Nonpartisan Nod for Apprenticeship

Analysis of the state of play for apprenticeship looks at wages across the most popular occupations, which now include IT and nursing assistant roles. Meanwhile, the Trump administration shares more on its plans to cut and consolidate workforce training and education programs. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Subscribe here.)

Expanding Training Options

The nation’s top nonpartisan government agency has endorsed the registered apprenticeship model, finding that those programs can pay off for both workers and employers. Yet the analysis from the Government Accountability Office also said a lack of awareness and employer concerns about administrative burdens continue to hold back apprenticeships.

Someone in the U.S. Congress asked the GAO to examine federal support for earn-and-learn opportunities. The agency focused on registered apprenticeships, in part because better data exists for those programs.

Representative Tim Walberg, the Michigan Republican who leads the House Education and Workforce Committee, said the report outlines how the federal government can get out of the way so more job creators can offer federally registered apprenticeships.

“Our workforce is at a dire turning point right now,” he said. “Committee Republicans are committed to equipping more jobseekers with the skills needed in the modern economy, and this includes expanding training options.”

That commitment has yet to translate into more funding or a plan to reduce administrative requirements for apprenticeships. And the White House, meanwhile, is stripping money from those programs, with further proposed cuts emerging in recent days. (More on the budget outlook is below.)

Even so, this is a “heady moment for apprenticeship,” says John Colborn, executive director of Apprenticeships for America. 

Colborn says Walberg’s statement sets a bar for federal action, while the new GAO report provides a helpful and credible cataloging of the state of play with registered apprenticeship.

“It speaks to a need for a more structured federal policy on apprenticeship,” he says. The report also raises questions about “disproportionate investment in programs that have less promising outcomes.”

ROI Data: The GAO analysis tapped the Labor Department database on registered apprenticeship, referencing it along with wage and employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to get a sense of how apprentices fare in the job market.

Participants who complete registered programs typically have higher wages than associate degree holders, the GAO found. The agency looked at the top 10 most popular occupations for registered apprentices, finding that nine of those career tracks pay better than the overall 2023 U.S. median wage of $48K.

The construction trades still dominate registered apprenticeship. Yet two “new-collar” apprenticeship occupations popped up on the GAO’s top 10 list, with computer-related roles in third place and nursing assistants in the 10th slot.

The emergence of those occupations is a big deal, says Deborah Kobes, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. And she says the growing shift in popular job roles isn’t fully apparent in the GAO’s data, because apprenticeships in the construction trades tend to take longer to compete than programs in IT and healthcare.

The GAO report found that registered apprenticeships generally help jobseekers break into high-growth and high-wage fields. But that financial premium doesn’t apply to nursing assistants, a decidedly low-income profession with median earnings of $38K.

Nursing assistants are symbolic of the tension over high-demand, low-wage jobs, Kobes says. And the growing presence of registered programs in that field dumps cold water on policies that generally have focused primarily on encouraging the growth of apprenticeships.

“Do we really want to focus on expansion overall?” she asks, calling instead for more of a sector-specific approach to policymaking.

The Trump administration has set a goal for reaching 1M active apprentices. The GAO found roughly 660K active apprentices in the system at the end of the 2024 fiscal year.

“If you look at those growth rates, we could get there,” Colborn says of the 1M threshold.

Registered apprentices skew heavily male and white, much more so than college students pursuing similar careers. About 84% of all participants in the system during FY 2024 were men, the GAO found. And among those who reported a race, roughly 74% were white.

Those demographics largely reflect that of the construction industry, which makes up nearly half of the registered system. But as Kobes notes, participation among women has risen slowly but steadily, with some of those gains not fully reflected in the data because of the relatively long length of apprenticeships in the trades.

“The occupational segregation of our broader workforce system is reflected in these numbers,” she says.

Sunny Rhetoric, Gloomy Budgets

The general strategy Republicans in Washington are pushing on workforce education and training has been one of consolidation and shifting to block grants for states. Meanwhile, their moves to cut budgets have made the sunny rhetoric from Trump’s cabinet members ring hollow.

The White House last week revealed more detail about its budget request for next year. The plan would combine all workforce programs while slashing $1.64B in funding, bringing total federal support down to roughly $3B. The workforce grants that include apprenticeship would be dubbed Make America Skilled Again. States would be required to spend at least 10% of those funds on registered apprenticeships. 

The proposal would result in a roughly $11M bump to the current annual Labor Department funding level for apprenticeship of $285M. That increase is a drop in the bucket, at best, says Nick Beadle, a former Labor Department official, in his newsletter, Jobs That Work.

“The political enthusiasm for apprenticeship hasn’t led to real meaningful dollars behind it,” Beadle writes, “meaning there is quite a bit of need for building up real apprenticeship infrastructure nationwide.”

Intermediary organizations are helpful for supporting the spread of apprenticeship, says Kobes. Nonprofit examples include CareerWise and Apprenti. Yet Kobes says an emphasis on state-managed block grants could threaten intermediaries, because it’s harder to operate at scale across states, which have different rules and approaches.

“It becomes a lot harder to support national intermediaries,” she says.

As attention moves to state governments, two of Kobes’s colleagues at the Urban Institute published a report on how state-level policies can harness registered apprenticeships to develop skilled workforces.

State-by-state variations result in different policies for employers to navigate the system, write Zach Boren and Shruti Nayak. To strengthen national apprenticeship governance, they recommend policy alignment between the registration agencies, clear guidance on quality and safety, and setting wage benchmarks to “ensure apprentices do not journey into occupations paying below the poverty line.”

Make America Skilled Again: The Trump administration’s budget calls for a massive cut in funding for workforce programs. For example, the Labor Department has already begun phasing out the $1.6B Job Corps program, which enrolls 25K vulnerable students. The department cited the program’s operating costs and deficits, saying they are unsustainable, as well as low graduation rates and safety problems.

The National Association of Workforce Boards says the White House plan to consolidate grants is poorly defined. More broadly, the association calls the budget request “extremely troubling and inconsistent with current workforce development needs across the country.”

On registered apprenticeship, Kobes says more federal money would help the White House reach its goal of 1M active apprentices. “It takes investment,” she says.

Education Department Cuts: The budget proposal calls for substantial trims to both the Federal Work-Study program, which helps students earn money to pay for college or career school, and to TRIO programs, which are federal outreach and student services efforts aimed at students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

In addition, both the domestic policy bill passed recently by the House and the White House budget request are seeking steep cuts to the Pell Grant program. 

For example, the president’s budget proposal would reduce the maximum annual award level to $5,710, down $1,685 from the current amount. The department says the cuts would protect the financial viability of the Pell program, which faces shortfalls due to increasing fraud and a lack of congressional support.

Slashing funds for these three programs would be a move in the wrong direction, says Maurice Jones, the CEO of FirstGen Forward, who previously led the employer-driven organization OneTen. The funding streams seek to close completion gaps in postsecondary education, which he says is badly needed “if we’re going to have any chance of developing a prepared workforce pipeline.”

The programs are effective, says Jones, who formerly was Virginia’s secretary of commerce and trade. But, he says, they are easy to incorrectly lump in with DEI programs Republicans are dismantling. And the savings from gutting these programs are relatively insignificant.

The Kicker: “This is small potatoes,” Jones says. “If anything, we need to be expanding them. I’m worried.”

More from Work Shift

Open Tabs

AI and Jobs
Job openings across professional and business services have declined sharply since 2022, suggesting some displacement effect from AI, finds Oxford Economics. The largest displacement seems to be in entry-level jobs for recent college graduates. For example, employment for young Americans (ages 22–27) in computer science and math occupations has declined by 8% since 2022, compared to a 2% rise across all other occupations.

Tech Hubs
Colorado’s Elevate Quantum, a federal Tech Hub, has partnered with IBM on a curriculum for workforce development, Tamara Chuang reports for The Colorado Sun. IBM will provide its training program at no cost. The company’s course materials can be integrated into computer science or physics degrees from participating colleges, while some coursework can be taken by students outside of tech majors. Students also will be able to access IBM’s quantum computers.

Outcomes Data
Most states lack critical data to assess whether education programs lead to good jobs and meet employer needs. But the fix could be relatively straightforward, according to a brief from the Strada Institute for the Future of Work. It recommends adding four fields—occupation, pay rate, primary work location, and worker type—to state wage records to enable better tracking of education-to-employment outcomes.

HR and Skills-First
Skills-first hiring reduces the cost per hire for employers by 30% while cutting worker turnover rates by 40%, according to the SHRM Foundation. The foundation’s new Center for a Skills First Future seeks to equip employers with the tools, resources, and insights to do skills-first hiring and talent development at scale. The effort will include the launch of a skills-first credential for HR pros and a centralized vendor database.

Work-Based Learning
The PwC Foundation and Jobs for the Future have partnered on a $6M program to help 10 community colleges across the country expand work-based learning and strengthen career-connected pathways for students. The three-year effort, which is the largest education grant from the foundation, includes both direct funding and technical assistance. The 10 colleges were selected through a competitive RFP process.

Job Moves
Josh Laney has been hired as vice president of apprenticeship and work-embedded learning at the Competency-Based Education Network. Laney previously was director of Alabama’s Office of Apprenticeship.

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