The Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998 dramatically changed the federal government’s approach to providing employment and training services, in part by shifting decision-making about service prioritization and delivery to state and local levels operating within a framework of federal principles, funding rules, and performance requirements. There is tremendous variation in whether local areas and individual frontline workers who encounter clients take advantage of WIA’s potential for flexibility to address emerging issues in workforce training (Becker and Derk 2011). Political factors arise in this process, through state-level politics that affect administrative decisions about the workforce and higher education, the politics of local boards and economic development processes, and local attitudes toward workforce investment priorities. We examine the role of flexibility and state- and local-level policies in addressing the important need to boost college completion rates among adults and efforts to promote college completion in general.

Using data from a mixed-method process evaluation of the adult college completion initiative, we explore the barriers and facilitators for the use of WIA funds to support college completion, as well as variations in the local approaches to ITA implementation. Our data include semi-structured interviews with staff and clients, client data, and content analysis of staff calls and meetings and local policy documents.

Prior research on the discretion of policy implementers highlights the role of rules and hierarchy in shaping day-to-day decisions that essentially can constitute policy (Lipsky 1980), and the importance of both context and the processes of learning and adaptation, or thought and action, by which policy implementers weigh judgment, rules, and moral considerations as they make decisions and take actions (Laws and Hajer 2008). Public-private collaboration in training provision complicates this: employers and training providers both have a seat at the table in determining funding priorities. These private actors are also involved in implementation of WIA’S goals, and in fact bureaucrats who guide trainees on the ground may be employees of the government, or of private entities contracted by government, while working in government offices providing services (One-Stops).

Researchers hypothesized that policy or practices surrounding performance reporting, the utilization of high-demand occupation lists to allocate dollars, and approved provider lists accounted for variation. Results partially supported these hypotheses and indicated that staff interpretation of rules and local cultures of practice reflecting shared learning (Wenger 1988) varied but emerged from WIA’s framework. WIB attitudes toward college as a step toward quick employment (a WIA priority) and good wages were also important. Variation in how One-Stops allocated tasks and relationships between collaborating institutions also shaped the approach to college as a viable option for training. In short, the political nature of making or changing WIB policy in interaction with the structure of WIA, while intended to promote flexibility, created barriers to fulfilling certain types of employment and training needs that prevent the system from reacting nimbly to emerging issues.