What’s in a Name? Unpacking Definitions of “Degree Apprenticeship” and “Apprenticeship Degree”

In January, the Center on Education and Labor at New America released a report on an exciting, emerging education and training model: degree apprenticeship. Mapping the Landscape of Degree Apprenticeship: Expanding a Promising Model for Mobility included the results of a comprehensive search that identified how many degree apprenticeship opportunities exist in the United States, where they are located, what industries and occupations they are concentrated in, and what institutions of higher education award them.

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed a particular terminology choice we made in this report: to refer to these programs that align an apprenticeship and a degree as “a degree apprenticeship” rather than “apprenticeship degree.” Both terms are used in the workforce world—and neither has a federal definition—so there’s often confusion about whether these terms refer to the same types of programs, and if not, how they differ. 

Fortunately, our colleagues at Reach University, a national nonprofit university, have spent a lot of time thinking about these two terms—and have crafted their own definition of the “apprenticeship degree.” Founded in 2020, Reach offers affordable job-embedded degree pathways with the aim of strengthening degree attainment among working adults while addressing labor shortages in teaching, health care, and other industries. We sat down with leadership at Reach to unpack how our organizations define these two terms and the nuances that distinguish them.

In our report, we defined “degree apprenticeship” as a Registered Apprenticeship program that includes a degree (associate, bachelor’s, master’s) as a credential earned. This simple, clear definition allowed us to narrow the focus of our landscape search of programs and aligned with New America’s previous research on this topic. 

We also convened an advisory committee of 12 leaders in the field, including Reach’s chief engagement and advancement officer, Eric Dunker, to develop a set of quality principles for degree apprenticeship that would outline what high-quality programs look like. The principles state that high-quality degree apprenticeship programs are accessible, responsive, affordable and sustainable, flexible, and collaborative. (For more on what these involve, please refer to section three of Mapping the Landscape of Degree Apprenticeship.) These principles were not part of our formal definition, so a program didn’t need to feature all of these principles to be counted in our landscape search.

Reach and its technical assistance wing National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree (NCAD) use the term “apprenticeship degree” to describe degree programs designed with work as part of the curriculum. Apprenticeship degrees, as Reach has defined them, “fully integrate workplace experience, award credit for on-the-job learning, and incorporate core hallmarks of apprenticeship, such as paid work and mentorship,” said Holly Smith, executive director of NCAD. Institutions of higher education and employers collaborate to co-design these programs, which can be associate, bachelor’s, or master’s degrees. 

In the apprenticeship degree, according to Smith, institutions of higher education award credit for structured, work-embedded learning aligned with academic and occupational competencies. They are also based in the workplace from the program’s start, with the “workplace serving as a primary site of learning.” This requires close partnerships between employers and higher education to embed occupational requirements into curricula so that student-apprentices’ on-the-job learning counts meaningfully towards their degree. “The apprenticeship degree is built through co-design so that work and learning are inherently integrated, not operating in parallel,” said Smith.

The other key component of the apprenticeship degree is affordability. In apprenticeship degrees, participants do not incur student loan debt. At Reach, undergraduates pay no more than $75 per month and earn a wage from their employer, according to Smith. 

Reach’s definition does not stipulate that apprenticeship degree programs must be Registered Apprenticeships. However, Reach’s own programs are built to meet those standards, and many do embed a Registered Apprenticeship into the degree program.

If you’re thinking that these definitions are pretty similar, you’re not wrong. They are—and many programs meet both definitions. But they aren’t entirely identical. 

For example, Reach’s core elements of an apprenticeship degree—credit for on-the-job learning, workplace integration, and affordability—all appear in New America’s quality principles but not in our definition itself. On the flip side of the coin, New America’s definition includes the components of a Registered Apprenticeship, like progressive wage increases for apprentices and mentor instruction. While these elements aren’t specified in Reach’s definition, in practice, Reach’s programs are designed to meet the standards of a Registered Apprenticeship and many are registered. 

Consider Figure 1 below, which New America designed in 2019 as part of previous degree apprenticeship research. Figure 1 presents a spectrum of apprenticeship models based on their level of connectivity with higher education. Of the models represented here, only the “Competecy-based Degree,” in which the institution of higher education awards credit for learning that takes place at the apprentice’s workplace, would align with Reach’s apprenticeship degree definition. New America’s definition would include both models that fall under the “Degree Apprenticeship” label, provided that they are registered.

It’s worth noting the different perspectives each organization brought to the development of their definition. New America is a research organization, and we designed our definition for a long-term, multi-part research project. We needed to be able to make sense of the nearly 600 programs we identified and the differences and similarities between them. Narrowing our focus to Registered Apprenticeship programs, for example, meant that all the programs in our scan shared a common baseline and allowed us to make apples-to-apples comparisons in our analysis. Moreover, the data we were able to collect on these programs often didn’t provide nuance about their orientations, motives, or components—information we would have needed to identify apprenticeship degree programs. 

Unlike New America, Reach isn’t a research organization, but an institution of higher education and field-builder. Their apprenticeship degree definition reflects the university’s mission to reimagine the college degree. “When [Reach] started six years ago, the first way we described what we were doing was: We’re going to turn your job into a degree, instead of the other way around.” Joe E. Ross, Reach’s co-founder, president, and CEO, said. Reach designs and runs apprenticeship degree programs and helps other colleges build their own continuum of work-embedded degree programs through NCAD.  

There are millions of Americans who need more training and education—and in many cases, a degree—to advance in their careers. But for most of them, a traditional college-going experience isn’t viable. They can’t afford to take time off of work or pay college tuition costs, especially not for a degree that can’t guarantee career advancement. Reach saw an opportunity to build a degree to serve these workers—one where students would get credit for what they learned on the job, where their coursework would be aligned with the skills they need to move up the career ladder, and where they’d build professional capital. While these aren’t traditional features of higher education, they are hallmarks of another education and training model: apprenticeship. Embedding these apprenticeship components into a degree program, Ross explained, could create avenues to higher education for workers for whom it was not otherwise a realistic option. 

For Reach’s leadership, putting “apprenticeship” before “degree,” rather than the other way around, better captured their goal of building a work-embedded degree, as they believe “it’s the degree that needs enhancing, not the apprenticeship,” per Smith. The core elements of the apprenticeship degree also reflect Reach’s degree re-design approach. Take the credit for-on-the-job learning piece, for example. Traditionally, higher education institutions only award credit for classroom-based coursework. By making job-embedded learning central to the degree itself, Reach can “push higher education to value the kinds of learning that work better at the workplace,” Anastasia Wickham, Reach’s provost and chief academic officer, said. “Knowledge and skills aren’t only acquired in higher education classrooms.”

Despite approaching this work with distinct lenses, New America and Reach are largely aligned on the big quality pieces that matter. We both see flexible delivery and affordability as central to strong programs. We want participants to receive a rigorous education in the classroom and on-the-job, and we want learning in both places to count for academic credit. We agree that programs should be driven by industry demand and that employers and higher education institutions must collaborate closely to build sustainable programs and to ensure relevant, aligned learning at school and work. And though we’ve used different terminology to describe slightly different program models, we both believe that bringing together the best of higher education and apprenticeship is a promising tool for advancing upward economic mobility.

Thank you to Reach University’s Eric Dunker, Joe E. Ross, Holly Smith, and Anastasia Wickham for sharing their insights and expertise for this article.