Apprenticeship in Review 2019

The Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship (PAYA) is a multi-year initiative that convenes and mobilizes the expertise, experience, and collective networks of national, state, and regional partners to expand access to high-quality apprenticeship opportunities for high school age youth. Over the course of the last year, PAYA has facilitated significant progress in the expansion of youth apprenticeship in cities, regions, and states across the country since its launch in 2018.

PAYA kicked off the year with the PAYA Grant Initiative, which awarded nine grants to support place-based partnerships of employers, educators, community partners, and policy leaders who are working together to build high-quality youth apprenticeship programs that promote inclusive economic development and create new opportunities for young people. The initiative marks the first joint philanthropic investment to expand youth apprenticeship in the United States. Selected from an extremely competitive pool of over 220 applicants from 49 states and Puerto Rico, the grant recipients are Apprenticeship 502 (Louisville, KY), ApprenticeshipNC (Raleigh, NC), the Birmingham Promise Initiative (Birmingham, AL), Career Launch Chicago (Chicago, IL), Early Care and Education Youth Apprenticeship (Oakland, CA), King County Regional Youth Apprenticeship Consortium (Renton, WA), Montana Youth Apprenticeship Partnership (Helena, MT), PPL Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential (LEAP) Initiative (Minneapolis, MN), Texas Youth Apprenticeship Program (Austin, TX).

These nine grant recipients are not the only partnerships that have spent the last year advancing youth apprenticeship across the country. The grantees are joined by the PAYA Network, a national learning community designed to link high-potential, dynamic partnerships working across the country to launch, expand, and improve apprenticeship opportunities for high school-aged youth. The PAYA Network was formed to recognize, support, and connect high-potential leaders identified through the PAYA Grant Initiative, and to support them as they work to build the emerging field of youth apprenticeship. Across this Network, PAYA provides technical assistance to accelerate and learn from the efforts of more than 45 communities across 33 states working to develop and improve youth apprenticeship programs to help young people launch careers in healthcare, IT, advanced manufacturing, financial services, education, and several other sectors. To learn more about the PAYA Network Members and learn more about youth apprenticeship activity across the country, click here.

PAYA is comprised of eight National Partner organizations: Advance CTE, CareerWise Colorado, Charleston Regional Youth Apprenticeship, Education Strategy Group, JFF, the National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity, the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, and the National Governors Association. PAYA is supported by funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Ballmer Group, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Joyce Foundation, JP Morgan Chase & Co., and the Siemens Foundation.

To stay up to date on the activities of the PAYA Grantees and Network, visit newamerica.org/paya or stay connected to the initiative’s progress by following the #PAYA hashtag on Twitter at @NewAmericaEd.

The majority of apprentices in the US are in traditional building trades programs. However, as interest in apprenticeship grows, others in a variety of sectors are benefiting from this proven education and training model.

This year, CESNA told the story of innovative apprenticeship programs connecting people to economic opportunity in nontraditional fields. Ivy Love wrote about the New Mexico Information Technology Apprenticeship program, a community college-led slate of apprenticeships based in Albuquerque, that supported residents like former dental assistant, Shauna Henington, interested in local tech careers. Cybersecurity is seeing growing interest in apprenticeship, and Mike Prebil shared wisdom gleaned from the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education conference about how to meet workforce demand in the field. Mike’s piece includes a profile of one institution, Dakota State University, integrating apprenticeship into their cybersecurity education pathway.

Many health care occupations have long histories of integrating classroom and work-based learning to prepare for careers. Following our 2018 Apprenticeship and the Future of Nursing report, CESNA convened around 50 nursing leaders in New York City in June 2019 to discuss the role apprenticeship could play in facilitating access to and mobility within nursing careers. At the convening, Ivy Love and Mike Prebil released a short brief outlining the apprenticeship model and how it is already being used to support nurses at a variety of levels of education. One of the highlights of the event was hearing from Alexis Barba, a registered nurse in California, who was able to pursue her nursing career dreams through a groundbreaking LVN-RN apprenticeship. Ivy Love shared Alexis’ story for the EdCentral audience.

Early childhood teachers are increasingly required to hold degrees for their positions, and apprenticeship is providing a path to earn needed credentials while benefiting from formal mentorship and paid tuition through Pennsylvania’s early childhood education apprenticeship. This apprenticeship, covered by Lul Tesfai, offers apprentices college credit for their work experience in the classroom, accelerating their time to degree.

Many occupations in high-growth, high-wage industries like healthcare and information technology require a college degree for career entry and advancement. And apprenticeship presents a promising and affordable strategy for equipping youth and adults with the skills and postsecondary credentials that employers demand. Yet as CESNA Director Mary Alice McCarthy points out, the historical disconnect between our higher education and apprenticeship systems means that there aren’t enough college-connected and degree apprenticeships, which by design culminate in an associate or bachelor’s degree.

To make it easier for apprentices to earn a college degree and college students to be apprentices, in December 2017 Mary Alice McCarthy, Iris Palmer, and Michael Prebil released a paper, Connecting Higher Education and Apprenticeship: Eight Recommendations, which laid out a set of federal policies for better integrating postsecondary and apprenticeship training. In 2019, some of these recommendations became reality. For instance, the US Department of Education launched a Federal Work-Study (FWS) experiment through which the Secretary lift caps on the number of FWS students that can be employed by private companies and allows postsecondary institutions to use FWS funding to cover a greater share of students’ wages, which could spur more formal work-based learning partnerships, namely apprenticeships. Furthermore, the US Department of Labor awarded $183.8 million in H-1B funding to 23 institutions of higher education – including 15 community colleges – and state systems of higher education, in partnership with employers and national industry associations through its Scaling Apprenticeship Through Sector-Based Strategies initiative. These grants are projected to support college-connected apprenticeship training for 85,000 apprentices.

In 2019, CESNA has also focused on the role that state and postsecondary leaders play in advancing quality, college-connected apprenticeship programs. In February, CESNA published a state apprenticeship policy agenda that highlighted the core components of an apprenticeship policy infrastructure and concrete recommendations for how states can align the work of state education, workforce, and economic development agencies to scale apprenticeships that meet the needs of their residents, employers, and communities. In September, Michael Prebil released research on state strategies to mitigate one of the most significant barriers to the scaling of college-connected and degree apprenticeship programs – tuition costs. In Solid Foundations: Four State Policy Approaches for Supporting College-Connected Apprenticeships, Prebil examined the advantages and disadvantages of several state financing policies. Additionally, Lul Tesfai published a brief, Creating Pathways to College Degrees Through Apprenticeships, with specific recommendations for college leaders to consider when developing a degree apprenticeship program.

CESNA has continued to follow the Trump administration’s efforts to create a system of industry-recognized apprenticeship programs (IRAPs), which would run parallel to the tested Registered Apprenticeship system. In the last year, the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) vision – and regulatory agenda – for IRAPs began to take shape. Through the new system, DOL would delegate IRAP selection and quality assurance responsibilities to third-party standards recognition entities (SREs). While unorthodox, DOL released a proposed application and criteria for the selection of SREs before fully outlining how IRAPs would function within our existing national apprenticeship system. CESNA submitted comments to assist the Department in enhancing the quality, utility, and clarity of the information it plans to collect from prospective certifiers of IRAPs individually and as part of the Apprenticeship Forward Collaborative. In response to DOL’s proposed regulatory changes to the national apprenticeship system revealed this summer, CESNA also submitted comments raising considerations for the IRAP quality assurance framework, as well as the responsibilities of IRAPs, SREs, and DOL under that framework. New America, along with along with the National Skills Coalition, Advance CTE, the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), Jobs for the Future (JFF), the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, and the National Fund for Workforce Solutions submitted joint comments consistent with the Apprenticeship Forward Collaborative’s principles for expanding quality apprenticeships.