Earning and Learning Where You Live Through Apprenticeship

MiraCosta College is creating opportunities for residents of affordable housing to earn and learn where they live through a unique Registered Apprenticeship (RA) being implemented in partnership with a local non-profit association of housing developers. It’s just one component of an emerging ecosystem of RAs and pre-apprenticeships that the college is growing to meet the needs of students and employers  in coastal North San Diego County in California., 

MiraCosta is participating in the first of two cohorts of community colleges receiving technical assistance to become RA sponsors through the Association of Community College Trustees’ (ACCT’s) Scaling Apprenticeship at Community Colleges Project funded by Ascendium. The college is expanding its role as an RA sponsor to strengthen workforce opportunities and support student success. As Molly Ash, director of apprenticeship program development, explains, “We care about the economic mobility of our students. MiraCosta has a long-standing reputation for partnering closely with employers and providing paid work-based learning. Apprenticeship is a natural next step. We want to give students real opportunities not just to survive, but to thrive in San Diego.”

In 2022, MiraCosta partnered with the San Diego Housing Federation to launch a successful, free non-credit certificate in affordable housing management that recruits learners from among residents of affordable housing. The program has two four-week courses. The first introduces students to property management, with an emphasis on affordable housing and multi-family properties, and on the laws and regulations that govern them. MiraCosta designed the course to incorporate real-world scenarios that students work through with support from current and former industry professionals who serve as volunteer mentors. The second course prepares students to complete financial reports and documents needed by property managers and to develop effective relationships with various stakeholders, and continues to give them support and guidance from industry mentors. Since the program’s launch, 55 students have earned the certificate. 

Building on the program’s success, MiraCosta and the San Diego Housing Federation saw an opportunity to strengthen the model by transitioning it to an RA. The shift would enable participants to earn wages from day one while completing their training. As Ben Gamboa, MiraCosta’s associate dean of career education, explains: “In conversations with our partner, we decided to shift to the apprenticeship model so students would be employed at the very beginning of the program rather than the end. The reasons are straightforward: we want these students to be earning income as soon as possible, since they tend to be low-income and often live in the communities where they’ll be hired, and we found that end-of-program placements were taking too long.” 

In adapting the program to an RA, MiraCosta decided that the program would continue as non-credit primarily because approval could be obtained more quickly than if it were offered as credit-bearing. However, the college is exploring credit for prior learning strategies that would enable apprentices to articulate their related instruction into part of a credit-bearing certificate or degree. Gamboa said the program was a good fit for RA because employers were closely involved in its development and design. “Every minute students spend in the classroom is spent learning a skill set that employers said they need. There really isn’t much theory-based teaching–it’s already highly applied. That made it a natural fit for an apprenticeship model.” The college worked closely with the Housing Federation to develop the apprenticeship standards and identify where to expand instructional hours to suit the apprenticeship model. Ash and Gamboa have found the opportunity to work with ACCT and peers from other colleges to be invaluable in helping them move the RA forward to the finish line. 

Ash noted that community colleges may have more programs that are suitable for RA than they realize, “whether it’s an employer who’s been offering paid internships year after year or a program like this one, where the employer was crucial to curriculum development. In those cases, the employer is already invested. The question is how you leverage those existing relationships.”

In partnership with CVS, MiraCosta has created a pre-apprenticeship for the occupation of pharmacy technician. In developing the program, the college determined that creating a pre-apprenticeship that prepares participants for the CVS apprenticeship as the greatest opportunity to support student success. “The pre-apprenticeship is structured so students move through quickly, get hired by CVS, and enter that career ecosystem,” Ash said. “Pharmacy tech is an entry-level career that provides a launch point and an on-ramp to a career in healthcare. We understand  that CVS offers significant wraparound services, which we thought would make this a good entry point. Some students just need a consistent job and a consistent wage to get to the next level–that’s who we’re hoping to serve.” MiraCosta has prioritized getting the pre-apprenticeship available to students quickly and is exploring opportunities to offer the initial cohort through its Technology Career Institute (TCI) while the college continues implementation of the permanent noncredit program. . 

Another health care RA that MiraCosta has established will help licensed vocational nurses (LVNs) prepare for careers in registered nursing. It chose to make the RA a credit-bearing degree apprenticeship so that students would earn the associate degree in nursing required for state licensure. Gamboa said the program originated “because we know there needs to be more racial and ethnic diversity in registered nursing. As part of our employer engagement strategy, we’re talking to hospitals and health care providers about how to use apprenticeship as an intentional means of diversifying their registered nurse workforce.”

It’s just the beginning. Gamboa wants to create a college-wide ecosystem of RAs that students can return to over time to advance their careers. “For me, apprenticeships aren’t just a key to entry-level employment — they’re a full career support system. Every generation changes jobs more frequently than the last, and having structured apprenticeship pathways that extend beyond entry-level work into professional-level roles is something I’m very interested in developing.” To that end, the college is exploring, with faculty, creating RA pathways that help home health aides transition to certified nursing assistants (CNAs) and move CNAs into LVN roles. 

Now is the time for community colleges to go all in on RA, Ash recommends. “If you’re thinking about an apprenticeship, leverage the opportunities you have right now. You don’t have to start with 100 apprentices. You can start with one program, one pathway, even one apprentice. Yes, it takes time to develop, and yes, there’s regulatory complexity. But it is worth it for the students you’re serving. And right now, there is more energy, more funding, and more appetite for apprenticeships than ever before. That means there’s a real opportunity to collaborate, learn from each other, and build something meaningful.”  From housing to health care and beyond, MiraCosta is demonstrating how community colleges can employ multiple apprenticeship development strategies simultaneously to improve the economic mobility of students and meet the needs of employers in their communities.