President Barack Obama will visit Michigan today, where he is expected to announce a $12 billion infusion for the nation’s community colleges, The New York Times reported.

Education officials said yesterday that $2.5 billion of the funds would go toward new community college facilities, with the remainder going to a variety of grants designed to boost graduation rates and encourage the teaching of skills that will better prepare students to land jobs in an increasingly competitive economy. The new funds will be spent over 10 years, beginning with the next fiscal year.

“We can have students who need to work getting higher levels of education to move up in their jobs, to get new jobs, and to get the retraining as quickly as we can,” said Martha Kanter, undersecretary of education. “We’ve been so affected by the economic downturn that we need to get students better trained to get jobs as much as we can.”

Administration officials also said that $500 million of the funds will be used as seed money to develop a state-of-the-art online curriculum that could supplement course work at all community colleges.

In all, the funding is expected to increase the number of community college graduates by 5 million during the next 12 years, which would nearly double earlier projections on graduation rates at community colleges. The graduation goal is part of a larger attempt by Obama to give the United States the world’s highest community college graduation rate by 2020.

Officials said the program would be paid for with proposed changes and efficiencies in the federal student loan program.

Des Moines Area Community College officials are “watching this very closely and waiting for more details to be released to see how it might impact DMACC,” said Todd Jones, a spokesman.