Best of Both Worlds

Both red and blue states seek to expand youth apprenticeship, while the U.S. takes first steps to pair apprenticeships with college degrees, an approach that’s booming in other countries. Also, a new federal analysis of the ROI of grants for short-term training.

Bringing Together Learning and Earning

As we’re on the cusp of a new administration, apprenticeship is a rare bipartisan issue and one of the only through lines of the first Trump and Biden administrations. 

States like Colorado, which went for Harris earlier this month, and Indiana, which voted for Trump, are both investing heavily in earn-and-learn models—and youth apprenticeships specifically. More than half of states passed laws seeking to expand and improve apprenticeship during the past two years.

While apprenticeships remain a boutique option in the U.S., they increasingly are moving beyond traditional fields like the construction trades, with growth in healthcare, manufacturing, and education. Meanwhile, pairing degrees with apprenticeships is becoming a hot concept, in this country and globally (see below).

At a Brooking Institution event on Monday to kick off National Apprenticeship Week, Senator John Hickenlooper, a Colorado Democrat, spoke about congressional efforts to grow youth apprenticeships. Last year, Hickenlooper and Indiana Republican senator and now governor-elect Mike Braun introduced the Youth Apprenticeship Advancement Act, which would support apprenticeships for students between 16 and 22 years old. 

“Apprenticeships are really just a larger reflection of our kids, which is a larger reflection of our future,” Hickenlooper said. “It’s not Republican or Democrat to make sure we have more opportunities for our kids. It’s not Republican or Democrat to make sure we have a workforce that allows us to continue to lead the world in innovation and new ideas.”

Aside from legislative moves, former youth apprentices at the event spoke about challenges on the ground, from not meshing with managers or knowing how to navigate professional relationships to teachers not being understanding about why a student may miss class to be on the job. 

High school counselors also face the tough job of convincing students—and, crucially, their parents—that an apprenticeship pathway is just as good an option as the traditional pathway of graduating high school, going to college, and then getting internships and a job. 

Lateefah Durant, vice president of innovation at CityWorks DC, a nonprofit focused on improving career development opportunities for young people of color, spoke about the need for high schools and higher ed institutions to see the relevance of the earn-and-learn choice, offering things like credit for experiences in the workplace. 

“You shouldn’t have to learn over here and earn over there,” Durant said. “Apprenticeship gives us a way to bring those two things together.”

The former apprentices who spoke at the event all chose different paths, with some staying in their jobs and earning a college degree at the same time and others sticking with the job only. 

Leah Sloan, a former CityWorks DC finance apprentice at Freddie Mac and a student at Bowie State University, encouraged youth apprenticeship alumni to get the word out to their peers just behind them.

The Kicker: “We should go to those high schools, go show them what it looks like,” Sloan said. “There are other opportunities for you. You don’t have to go to college. You can learn and get real workforce development and experience.” —By Colleen Connolly

Classroom Theory and Real-World Practice

Germany has long been a global poster child for apprenticeships. But as veteran journalist and author Ben Wildavsky reports from Munich, Germany’s traditional vocational apprenticeships have become less popular.

In recent years, a growing number of young Germans are enrolling in career-focused institutions known as universities of applied sciences, Wildavsky writes in Work Shift. These practical universities have partnered with employers on a small but growing path that combines applied sciences degrees with a new kind of apprenticeship.

These degree apprenticeships now make up nearly 5% of German higher education enrollment, reports Wildavsky. 

“The mixture of classroom theory and real-world practice,” he writes, “reflects a strong public appetite for a new approach—more opportunities to learn beyond secondary school in settings that combine scholarship with a focus on careers.”

The Apprenticeship Degree: Beyond Germany, these dual-study apprenticeship programs are growing in several other countries in Europe and elsewhere in the world, says Joe Edelheit Ross, president of Reach University, a pioneering U.S. institution offering apprenticeship-based, job-embedded degrees for working learners. 

After creating degree apprenticeships in the U.K. in 2015, that model now accounts for more than 6% of new postsecondary enrollments, Ross says, pointing to a presentation from Michael Gessler, chairman of the Institute of Technology and Education at the University of Bremen.

France has seen even more growth. Roughly 204K apprentices, comprising 42% of the nation’s apprenticeships, are enrolled in higher education programs. “Apprenticeships that lead to a degree are commonplace in many other countries,” says Ross, who recently wrote about this approach for Work Shift.

In the U.S., Ross is hopeful that the model can help make a case that liberal education is career-worthy. By connecting four-year degrees to the workplace, he says, this form of apprenticeship makes good on the “tremendous push for work-relevant education.”

Yet Ross doesn’t think “degree apprenticeship” is the right term for the American take on dual-track programs. The Euro lingo doesn’t land well here, he says. And it fails to adequately tap into the bipartisan political interest in apprenticeships. 

Instead, the preferred terminology for Reach University is “apprenticeship degrees.”

“We need to do it our own way,” says Ross. “Are we modifying the apprenticeship here? Or are we modifying the degree?”

No Earnings Boost in Short-Term Pell Experiment

Offering Pell Grants to students for short-term programs had no significant impact on employment rates or average earnings—despite the fact that the grants increased both enrollment in and completion of such programs, according to a new federal study of two experiments that expanded eligibility. 

The Big Idea: The findings could influence the debate around more permanently opening up Pell Grants to programs that are shorter than 15 weeks—with critics of such a move highlighting the study this week. Legislation to enact short-term Pell stalled in the current Congress but may have new life with Republicans controlling both the House and Senate in the new year.

Experts not involved in the research say the findings are strong, if a bit dated—the study employed randomized-control trials, believed to be a first for research on Pell Grants. Researchers noted, though, that the program mix at the studied institutions could have had a substantial impact on the results. Eligible programs had to be credit-bearing and aligned with local workforce demand—but colleges were left to determine what fields qualified as high-demand. 

“We know that earnings vary quite a bit across field of study, and it is important to look more carefully at the mix of programs included,” says Michelle Van Noy, director of the Education and Employment Research Center at Rutgers University.

The Details: Between 2012 and 2017, the U.S. Department of Education ran two experiments across 46 mostly two-year colleges:

• One offered Pell Grants to low-income bachelor’s degree holders to pursue an additional short-term credential.

• A second offered the grants for adults without degrees to pursue very short programs that lasted as little as eight weeks.

The Results: Being offered a Pell Grant increased the uptake of high-demand credentials among people who had already expressed interest in occupational programs:

• In the postbaccalaureate study, almost 40% of those offered a Pell Grant went on to complete a high-demand credential, compared to 29% of those who weren’t offered one.

• In the nondegree, very short-term experiment, the numbers were 41% for Pell eligible and 33% for not eligible.   

That increased completion, however, didn’t translate to higher average employment rates or wages, measured in 2020–21, for the groups that were offered Pell Grants.

What it Means: The jump in completion is impressive, says Lindsay Daugherty, senior policy researcher at RAND and an expert on short-term credentials. But it matters what credentials students are earning using the grants, she says. Certified nursing assistants, for example, are in high demand but tend to make little more than workers with only a high school diploma. “Field matters,” she says. “Geography matters, too.”

Graduates in Ohio, for example, often get a higher wage premium for short-term credentials than those in other states do. Across states, short-term programs that last 15 weeks or more—many of which are already eligible for Pell Grants—tend to have a higher return than very short ones do. And students benefit the most, Daugherty says, when short programs serve as a gateway to additional credentials and eventually degrees.

Various versions of the federal short-term Pell legislation have included a wage floor and other performance metrics to narrow the programs that would qualify. These latest findings could be instructive as Congress, as well as states that have invested in grants for short-term credentials, consider how to proceed. It’s critical, Daugherty says, for policymakers to focus on credentials that are truly high-demand and pay off financially.

The Kicker: “There is a very important policy lever there that when you provide funding for something, you want to make sure it is high value,” she says. —By Elyse Ashburn

Open Tabs

Housing Crisis
Apprenticeships will fail to meet projected job needs in the construction industry, exacerbating the housing crisis, according to new research from RAND. Roughly 36% of construction jobs required an apprenticeship last year, and the number of registered apprenticeships in construction has grown by 60% over the past decade, reaching 6,800 in 2023. Yet a third of construction apprenticeship programs (2,257 programs) had just one active apprentice.

Apprenticeship
The five states with the largest share of apprentices in their labor forces are Arkansas, Alaska, Hawaii, Indiana and Missouri, finds a report from Apprenticeships for America. The states with the biggest proportional growth in new apprentices during the last decade are Delaware, Maine, New York, Rhode Island and Virginia. With the right conditions, the report says, the U.S. system could see exponential growth, reaching 2M new apprenticeships a year.

Longer Lives
Expertise and investment in addressing the challenge of lifelong learning are scattered across disconnected professional communities in industry, philanthropy, and academia, according to the new Futures Project on Education and Learning for Longer Lives from Stanford University. The project seeks to catalyze this larger whole and is convening a broad range of fellows to tackle questions such as the role and responsibility of employers with lifelong learning.

Industrial Policy
New America announced a new partners council aimed at boosting a capacity-building program the think tank created with the National Science Foundation to support community college partnerships for economic development and industrial policy, including the implementation of the CHIPS and Science Act. The council brings together membership associations representing governments, higher education, workforce boards, and science groups.

Measuring Skills
Accenture and ETS are collaborating on skills training and the assessment of job readiness. The partnership will pair an AI-enabled talent solution from ETS, as well as measurement and credentialing solutions from the testing firm, with Accenture’s learning and skills-development platform. The combined capabilities are designed to help organizations measure the durable and technical skills of their current and future prospective employees.

Skills Training
The new California Workforce Accelerator is a tech-driven public-private partnership that integrates industry-specific training with classroom instruction. The statewide project includes Calbright College, NexusEdge, the California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, and HubSpot. A pilot version for up to 150 Calbright students will feature modules shaped by HubSpot, microinternship training, and hands-on projects.

Thanks for reading. We’ll pause the newsletter next week for the holiday. The Job will be back in your inbox on Dec. 5. Happy Thanksgiving! —PF