of a shakeup at all. 

“The fact is that the post-secondary education system has not been working for a lot of young adults for a very long time,” Dan Rhoton, CEO of Hopeworks, told Technical.ly. “The young folks who Pell Grants are supposed to help are repeatedly failed by the system.” 

Hopeworks is a tech workforce development organization that serves Camden, New Jersey and Kensington in Philadelphia, focusing on training chronically unemployed adults in low-income communities. It’s not a bootcamp, Rhoton stresses.

“We do web development, data analytics and revenue cycle management, where we provide services to companies like any other business,” he said, “and we use those businesses as a way to train young adults into permanent jobs.”

It is part of an ongoing tech movement that includes some coding bootcamps and IT training cohorts of various models that evolved from coding camps born in Silicon Valley in the early 2010s. The potential for hands-on tech programs as an alternative to a four-year college education, specifically as a pathway from poverty to a high-paying job, led to many of the tech career opportunities that exist in most cities today.

If the DOE goes away, Rhoton doesn’t expect a change in the number of students Hopeworks serves since the communities they’re in are already largely shut out when it comes to college opportunities.

With a waiting list of over 300, the level of need is already high, with or without the DOE.

Tech apprenticeships and changing debt culture

There are few pathways into high paying jobs that have the track record of apprenticeships when it comes to relying less on government funding and debt accumulation. 

Brian Kennedy, senior vice president for operations and government affairs for the Pittsburgh Technology Council, told Technical.ly that non-college pathways like their registered apprenticeship program tend not to get as much support from the DOE as they do from the US Department of Labor and the Workforce Education and Innovation Act. 

These are also at risk under Trump — while the Department of Labor is not slated to be abolished, it was reported to be facing staff cuts of 90%, with some staff that was fired in February reinstated in early March.

Still, the issues in the US education system go deeper than those departments, Kennedy said.

“The bigger issue that we have isn’t really about government funding,” he said. “The bigger issue is a cultural problem that is somewhat unique to the United States, where the business community is expecting people to go out and finance their own education, find ways to get meaningful work experience and and then wants to hire you when you have five years of experience, the degrees they require and you’ve accumulated massive amounts of debt — and that system is very clearly broken.”

The Pittsburgh Technology Council’s registered apprenticeship programs, he says, get hiring companies involved with the education of their employees.

“It’s been widely adopted in Europe, and to some extent in places like India,” Kennedy said. “Through registered apprenticeship programs, industry comes to the table as part of the training — and not just for their incumbent workforces, but for their entry level workforces. That’s where the cultural disconnect is today.”  

Apprenticeships, once thought of as primarily the way into journeyman trades like plumbing and carpentry, have been increasingly catching on as a way to build tech pipelines. Though the number of available tech apprenticeships remains limited, they have trended up since 2020, with a slight dip between 2023 and 2024. Still, in 2024, there were more than 64,800 registered apprentices in tech occupations, a 29% increase over the previous four years. 

College aid will still be available, at least to some, without the DOE

For students whose career choices require a more traditional college route, programs like the Pell Grant, which existed before the DOE was launched during the Jimmy Carter administration in 1980, may be shuffled to a different department but will likely still be available to students, Kennedy said.

“We’re probably not seeing any chance that things like Pell would be cut,” he said. 

Still, as we saw with the FAFSA debacle in 2024, any disruption in financial aid can cause havoc.

The technical glitches after the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) soft launched its overhauled website in 2024 were at least partially to blame for college closures, including the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and the Delaware College of Art and Design, demonstrating that even a jostle to the program can cause big problems for students seeking postsecondary education.

Are bootcamps a viable answer?

Bootcamps like Zip Code Wilmington (ZCW) have helped people get into tech careers for more than a decade. While bootcamps in general, partly due to their expensive Silicon Valley roots, have a reputation for costing a lot of money for certifications that may or may not result in a high-paying job, community-based programs and non-profits like ZCW have partnerships with hiring companies and good track records — always check their track records — and they’re more than ready for a potential increase of students if federal financial aid is disrupted.

“Zip Code’s immersive training program continuously analyzes and adapts to the changing economy,” Desa Burton, executive director of ZCW, told Technical.ly in an email. ”While we anticipate that more adult learners may seek out alternative education pathways to get into good paying jobs or to stay relevant in their current positions, the economic trends in the tech industry are a considerable challenge: hiring freezes, layoffs, and the uncertainty surrounding the impact of artificial intelligence are having a major impact on enrollment.” 

To manage these challenges, Burton said, ZCW offers its training for free for qualified applicants, and, because the program is too intense and time-consuming to allow students to have a job during the cohort, qualifying students also receive stipends to support living expenses during training and access to other nongovernment financial aid. 

Whether those kinds of financial accommodations will convince people concerned about the Trump Administration’s impact on federal financial aid that a bootcamp is a better fit than college remains to be seen, but a focus on education that specifically aims to make people, regardless of their walk of life, gainfully employable is potentially about to have a moment.

“I think the shift is happening, and this might slightly accelerate it,” said Rhoton. “But I think the fundamental reckoning — is college or even a high school education preparing folks for actual work? —- is happening, regardless of the changes in the Department of Education.”