Evidence for higher education and workforce decisions.

Semantic Insight tracks how workforce programs move from eligibility to approval — and what happens after.

For Workforce Pell, that matters because the programs clearing these state and federal steps are the programs that will have to produce results. We track approval because approval determines which programs move forward. Then the question that matters most is placement: every certified program keeps its eligibility on a 70 percent placement rate the state computes from wage records. Approval is the starting line. Placement is the test.

We maintain the national record of state eligibility and federal approvals, then use the same labor-market evidence to help institutions see where graduates can actually get hired: which employers are hiring, what they require, what they pay, and where the real openings are. For each certified program that becomes a placement guide, tools for every completer on SkillsFirst, the real openings in the portal, and sight of the search so it can be coached — the placement system. Before approval, a Readiness Review screens a catalog against the state's gates. Every partnership is led personally by Dave McNasby.

Operating company

Lead

Dave McNasby is the founder of semanticinsight.tech and CEO of SkillsFirst, and leads every Semantic Insight partnership personally. He has spent two decades building career-readiness technology for higher education — first through OptimalResume and more recently through SkillsFirst. Together, these platforms have served more than 800 institutions and 3.5 million students and job seekers since 2005.

Recent work centers on Workforce Pell implementation: Semantic Insight maintains the national record of state eligibility artifacts across all 52 jurisdictions — every published occupation list, crosswalk, and approval commitment, verified against primary documents, and for the jurisdictions that have not published a list, what each is doing instead — alongside the Approvals Tracker and a free Program Screener. There is no federal registry of this information; this practice assembles the record the government does not, built on the same federal data stack institutions are accountable to (O*NET, BLS OEWS, NCES CIP-SOC, IPEDS).

Why we're building the record now

What exists today is a starting line: which states published a list, which programs cleared certification, which cleared the federal step, and how long each took. The accountability runs both ways — the law puts states on the clock too, and the record shows how differently they are answering. We keep it because the questions that matter come later, and only someone who wrote down the start can answer them.

Within months the handful of measured state-to-federal laps become dozens, and the first denial arrives. Within a year the programs certified in 2026 have completers, states revise their lists, and the question shifts from who was approved to what happened to them. Within two years the placement and earnings tests begin to bite, and a program that misses loses eligibility for two years. The same record that tracked approvals becomes approved, still approved, lost eligibility — and the placement work above is what keeps a program in the first two columns.

None of that needs a new method. It needs the one already in use: a dated row for every change, cited to the document it came from.

What we do — and what we don't

We document, we don't decide. We produce traceable, sentence-level evidence of regional employer signal and package it against the regulatory frameworks your reviewers will use — WIOA, Perkins V, Workforce Pell, accreditation. What we don't do is interpret it into institutional strategy. The strategic work belongs to the people who already know your institution — your provost, IR team, accreditation consultants, and the economists who serve them. We give those people better evidence to work with.

How we work