Last month, Sallie Mae, the enterprise set up by the federal government to help finance college education, reached an agreement with the AFL-CIO to make education and training loans available to union members and their families on favorable terms. The program includes college loans, to be sure, but more interestingly it offers (through a Sallie Mae subsidiary called SLM Financial Corp.) job skills training loans for technical, trade, or professional schools for any point in life (for more information, see http://www.salliemae.com/about/slmfin.html). SLM already offers career training loans to the general public, though on less favorable terms than are available through the AFL-CIO program.

The idea is to make it as easy to finance lifelong learning and skills upgrades as it is a college education. These loans come at a time when the former is becoming as important as the latter in the New Economy. New Democrats have long promoted this idea. In the Winter 1998 issue of Blueprint: Ideas for a New Century, the Brookings Institution's Robert E. Litan called for "LEAP" (Lifelong Educational Advancement Pursuit) loans that workers could obtain on terms similar to college loans, with subsidized interest rates, and deferred (and preferably income-contingent) repayment. The Progressive Policy Institute made LEAP loans a key element of the New Democrat agenda for the New Economy in Kenan P. Jarboe's November 1999 paper, "Making the Global Economy Work for Every Worker: An Agenda for Expanding the Winners' Circle."

Public job training programs are important for creating a system of lifelong learning, but they will never be sufficient to meet the needs of an economy in which nearly every worker will need continuous skills upgrades. Employers, who already conduct the lion's share of skills training, should look into Leap loans as a way to expand their efforts. Such loans are also an obvious way for labor unions to play a critical role in helping workers obtain the resources they need for improving their own job prospects and economic security (one reason we are so happy to see the AFL-CIO join forces with Sallie Mae). But the public sector can play a key role at limited cost to leverage private funds for worker training. This will create fair and affordable terms for loans workers can pay off with the better jobs their higher skills will secure. We encourage every state education finance agency to take a good look at Sallie Mae's career training loan programs and help workers "leap" to higher skills and income.