If there’s one thing Mississippi has in abundance, it’s people who made wrong choices as teenagers, wound up quitting school and never went back to get an equivalency diploma.
In fact, the executive director of the Mississippi Community College Board says the state has more than 360,000 people without a high school diploma. That’s at least 15% of the state’s adult population.
Although some of these residents have worked their way into decent jobs, there are too many others who lack the skills to compete in a rapidly evolving labor market. They may also lack the means to correct their earlier decision to leave school by getting a trade education that would point them toward a job.
Given that, it is a good sign that the U.S. Department of Education has approved the Community College Board’s application to provide financial aid to students without a high school or equivalent program. Mississippi will be the fourth state in the nation to receive this aid through the Ability to Benefit program.
The Community College Board said this week that certain students who previously would not qualify for federal education assistance — because they do not have a high school diploma — may be eligible for Ability to Benefit assistance. This includes people enrolled in the state’s MIBEST program, which stands for Mississippi Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training and is available at all 15 of the community colleges in the state.
It’s too early to say how many people will take advantage of this new program. But given the large number of residents without a high school diploma, the opportunity to make a difference is obvious.
Community colleges are beacons for job training in Mississippi. If Ability to Benefit steers just a few hundred or a couple of thousand people per year into a skill and a job, the investment will pay for itself by helping more people to become self-reliant.
