Recommendations

Apprenticeship’s earn-and-learn model resonates across the political spectrum¹ as Americans facing a skills-hungry job market choose among expensive and often perilous options in conventional academic higher education. Across the country, a number of programs now allow job seekers to pursue college degrees while apprenticing as software developers, early childhood educators, nurses, and risk managers. But if apprenticeship is to fully satisfy Americans’ demands for economic and educational mobility, states must do more to encourage connections between apprenticeship and their college systems.

With the exception of unfunded tuition waivers, each of the policy approaches discussed above can support the participation of colleges in apprenticeship and provide apprentices improved access to degree pathways. Even modest state investments to encourage colleges to play a more active role in apprenticeship can go a long way towards bridging the historical divides between apprenticeship and higher education: North Carolina and Wisconsin each spend just over $200,000 per year on their waiver and reimbursement programs. For some apprentices in North Carolina, like Phillip Fuller of Bright Plastics in Greensboro, this amount has meant getting through college without paying a dime—not even for parking fees.

Differing objectives, funding constraints, and political contexts will enable or restrict policy options for apprentice support in different states. For any state that chooses to support apprentice tuition, the experiences of existing state models highlight six best practices:

1. Dismantle existing disincentives to college participation. Colleges can serve a valuable role as providers of apprenticeship instruction, or even as sponsors or intermediaries for multi-employer apprenticeship programs, but structural disincentives must be eliminated first. Most importantly, states must fully fund tuition waivers and adjust funding formulas so that colleges are compensated equally for apprentice enrollments and conventional students.
2. Start with startup grants to specific sectors or apprenticeship types, if necessary. Whether they aim to develop talent in high-wage emerging industry sectors, connect underserved populations to economic opportunities, or retrain dislocated workers,² states can tailor apprenticeship supports to meet their particular economic goals. States that are not yet able to establish recurring appropriations to support all apprentices’ college coursework may still choose to support college costs as part of one-time grant initiatives aimed at supporting nontraditional apprenticeships, as New Jersey has done through its GAINS program.
3. Demand quality but allow flexibility in funding recipients. Though states should develop policies that encourage apprenticeship programs to include credit-bearing college coursework in nontraditional fields, a big-tent approach to apprenticeship supports is often useful. Reimbursement systems in Texas and California allow participation of colleges, K–12 districts, and traditional apprenticeship committees alike. California has even set up a separate office within its Department of Apprenticeship Standards, the Interagency Advisory Committee on Apprenticeship, to support and register apprenticeships outside the building trades.³ These models support expansion of Registered Apprenticeships in nontraditional occupations without alienating providers of well-established non-college pathways.
4. Develop and maintain a single guidebook. It is crucial that prospective sponsors and college partners have a definitive central resource to help them plan apprenticeship development and funding. John Wensveen, vice provost of academic schools at Miami Dade College, compared his institution’s apprenticeship guidance needs to an airplane pilot’s flight checklist, with pre-takeoff, takeoff, and landing phases. Texas provides such a resource in the form of its Apprenticeship Training Program Administrator’s Guide, which includes the yearly timeline for Chapter 133 funding.⁴
5. Establish credit equivalency for on-the-job training. States just beginning work on their apprenticeship expansion initiatives should focus on ensuring that employers can use credit-bearing courses for their apprentices’ classroom instruction. They can go even further, however, by working with colleges and their accreditors to establish college credit equivalencies for apprentices’ on-the-job training. Texas and North Carolina both have statewide provisions to count a portion of on-the-job training for credit, as do some early childhood education apprenticeships in Pennsylvania.⁵ A strategy being developed in New Jersey would provide additional funding to colleges that award up to 12 credits for on-the-job apprenticeship training.
6. Connect supports for apprentice training to existing education and workforce initiatives. Many states already have systems in place that could be adapted to better support college-connected apprenticeship. Dual enrollment and college promise initiatives, available in an increasing number of states, provide an ideal platform for expanding support for college-connected apprenticeships for youth apprentices.

Policymakers have a wide array of tools they can use as they build apprenticeship opportunities to meet their state’s economic goals. Few can do as much to support the expansion of nontraditional, college-connected apprenticeships as supporting the costs of apprentices’ classroom instruction, however, especially with such modest investments. Until the historical separation between apprenticeship and higher education systems is dismantled at the federal level, states hoping to leverage apprenticeship towards equitable economic development must devise their own strategies to make it affordable for learners to pursue apprenticeship and a degree at the same time.