Conclusion

These case studies show why community colleges have the potential to be effective apprenticeship intermediaries. Community colleges are well positioned to co-design, with employers, the curricula for apprentices’ related technical instruction. But they are also in the position to make sure apprenticeships benefit students. For example, they can make apprenticeships credit-bearing or ensure they lead to credentials rather than just immediate employment in jobs that might disappear. While the colleges in each of our case studies were realistic about the challenges of the intermediary role, each also found ways to play to their strengths in creating place-based opportunities for students to advance their careers.

ApprenticeshipNH’s experience shows what community colleges can achieve by approaching the intermediary role with the right mix of caution and ambition. By focusing on the fundamental components of an apprenticeship—committed employers and support for apprentices—ApprenticeshipNH has steadily grown, enabling true systems change and closer linkages between apprenticeship and higher education. The ApprenticeshipNH program is built on a solid foundation of collaboration with employers and support via multiple streams of grant funding, which has allowed it to create programs that serve employers and students well.

Both Coastal Alabama and TXIT launched with ambitious goals and, despite immediate disruption by the coronavirus pandemic, have made impressive progress. Although not everything has gone to plan, supportive and engaged employer partners have helped them prove that apprenticeship can work, even for nontraditional fields like cybersecurity, IT, and nursing. Howard and Coastal Alabama also shared incredible champions in the field, without whom their programs would not exist, and Arapahoe demonstrated the importance of looking for champions and partners in unexpected places through its relationship with CyberUp.

Each institution featured in this study is distinct, and each approached its intermediary role differently, but we saw the themes of collaboration, flexibility, and the need for sustainable funding models in them all, along with the recognition that quality programming takes time, planning, and patience. The fact that this group could all achieve success demonstrates that intermediary functions are portable, and there are many different occupational pathways and workforce offerings available to community colleges interested in becoming apprenticeship intermediaries.