Vice President Kamala Harris’ recent shoutout to apprenticeships and other alternatives to four-year college degrees may have surprised those who are accustomed to the Democratic Party’s longstanding promotion of “college for all.” Her call on employers to focus more on the skills applicants have acquired than the diplomas they’ve earned further signaled a shift in the Democratic Party’s messaging on the value of a college education.
Those messages, delivered during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania last month, likely drew more grimaces than cheers from higher-education leaders already worried about enrollment declines and increasing skepticism about the value of a four-year degree. But they probably resonated with registered voters who responded to a survey commissioned last month by Jobs for the Future, a national nonprofit working to better integrate education and the work force.
The results, released last week, showed that 84 percentof respondents said it was somewhat or very important for the next president, in their first 100 days, to expand apprenticeship programs and facilitate hiring based on skills rather than degrees. By similar margins, they wanted the next president to provide better guidance on education and training options that lead to jobs with wages that can support a family.
Responding to this voter sentiment with actual policy isn’t easy, government and higher-education officials have discovered. Skills have to be defined and assessed. Apprenticeships are expensive and challenging for colleges and employers to coordinate. Community colleges, where many of these work-based opportunities originate, are underfunded. But families who don’t find what they’re looking for in colleges, higher-education officials fear, are likely to vote with their feet.
The survey of around 1,800 voters was conducted by the polling company Morning Consult. Voters were asked to prioritize 22 education and work-force policy ideas drawn from 2024 Democratic and Republican platforms, current congressional bills, and Jobs for the Future policy agendas. Data were weighted to approximate a large sample of registered voters based on age, gender, race, education, and other factors.
At least 70 percent of respondents prioritized making child care affordable and accessible by expanding tax credits to working parents and to employers who provide child care for their workers. Support for all of these proposals was slightly higher among Democrats than among Republican or independent voters.
Respondents seemed less concerned about proposals related to college affordability, including making trade school and community college free, doubling the maximum federal Pell Grant, and basing student-loan repayments on income. Fewer respondents — 68 percent, 66 percent, and 60 percent, respectively, ranked those among their top priorities.
Similar themes have been echoing on the presidential campaign trail. At a rally in Pennsylvania last month, Harris said that she would make sure well-paying jobs are available to all Americans, not just those with college degrees. She also called for employers, both from the government and the private sector, to remove unnecessary degree requirements in hiring.
“For far too long, our nation has encouraged only one path to success: a four-year college degree,” she said. The nation needs to recognize the value of alternatives, like apprenticeships and technical programs, Harris added.
Her stance, which former President Barack Obama reiterated in a speech at the Democratic National Convention, is a pivot for Democrats, who, for more than a decade, have pushed for more students to obtain four-year degrees.
Several Republican governors, meanwhile, have questioned whether the government should be subsidizing liberal-arts and humanities degrees that don’t have an immediate career application. Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has declared college professors “the enemy” and colleges elitist and hostile to conservatives, even as his Ivy League pedigree helped elevate him out of poverty and a troubled upbringing.
Jobs for the Future convened a bipartisan group of White House labor advisers last week to weigh in on the calls for more apprenticeships and skills-based learning. The point was to show that these programs enjoy widespread bipartisan support, even if they’ve been slow to move to the top of the national agenda.
“A very, very, very senior member of the Democratic Party said that possibly the biggest mistake Democrats made in their relationship with working people” was telling them that if they didn’t go to a four-year college, they had little hope of joining the middle class, said Seth D. Harris, a senior labor adviser to President Biden who served as acting labor secretary under Obama.
“Community colleges are likely the institutions best able to navigate the two pathways everyone agrees on,” he said — connecting academic skills and work-force training. The fact that the country “grossly underfunds” these institutions, he said, “is a failure of vision.”
Seth Harris, who is also a professor of practice at Northeastern University, said there’s widespread bipartisan agreement on the need for more skills-based training and hiring, yet year after year, little happens. That comity, a rarity these days in national politics, can deter action, he suggested.
“The reason policies don’t go forward is that everyone’s generally for them, but there’s no big push that gets them on the national agenda, and no big interest group with a lot of power,” he said.
Michael Brickman, who was a senior adviser on postsecondary issues to Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, said it was likely that the emphasis by Democrats on the need for four-year college degrees might have soured many conservatives on pursuing higher education. “It’s natural there would be resentment if you end up with student loans and nothing to show for it.”
Eighty-four percent of respondents said the government should remove unnecessary college-degree requirements in hiring for contract positions, and that private employers should be encouraged to do the same. That, in fact, started years ago.
In 2020, Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to de-emphasize what he considered an overreliance on whether a job candidate has a college degree. At least 16 states followed by removing degree requirements for public-sector jobs.
John Pallasch, former assistant secretary for employment and training for the U.S. Department of Labor under Trump, pointed out what observers on both sides of the aisle have cited as an impediment to skills-based hiring: uncertainty about what exactly they’re measuring.
“What do we mean by skills? How do we define skills? How do we assess skills?” Pallasch asked. “We’ve really got to put some meat behind it.” One tool he finds promising is SkillBott, which offers lessons and advice on mastering dozens of soft skills that business and human-resources professionals have identified as essential. SkillBott offers career guidance to people who have opted out of college, are struggling to finish, or graduated and are unsatisfied with their careers.
Iris Palmer, director of the Education Policy Program at New America, a left-leaning think tank, said she understands the appeal of hiring based on skills, rather than degrees.
“It’s lovely in theory, but it’s very hard to do in practice,” she said in an interview. In the absence of a certification system that checks off a list of competencies, “validating a person’s skills is very difficult.”
Dropping degree requirements doesn’t necessarily change hiring practices, Palmer pointed out. A recent Harvard Business School study found that the share of new hires with bachelor’s degrees only dropped by two percentage points when degree requirements were scratched. And, even though Palmer’s own job postings don’t list a degree requirement, most of the people she hires have graduate degrees. That’s partly due to the nature of the job; a think tank, she said, is more likely to attract a competitive pool of highly educated applicants.
When people talk about work-based learning, they often conflate vastly different offerings, from microcredentials that can be completed in months to formal apprenticeships that typically take about four years. Apprenticeships, she said, are “the gold standard” for people who want to earn while they learn in a structured, carefully crafted sequence of courses.
“If we want to grow beyond the skilled trades, where the vast majority of apprenticeships are, we need more transparent skill standards that are swappable between colleges,” Palmer said. That would require codifying the skills that need to be mastered and coming up with a sequence of classes that makes sense for the college.
But as anyone who followed the uproar the K-12 sector experienced over the Common Core Standards can appreciate, trying to impose federal standards on workplace training is bound to encounter resistance, Palmer said.
Maria Flynn is CEO of Jobs for the Future and a former administrator for the U.S. Department of Labor, where she oversaw the development of policies for work-force training programs. She said the survey results and the bipartisan commentary it spurred have elevated an essential challenge for education and work-force leaders: “How do we build high-quality, transparent, multiple pathways to the middle class? Gen Z’s and the younger generations are going to demand that.”
