I. Introduction

Juan Lomeli was working as a dental assistant in his hometown, but he wanted more. He liked being part of creating a healthy community in Ft. Morgan—a town of about 12,000 in rural northeastern Colorado—but he was struggling to find his next step. He thought back to a moment as a soccer coach in nearby Greeley that had stayed with him. One of his young players was struggling in school but felt comfortable being himself and found success playing on Lomeli’s team. The player’s father pulled Lomeli aside and said, “You know, you’d make a great teacher.”

Lomeli decided he wanted to follow that call but wasn’t sure how to make it work. He looked into enrolling at the local community college, but the classes he’d need took place on campus during the day, which would have been impossible with his work schedule. So, he texted his high school math teacher, Adrianna Nickell, who is now the principal of Pioneer Elementary School in Ft. Morgan, to ask for advice.

What Nickell shared changed the course of Lomeli’s life. She directed him to an innovative, new program at Colorado Mountain College, a community college with campuses in the foothills of the Rockies that offers many of its associate and bachelor’s degree programs online. Lomeli could earn his bachelor’s degree in education while being paid to learn to teach on the job under the guidance of a mentor at Pioneer. Lomeli was on board right away. “I’m a graduate from Ft. Morgan High School. I went to elementary school in Ft. Morgan, so this is a really good way for me to give back to the community,” he says.

Lomeli is one of a growing number of Americans earning a degree while gaining relevant, paid work experience through an emerging model: degree apprenticeship. Degree apprenticeships provide a more affordable path through higher education, and the degree is enhanced by the extensive mentored, paid practical learning essential to Registered Apprenticeship.

Now in the second year of his apprenticeship, Lomeli is even more committed to the teaching profession. “I tell my kids this all the time,” he said, that “it’s the hardest job I’ve ever had, but it’s been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my life. The students have changed my life. I see myself being a teacher for the rest of my career.” Lomeli also sees degree apprenticeship as a crucial tool for the teaching profession: “The answer to the teacher shortage is making more apprenticeships available for those people where a four-year university may not be an option. Apprenticeship provides a way for future teachers to get that experience that a lot of jobs require.” He added, “By the time I graduate, I’ll already have been in the classroom for four years. A lot of the people in my classes are older and wanting to go back to school, and this has been a great, great opportunity for us.”

Opportunities like these could not be emerging at a better time. Americans are increasingly skeptical about the value of a postsecondary degree, but they’ve never needed them more. A slim majority (52 percent) of the adults polled for New America’s Varying Degrees 2025 survey identified a postsecondary degree as “the minimum level of education that you believe your immediate or close family members need to complete to ensure financial security.”¹ However, earning a postsecondary degree remains the surest path to economic security and family-supporting wages. In 2024, families with households with two adults needed to make more than $100,000 to support two children²—yet the only jobs paying that much typically require at least an associate degree.³

Higher education is very expensive. In 2024, the average out-of-pocket cost of attending a public, two-year college was $15,810; a public, four-year institution cost $20,780.⁴ For students who attend private institutions of higher education, the out-of-pocket costs are much higher. Students and their parents borrowed an estimated $99 billion in federal and other loans in 2024 to pay for college.⁵

Finding that first family-sustaining wage job right out of school has become a toss-up.⁶ Many students don’t have a clear pathway from their degree into a job in their field, and many new graduates struggle to put their degree to work right away. If they settle for a job that requires less than the education they have, they could find themselves locked out of the college-level job market for a decade.⁷ While participating in work-based learning during school improves those odds,⁸ those opportunities are scarce and fiercely competitive.⁹

At its most basic, a degree apprenticeship is an industry-vetted and approved apprenticeship program that includes the following four elements:

• Paid work experience: Apprentices earn progressive wages.
• On-the-job learning: Programs provide structured on-the-job training, including instruction from an employee mentor.
• Supplemental education: Apprentices receive classroom education, based on the skill needs of employers.
• Credentials: Apprentices earn a portable, industry-recognized journeyworker credential plus an associate, bachelor’s, or master’s degree.

In the degree apprenticeship model, learners engage in paid, mentored, work-based learning emblematic of apprenticeship. They complete coursework that complements their on-the-job learning—known as related technical instruction—at an institution of higher education. In degree apprenticeship models, that related instruction culminates in a degree. Graduates of degree apprenticeships hold the same higher education credential as peers who took a traditional path to a degree, but they have also earned wages and benefited from structured opportunities to apply their classroom learning on the job.

“…anytime that you can have a program that marries paid work and higher education, you better do it.”

Degree apprenticeship addresses a compelling need in higher education. As Kelli Morris, director of Career Services and Cooperative Learning at Calhoun Community College in Decatur, Alabama, put it, “Over 60 percent of our students are part time. And they’re part time because school is optional and work is not. So anytime that you can have a program that marries paid work and higher education, you better do it.”

Despite their promise, these models remain rare in the United States, but interest in their earn-and-learn potential is growing. However, data and analysis on these programs is still scattered, making it difficult to identify trends, name and address common challenges, and craft policy to support the development and sustainability of the most promising programs.

To begin to address these gaps, New America launched a research project to identify and analyze degree apprenticeship opportunities in the United States. We conducted the first survey of where degree apprenticeships are offered, their types, and the characteristics of the institutions that offer them. We worked with an advisory committee of degree apprenticeship experts to develop a set of aspirational quality principles for these programs. We sought out leaders among institutions of higher education offering degree apprenticeship programs so that we could highlight exemplar programs and best practices and identify common barriers to developing and sustaining degree apprenticeships. This report brings together all of these findings—mapping the current landscape, outlining quality principles, profiling leading programs, and synthesizing the lessons and challenges that emerged across the field.