To: President Donald Trump
WIA Funding must be fixed!
Current WIA program protocols are inadequate to address the issues of student retention and program completion. We would ask for a review of the entire program, focusing on the problem area of abrupt tuition increases by universities which results in massive dropout rates among the programs participants. Many students are forced to abandon the program and find themselves in a worse situation than before having been enrolled.
Why is this important?
WIA is a government tuition assistance program for unemployed workers who want to retrain themselves for in-demand jobs, such as computer networking. The problem is that many participating schools have dramatically raised their tuition costs (my school went up over 208%!) in order to 'milk the program' (?). The WIA contract REQUIRES participants to complete their studies or face penalties, so many students are forced to take out loans they may not be able to repay in order to complete their funding or - in over a quarter of the cases - they drop out and never finish the program, having wasted two years of their lives in a futile effort to improve themselves.