III. Quality Principles

Degree apprenticeship is an emerging, fast-growing, but still rare, model in education and workforce development. We can learn from the pioneers and experts in degree apprenticeship about what works, what doesn’t, and how to deliver a high-quality program that effectively serves both learners and employers. As programs continue to grow and emerge, quality principles can point the way to successful implementation.

To this end, New America convened an advisory committee of 12 leaders in the field with a wide range of expertise and experience. We asked them to develop a set of principles to help define what high-quality degree apprenticeship programs look like. They agreed upon five quality principles for degree apprenticeship programs. Grounded in research and experience, the principles are both practical and aspirational, setting a high bar for program design, outcomes, and continuous improvement. They offer guidance for those who seek to replicate degree apprenticeships, and provide a framework that policymakers can use to assess the extent to which policy may foster their growth and quality.

The quality principles put student-apprentices at the center, recognizing the great challenges they face in their dual roles as learners and workers. Completion rates for similar, overlapping learner populations suggest that degree apprenticeship programs may not be easy. Estimates of the average completion rate of an apprenticeship range from below 35 percent¹ to 60 percent,² while 34 percent of part-time college students earn a postsecondary certificate or degree within six years of enrolling.³ The quality principles aim to create the conditions for apprentices to succeed in both realms, while also meeting employer needs. A high-quality degree apprenticeship prioritizes the goals, needs, and experiences of degree apprentices while helping employers build a strong talent pipeline. This kind of program features five characteristics.

1. Accessible: The program must offer comprehensive wraparound support to ensure both participation and sustained engagement. It should include services like recruiting, academic guidance, transportation assistance, and help with employer negotiations. The degree apprenticeship infrastructure should actively promote equity, access, and inclusion for all participants.
2. Responsive: The program should be grounded in strong quality assurance systems that prioritize accountability towards occupational mastery through clear outcomes, robust program oversight, and mentor and faculty support. It should also be data-driven, aligned with identified labor needs, and regularly evaluated against defined metrics to ensure it meets high design, delivery, and learner success standards.
3. Affordable and Sustainable: The program must be economically sustainable for colleges, employers, and apprentices. This means ensuring affordability in tuition (eliminating or reducing debt), competitive salaries and benefits, and cost structures that deliver value for participants and employers.
4. Flexible: The program must be permeable and flexible, maximizing academic credit in required coursework for contextualized on-the-job learning while streamlining college and employer administrative processes. The registration process should be sequenced appropriately for the target occupation, so the apprentice benefits from continuity of employment. This approach enables apprentices and employers to efficiently navigate the path from training to a quality degree.
5. Collaborative: The program should be developed and run with all stakeholder groups in order to build strong, trust-based relationships. It must integrate industry-driven skills and competencies, so that training directly reflects employer needs and secures buy-in and ongoing partnership between industry leaders and faculty.

Below, informed by our interviews and site visits, we discuss each principle in depth. We highlight programs that have successfully and effectively implemented these principles, and we explore barriers or challenges to adopting them.

High-quality degree apprenticeships offer student-apprentices comprehensive wraparound supports that are in addition to those available to regular college students. The Aon Corporation’s degree apprenticeship at Harold Washington College in Chicago, Illinois, is one such example. The college pairs student-apprentices with a workforce success coach who helps them navigate their college experience and resolve any challenges that get in the way of completing their schoolwork. The coach also keeps Aon informed about apprentices’ academic progress.⁴ On the employer side, Aon contracts with the nonprofit One Million Degrees to provide career navigators who work with apprentices to address any life or workplace challenges that may interfere with their progress at work. Aon also offers a monthly professional development series for apprentices to build their employability and technical skills. These partners share student-apprentice progress and challenges across their organizations. The Aon apprenticeship coordinator collects a monthly status report from supervisors to identify areas where career coaching might be helpful. The coordinator meets monthly with the coaches from Harold Washington and One Million Degrees to share information and to collaborate with them to address problems apprentices may be experiencing.

A key strength of the Aon and Harold Washington College apprenticeship is its cohort model. Degree apprentices are usually enrolled in the same classes as their cohort members and have opportunities to connect with them formally and informally in the workplace. As we heard from program leaders and apprentices alike, the cohort structure is an important source of support, enabling degree apprentices to call on peers if they need help in class or at work. “Your own cohort is one of the main supports that you have while you’re in an apprenticeship,” said one student-apprentice.

At Harper College and Illinois Central Community College, apprenticeship coordinators are exclusively responsible for helping student-apprentices navigate life and academic challenges. Harper College’s Annie Sylvester compared her role to that of a “concierge,” explaining that she is there to “make sure that [student-apprentices] have somebody that’s there to help connect them with the resources that they need.” At Illinois Central College, Amanda Nordstrom said that she develops close bonds with the student-apprentices. “We will go with them if they feel uncomfortable going to a tutor or going to talk to a faculty member. I’ll be their support. They trust us,” she said. The Harper and ICC coordinators also keep employers informed about apprentices’ attendance and grades.

As the labor market evolves, so do the skills and competencies required for career success. Degree apprenticeships must adapt accordingly. Collecting and analyzing quality data is crucial to ensuring programs effectively prepare student-apprentices for their chosen careers. Programs we encountered were ramping up their collection and use of data as their portfolios of degree apprenticeships grew.

Illinois Central College collects qualitative and quantitative data from employers and student-apprentices during and following the degree apprenticeship. Apprenticeship Manager Kelly Bay and her team regularly collect data about participants’ experience and performance in their classes and their progress against their work process schedules and attainment of competencies. They survey participants after they’ve earned their degree to assess their satisfaction with their courses and the program. Bay and her team connect with employers regularly to assess their satisfaction and identify issues that may need to be resolved. Since the college’s degree apprenticeships have grown, the team is currently developing a formal survey to collect data rather than relying on verbal feedback from employers.

Bay and others at ICC ensure that employers have a clear line of communication with the college, and their feedback is taken seriously. “They know that they can reach out to me anytime there’s an issue,” she said. Participant feedback gets prompt attention as well. She recalled an incident when she approached a dean about participants’ concerns about classroom communication. “The apprentices were amazed at how quickly we responded. They felt immediately supported,” she said. We identified similar commitments to using feedback to support effective instruction and mentorship in degree apprenticeships across the country.

Further north, City Colleges of Chicago are investing in improved data collection systems and processes for their apprenticeship programs. The Decision Support Department recently launched a study to fill in gaps in the system’s data on apprenticeship outcomes, including completions, earnings, the extent to which apprentices are converted to full-time employees, and progress on the job. City Colleges are working with a technical assistance provider to develop survey instruments for apprentices and employers and question prompts for focus groups. They are also hiring a full-time data coordinator in the Apprenticeships and Work-Based Learning unit and investigating strategies to integrate data on apprenticeship participation and outcomes in their student information system.

For degree apprenticeship models to address the cost concerns of both learners and employers, they must be affordable for apprentices and sustainable for all partners. Deliberate design and policy decisions can make this possible.

The Alabama Office of Apprenticeship (AOA), for example, does not register an apprenticeship unless the related instruction is made available to apprentices at no cost. Employers are required to provide a “last dollar scholarship,” paying any costs associated with an apprenticeship that remain after federal student aid, education and training benefits under the GI Bill, scholarships, tax credits, or grants have been tapped. The 2020 memorandum announcing the policy said, “One of the most important and attractive benefits of apprenticeship when compared to other forms of post-secondary education is the opportunity to avoid student debt.”⁵

Josh Laney, who directed AOA at the time the policy was adopted and authored the memo quoted above, recalled that AOA received “essentially no pushback on that” policy change. That’s because AOA makes sure employers understand that they’ll get a return on the money they put towards apprentice training. “When we start out orienting the employers, we start with their return on investment,” he explained. “We’re not asking you to do this just out of the goodness of your heart or for the benefit of the community, or some kind of corporate altruism,” he said. “It’s got to make sense for you as a company, because somewhere in that building is a CFO who’s got to decide whether we’re going to continue to fund this thing or not.”

North Carolina’s youth apprentice tuition waiver, which became law in 2016, keeps degree apprenticeships affordable for both employers and student-apprentices. It waives community college tuition costs for students who begin a Registered Apprenticeship within four months of their high school graduation. Lydia Walton, Human Resources Manager for Energizer Holdings in Randolph County, North Carolina, described the tuition waiver as “a great way to get employers involved initially. It makes it an easier transition to get into the program, and especially for some of our smaller employers, they have an opportunity to tap into talent that they may not have been able to reach otherwise.”

School districts that hire apprentices have had to find creative, nimble solutions to ensure that their program is affordable for themselves and their apprentices. St. Vrain Valley Schools, the school district in Longmont, Colorado, has done exactly this, developing ways to keep both related instruction and apprentice wages low-cost and sustainable in the long term. An agreement with the University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver) has allowed the district to offer dual enrollment classes at “basement, bottom-dollar community college level rate, which is about a fifth of regular tuition,” according to Cindy Gutierrez, assistant dean of Teacher Education & Partnerships at CU Denver’s School of Education & Human Development. These classes, which count towards related instruction requirements, are available not only to high school students but also to paraprofessionals, which has allowed the district to expand the pool of apprentices.

Flexible programs eliminate redundancies and reduce burdens for learners without sacrificing quality in the knowledge and skills gained. These programs are designed so that students neither have to miss work to attend classes nor have to spend time in the classroom to get credit for skills they have already mastered on the job. These flexible models of learning and work allow student-apprentices to more easily complete the many requirements of their program on time and with minimal additional burden.

Reach University, based in Oakland, California, sets the standard for awarding credit for on-the-job learning in degree apprenticeship programs designed for teaching, and starting in 2026, health care. As much as half of the academic credits in the work-embedded degree are earned through paid on-the-job learning as degree apprentices work with a mentor to apply the methods they learn in their synchronous seminars. Mentors document learning through portfolios and observations and faculty review for academic equivalence.⁶

In North Carolina, community colleges can award up to 16 semester credit hours for work-based learning in a Registered Apprenticeship offered in conjunction with an associate of applied science degree program.⁷ Kristie Sauls, formerly with the North Carolina Business Committee for Education, noted that this flexibility enables colleges to tailor the degree apprenticeship to the needs of the employer. She said, “If an employer really wants to craft a degree, they can because they can replace some of those electives with work-based learning.”

We observed embedded flexibility in other aspects of the degree apprenticeship experience as well. For example, Colorado Mountain College offers all the coursework for the degree remotely, allowing teacher apprentices in communities far from a CMC campus to participate, including the two apprentices we interviewed from rural Morgan County in northeastern Colorado. “The fact that I don’t have to drive forever-and-a-half to go to school is a huge plus,” said Sergio De La Rosa, one of the teacher apprentices.

In other instances, colleges find ways to reduce the administrative burden on employers. Often this involves taking on the logistical work of registering apprenticeships and liaising with the state apprenticeship agency or U.S. Department of Labor representatives. At Illinois Central College, for example, staff handle all the documentation necessary for registration, from developing competencies and related instruction curricula to making DOL-requested updates to the work process schedule. And ICC staff support employers through the paperwork they can’t avoid, like providing hands-on guidance for how to track apprentice progress against DOL competencies. “Our handling of all of the required documents for Registered Apprenticeships and working with DOL takes a huge burden off of employers,” said Paula Nachtrieb, the college’s executive director for Workforce Development.

Often, challenges arise when partners have conflicting interests or goals. For example, some employers do not see the value of the general education courses required to complete a degree program. A collaborative attitude has been key to finding a resolution to this issue. College partners have adapted or created general education courses relevant to the employer’s needs. Illinois Central College, for example, offers a math course designed for the skilled trades. College faculty also persuaded the college’s general education curriculum committee that some of its industrial electrical maintenance and instrumentation technology courses were rigorous enough to be considered science courses. Kelly Bay, the school’s apprenticeship manager, reported that employers were enthusiastic about including these courses in an apprenticeship once they understood that they were contextual.

Strong partnerships were often evident in the development and revision of curricula in many of the degree apprenticeships we encountered. College faculty and apprenticeship program staff collaborate with employers to develop courses and to make regular revisions to meet employers’ evolving needs. In some cases, this has involved creating entirely new courses, as Harper College’s business department did, developing insurance courses for a degree apprenticeship with Zurich North America and a finance course for a banking and finance degree apprenticeship.

At the degree apprenticeship programs we encountered, deep relationships between colleges, employers, and other key stakeholders, like community-based organizations or industry associations, allowed the partners to run the program collaboratively. North Carolina, for example, is home to several public-private partnerships that help its degree youth apprenticeships thrive.⁸ Based at the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro, Guilford Apprenticeship Partners (GAP) is a decade-old collaboration among Guilford Technical Community College (GTCC), the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce, Business High Point Chamber of Commerce, Guilford County Schools, and more than 30 employers. GAP recruits and supports young people in pursuing degree apprenticeships at GTCC in accounting, supply chain logistics, advanced manufacturing, and six other career areas. It sponsors educational events to brief students and their parents about the opportunities, helps employers recruit and screen prospective apprentices, and provides technical assistance, training, and support to employers in their roles as Registered Apprenticeship sponsors. There are similar partnerships supporting degree apprenticeships for youth at Alamance Community College, Randolph Community College, and Surry Community College. These programs meet the definition and quality standards for youth apprenticeship that the Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship (PAYA), a New America-led initiative to advance high-quality youth apprenticeship opportunities, has established.