Education Department officials and higher-education advocates agreed on proposed regulations this week to launch Workforce Pell Grants, setting a projected July rollout and triggering a scramble at community and technical colleges. The change will let low-income students use Pell to pay for short-term, career-focused programs, but the department left detailed eligibility, completion and accreditation rules to implementation. Institutions face a compressed timeline to build the required data-tracking, staffing and quality-assurance systems needed to certify programs that run between eight and 14 weeks or meet a 600-clock-hour threshold. Officials warned that many colleges lack the analytics capacity and workforce to comply quickly, raising risk that schools will rush certification or fail to demonstrate employment outcomes. Nicholas Kent, the Education Department’s top higher-education official under the current administration, called Workforce Pell a “game changer,” while policy experts cautioned that a hasty rollout could undermine program quality and create compliance headaches for campuses that traditionally serve short-term learners.