Student Financial Aid: Kentucky’s Educational Excellence Scholarship

A commonly held belief about apprenticeship is that it is by definition a free, or at least debt-free, postsecondary pathway for students.¹ Indeed, many employers pay all apprentice training costs, including tuition. That makes sense—apprentices are trained to their employers’ specifications, after all. However, federal regulations do allow apprentices to access federal financial aid for credit coursework taken during a registered apprenticeship, ² and in most states’ laws nothing prohibits apprenticeship programs from charging tuition for RTI.

Registered apprentices can draw on several sources of federal aid to support their classroom instruction, including G.I. Bill benefits, individual training accounts provided under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, and—if coursework is taken at Title IV eligible institutions as part of a certificate or degree program—federal student financial aid including Pell grants and direct loans.³ These federal programs are often targeted at particular populations—needy students, laid-off workers, or job seekers with young families, for example—and none are specifically intended to support apprenticeship.

To provide further support for apprenticeship specifically, Georgia, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania have all leveraged existing state aid programs to fund apprentices’ college coursework. In both Georgia and South Carolina, youth apprentices who are dual-enrolled in high school and college coursework draw on state grant initiatives (HOPE Grants and the Lottery Tuition Assistance Program, respectively) in the same way as conventional degree-seeking college students. In Pennsylvania, degree apprenticeships in early childhood education are eligible for the state’s T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood Scholarship Program, funded by the state’s Department of Human Services.

Georgia, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania have all leveraged existing state aid programs to fund apprentices’ college coursework.

None of these states took an explicit legislative action to allow the use of their student financial aid programs for college-connected apprenticeship costs—it was a simple matter of convenience, and sometimes necessity, for program administrators and state apprenticeship agency staff. In Kentucky, on the other hand, a 2017 bill expressly permitted the use of the state’s merit-based Educational Excellence Scholarship (KEES) for registered apprentices.⁴

For each year they attain a GPA of 2.5 or better, students at any Kentucky high school earn a KEES allowance that they can apply towards in-state college education, with bonuses for high scores on college aptitude tests or AP/IB coursework. The 2017 legislation, which was the product of three years of advocacy after a tax credit initiative fell through, allows registered apprentices to access the same benefits. For apprentices, in fact, the money goes even further: Unlike conventional KEES recipients, they are eligible to receive their allowance directly, and can use it at their own discretion to pay for tuition, books, equipment, and licensure exams.

According to Mary Taylor of Kentucky’s Department of Education, the $42,000 in KEES funding disbursed to registered apprentices so far has served several valuable purposes. First, in keeping with apprenticeship’s traditional reputation as “the other college degree,” it has encouraged students who otherwise would not care about KEES funding to apply themselves towards the program’s merit benchmarks. But the scholarship’s new apprenticeship availability has had less intuitive benefits as well. Employers see the legislation as a signal of the state’s endorsement of the apprenticeship model, says Taylor, and so have some college-bound students who might not have considered apprenticeship to be a feasible college pathway.

State financial aid strategies are a student-focused incentive and provide a valuable mechanism for states to signal their endorsement and support for apprenticeship pathways to students and parents as well as employers. The increasing prevalence of college promise programs (where states and localities guarantee college tuition for high-school graduates) and of tuition-free dual enrollment initiatives provides policymakers in several states⁵ with convenient groundwork for building up further apprenticeship supports. But though state financial aid can reduce cost barriers for apprentices, whether they use aid to pay for credit coursework or for other supplies, it does not provide any additional support to employers or colleges just getting started with apprenticeship. To help out, states can invest in startup grant initiatives to support the development of nontraditional apprenticeship pathways.