Everyone Agrees on Value of Apprenticeships. The Question Is How to Pay for Them.

Theo Stroomer for The Chronicle

Lately, everyone is talking about apprenticeships as a solution to some paradoxes in work-force training. More jobs — many of them better-paying — require higher levels of education these days, yet college degrees have become more expensive, and graduates aren’t necessarily leaving college with the skills that employers want. Apprenticeships are seen as the escape valve in that high-pressure environment: People can “earn while they learn,” as advocates are fond of saying, holding down the costs of getting a certificate or degree. And employers can train future employees in the most relevant skills they need.

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So why aren’t apprenticeships taking off? In some European countries, most workers pass through apprenticeships on their way to jobs in hundreds of fields. But in the United States, there are only about 500,000 apprentices — a number that has grown little despite years of investment — compared with some 17 million students preparing for work through the traditional route of college. And most apprenticeships in the United States still focus on traditional blue-collar trades, such as electricians, carpenters, and machinists. And most people associate apprenticeships with training for those “dirty jobs,” not more coveted white-collar work.

If government agencies, colleges, and companies needing talent can get aligned, we might be on the cusp of change. Two reports — one just out from Burning Glass Technologies and the Harvard Business School, and one forthcoming from the policy shop New America — propose ways that apprenticeships could be vastly expanded. Many of those methods rest on redefining what apprenticeships and apprentices are, a process now underway in many states and industries.

California, for example, has invested tens of millions of dollars in apprenticeship programs over the past three years, with an enrollment of 78,000 apprentices. Along the way, California officials have had to grapple with negative perceptions about apprenticeship programs among businesses and the public — that the programs would be bureaucratically cumbersome, for example, or that they would serve only occupations in the trades.

“There’s a lack of understanding of what apprenticeship is,” said Nicholas Esquivel, who coordinates apprenticeship programs for the California Apprenticeship Initiative, a division of the California Community Colleges. About 70 percent of those apprentices are in traditional trades, but a growing number of positions are in nontraditional programs in cybersecurity, aerospace, and viticulture.

Expanding the Fields

The report from Burning Glass Technologies and the Harvard Business School follows some strict job criteria in discussing how to expand, from 27 to 74, the number of fields open to apprenticeships: They had to be stable, decent-paying jobs without strict licensure requirements, demanding a limited cluster of skills, and requiring no bachelor’s degree.

Those criteria generated a list of occupations, many of them somewhat adjacent to blue-collar work or lower-level office work: cabinetmakers and bench carpenters, solar-panel installers, chefs and cooks, graphic designers, health-information technicians, and so on. Some of the jobs listed — like insurance agents and underwriters — are in fields that are already aggressively exploring apprenticeships as a training option.

Matthew Sigelman, chief executive officer of Burning Glass Technologies, a company that analyzes the labor market by collecting data on job postings, acknowledged that other countries use apprenticeships in a broad array of fields, and that many more jobs could be “apprenticeable.” But for this report, he said, his team tried to “take a pretty realistic and near-term view of what might be achievable.”

One barrier, he said, derives from attitudes about apprenticeships among employers. In Europe, with its long history of apprenticeships, employers invest in training to support apprentices. In the United States, employers are more reluctant to invest in training — in part, because they see schools, colleges, and universities as an employee-training resource that they don’t have to pay for directly.

That view is paradoxical, Mr. Sigelman pointed out. Employers might not pay for training under the current system, but it costs them money anyway. Job openings requiring bachelor’s degrees take longer to fill. Prospective employees with college degrees demand higher salaries, and they still might lack the training they need for the job. And when college graduates hold jobs that don’t require bachelor’s-degree skills, turnover is higher, according to another recent report by Burning Glass and the Harvard Business School.

“There is a risk employers take in hiring people with greater levels of mobility,” he said. When employers hire people with and without college degrees for the same job, “you actually wind up often with greater levels of engagement and tenure from those who don’t have a college degree.” Employers, to some extent, also hire people who look like them or have their level of education, Mr. Sigelman said. “One of the fields that’s experiencing the highest levels of degree inflation is HR,” he said. Yet human resources is one of the fields that shows potential for apprenticeship training.

Another barrier is public perception. People associate apprenticeships with manual-labor jobs, with few opportunities to move to other, better jobs. And after years of policy makers seen as pushing “college for all,” students and their families might perceive apprenticeships as something less prestigious than a college education.

Covering the Costs

The report classifies two types of apprenticeable occupations: “expanders,” lower-skilled work that might be an entry point for people without college educations, and higher-skilled “booster” jobs, which could be a pipeline to higher-wage, varied careers.

The latter category, in particular, offers opportunities for higher education, as students would seek to advance their careers through a combination of on-the-job training and classroom instruction, which could eventually lead to four-year degrees. “That structure could be a good road map for expanding the market that higher education serves,” Mr. Sigelman said.

In Europe it’s very common for students to start apprenticeships in high school, attend vocational college, and perhaps later earn an advanced degree from a university. Those apprenticeships lead to jobs in fields as prestigious and diverse as health care, social services, finance and banking, and information technology. Students in Switzerland and Germany “know that they can continue moving up the higher-education spectrum,” no matter where they start out, said Mary Alice McCarthy, who directs the Center on Education and Skills at New America.

On Wednesday, New America will host a discussion about apprenticeships and will release its own report on ways that higher education and apprenticeship programs could build stronger connections. (Next week New America will host another discussion about apprenticeships, but focused on high-school students.) A key recommendation in the report will focus on financing strategies. U.S. Department of Commerce studies indicate that apprenticeship programs can cost as much as $250,000 per apprentice, the report notes, which can be a disincentive for employers.

Helping to cover those costs would foster the expansion of apprenticeship programs. New America’s report suggests, for example, rejiggering the Federal Work-Study program to allow it to support apprenticeships. The think tank also calls for more state investment. However, the report notes that repurposing the Pell Grant to cover apprenticeships would be a mistake, further isolating apprenticeships as a “lesser” educational option.

The Pell Grant “was specifically designed for low-income students, and we don’t want our apprenticeship system to become a system that primarily serves low-income students,” Ms. McCarthy said. “We want apprenticeships to simply be another option for all students.”

Lately, she said, there has also been a muddying of what “apprenticeship” means. On Friday, Republicans in the House of Representatives introduced a bill to reauthorize the Higher Education Act that includes a section focused on “expanding access to in-demand apprenticeships” through a grant program. But, Ms. McCarthy pointed out, the outline of apprenticeships in the bill — positions as short as three months — does not match the federal definition of apprenticeships, which are at least a year long.

“This basically creates more fragmentation and more confusion about what is an apprenticeship,” she said. The grant program would raise wages for the “apprentices” outlined in the bill, but “wages are not the big barrier here,” Ms. McCarthy said. The costs of developing apprenticeship programs are more significant.

‘Enchanted’ Employers

In states with robust job-training councils, such as Washington, advocates cite other challenges, besides money and definitions, in expanding apprenticeships. Eleni Papadakis, executive director of Washington’s coordinating board for work-force training and education, said more states need intermediaries to set up programs.

“What employers say is, We don’t want to be the ones responsible for designing and managing apprenticeships in our facilities,” she said. Chambers of commerce, work-force-development councils, or other entities could act as brokers between companies and colleges in handling some of the bureaucracy.

“When we talk to employers, they are enchanted with the idea of apprenticeships,” she said. “But even to try an apprenticeship, you need to have designed the whole system, and that’s what companies don’t want to do.”

To appeal to the public, she said, the skills and credits earned through apprenticeships need to be portable. Apprenticeships, after all, are a kind of competency-based learning process. “If somebody becomes a journeyman electrician, we know that they have excelled at pretty high levels of math, deductive reasoning, language arts, as well as negotiating in the workplace,” Ms. Papadakis said. “We need to think about work-based training and education as legitimate educational pathways that folks recognize.”

Despite the challenges, she sees apprenticeships only growing in the future.

“Employers in the new-world economy need to be nimbly responsive to market opportunities and market forces, so they want people that can come in and just hit the ground running,” she said. Real-world work experience is a proven way to train people. “They’re moving away from degrees as the coin of the realm to knowledge, skills, and ability.”

Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.