Why Colleges Need to Embrace the Apprenticeship

Noel Ginsburg, chief executive of a plastics company, spent years pouring money into college scholarships, trying to entice dozens of high-school students to graduate and to pursue four years of college. A four-year college education, he thought, could be the “secret sauce” to a lifetime of success.

Now he wonders whether the promise of college was ever enough, since most kids never make it to a four-year institution anyway.

“We were wrong,” he says, in an interview at Intertech Plastics, a warehouse facility here on Interstate 70. “It should have been college and career. To this day, you walk in many of the high schools and it’s all these banners of colleges around the country that you should go to, and we know damn well that, at best, 25 percent or 20 percent of those students are going to go.”

For the students who don’t go to four-year colleges, what’s the implied message? “You’re a loser,” he says.

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Now Mr. Ginsburg is taking a different approach, one that puts work experience and learning on the job first. He is the founder of CareerWise Colorado, a nonprofit organization that aims to establish apprenticeships as a key to training the state’s next generation of workers. This fall, as many as 140 high-school students will work as apprentices, earning college credit and a salary at more than 50 businesses in Colorado — in health care, education, telecommunications, technology, and manufacturing. If CareerWise meets its goals, 20,000 Colorado students will be enrolled in apprenticeship programs by 2027.

Apprenticeships — long embraced as a work-force-training method in other countries — may now have an opening to become a far more common pathway to education and employment in the United States. The enthusiasm for apprenticeships represents a kind of refutation of college education — a recognition that something about the path from college to career is not working for many people.

Last month, in Washington, more than half a dozen educational and labor groups organized a sold-out conference called Apprenticeship Forward, with an underlying message that hit higher education in the gut: Colleges saddle students with debt and yet still don’t deliver graduates who have the hard and soft skills to enter the workplace.

With apprenticeships, advocates often say, students could be “earning while learning” — gathering valuable skills on the job, while their employers pay for related courses and degrees at a nearby college. In the past, employers may have been reluctant to invest money in training. But today a number of companies, desperate for skilled workers and dissatisfied with the talents of college graduates, are starting apprenticeships to build up their work forces. Meanwhile, parents and prospective students, wary of the rising cost of college and what to them seem like uncertain returns, may be more willing to seek out alternative forms of education, which allow students to earn a salary and college credits at the same time. The new forms of apprenticeships don’t replace college, they supplement it.

In the popular imagination in this country, apprenticeships might be most commonly associated with manual labor and the trades. People might picture a young man, smudged with grease or coated in sawdust, standing next to a sinewy older man with rough hands, learning the essential secrets of carpentry, plumbing, or mechanics. Certainly those apprenticeships continue to exist. But the trades — while romanticized by pundits and politicians eager to connect to a blue-collar base — have been denigrated in recent decades, as school systems have pushed more students to consider college as the main training pathway to a job in the service economy. For some students, the term “apprenticeship” connotes a path away from college and lucrative white-collar jobs.

But apprenticeship has expanded in recent years to occupations far from the factory floor, the wood shop, the dusty job site. Apprenticeships in white-collar work, like insurance and information technology, can be found among traditional apprenticeship offerings in manufacturing or the trades. An interest in apprenticeships from President Barack Obama has fueled growth, too. In his 2014 State of the Union address, he lauded apprenticeships as a path that could “set a young worker on an upward trajectory for life.” His administration devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to expanding apprenticeship programs, and the number of apprentices in the country grew by 75,000 over the next two years.

Advocates believe the federal government could do yet more — to eventually establish one apprenticeship for every four college students. It could offer tax incentives to companies that expand their work-based learning programs, expand the Pell Grant program to support apprenticeships, and establish more organizations, like CareerWise, that can work between educational systems and industries.

Mr. Ginsburg believes that the CareerWise apprenticeships will make a difference in students’ lives by giving them an entry point to good jobs. But he also thinks that those apprenticeships will deliver life skills that many employers say are hardest to teach new employees: the ability to show up on time, communicate with co-workers, work in teams, take leadership roles, improvise solutions to new problems.

Colleges say they teach some of those skills through liberal-arts programs and the social environment on a campus, but Mr. Ginsburg says the job environment has higher stakes and weightier lessons.

“Soft skills are actually better taught in a business environment than they are in a classroom,” he says. “In a classroom, the consequences are very different — like you don’t get fired. But when you’re put in a professional environment at a young age in a business, you behave differently, hopefully.”

Apprenticeships go back hundreds of years as a learning arrangement between master craftsmen and young men entering the field. They have been codified in the modern era by the National Apprenticeship Act, also known as the Fitzgerald Act, a New Deal law that set up labor protections for apprentices, as well as other employees, at the companies that hired them.

But as a training method, apprenticeships in the United States have been marginalized.

“Our registered apprenticeship system has almost no connections, or very limited and very tenuous connections, to either our secondary-education system or our higher-education system,” says Mary Alice McCarthy, who directs the Center on Education and Skills at the think tank New America.

Apprenticeships are common in European countries like Germany and Switzerland, where they are incorporated into the pathways from school and college to work. Swiss students start learning about apprenticeship opportunities as early as the fourth grade, and 70 percent of them will start an apprenticeship at age 15 on their way to college or a job. Advocates for apprenticeships often point to the results in Switzerland: Swiss high schoolers are ready to work by the time they graduate. Ninety-seven percent of them graduate from high school there, compared with 82 percent in the United States. The youth unemployment rate — which measures the jobless status of 15- to 24-year-olds — averages around 8 percent in Switzerland, versus 10 percent in the United States. Nearly half of Swiss companies participate in apprenticeship programs, and half of the business leaders in the country were once apprentices.

I n the United States, apprenticeships are relatively little known, used mainly by the building trades and the manufacturing industry, and largely disconnected from the offerings of high schools or colleges. As a result, American apprentices, at an average age of 28, are much older than their European counterparts.

“For an American high-school student to find an apprenticeship program is very unusual,” Ms. McCarthy says. “You wouldn’t even know where to start.”

Not that advocates haven’t tried to call attention to such programs. In the 1990s, she says, policy makers under the Clinton administration tried to push apprenticeships, but the effort “ran like a buzz saw into our long history of tracking.” By the 1990s, educational tracking — which sent students to college-preparatory or vocational courses, depending on perceived ability — had been deemed discriminatory. Apprenticeships, associated with the trades, were out of sync with an education system pushing college for all.

Today, given the rising cost of college, apprenticeships could have a broad appeal. The American apprenticeship system, Ms. McCarthy says, could make crucial changes to be more useful in work-force training.

She would like to see the on-the-job training gain as much respectability — and credit toward a degree — as what a person might get by sitting in a classroom. That prospect, she notes, is an uncomfortable one for colleges and accreditors, who are reluctant to grant credit for learning that happens outside of academe.

The success of apprenticeship programs in the United States hinges on their connections to higher education. The college degree is still the most accepted credential — the gateway to viable careers — and apprenticeships have to work with that system. What’s more, given the negative associations with tracking, many people would resist an educational alternative that diverts people from postsecondary education.

“You cannot make this a pathway that doesn’t lead to college,” Ms. McCarthy says.

Instead, she says, apprenticeships could help solve problems associated with the costs or time needed to get a college degree. They could be a more practical way to train workers for jobs — in health care or early- childhood education, for example — that require high-level skills but don’t pay well. In cybersecurity, she says, apprenticeships could give workers exposure to the latest computer viruses and threats, which evolve too quickly for college curricula to keep up.

The insurance industry has embraced apprenticeships as a way to solve a persistent problem: attracting younger employees. Close to half of the industry’s workers will retire in the next decade, according to some studies. One company, Zurich North America, formed a partnership in 2015 with Harper College, a two-year college about three miles away from the corporate headquarters, just outside of Chicago, to offer an associate degree in business, with a focus on insurance, for 24 apprentices who started work at the company in January 2016. (Zurich has since hired another 12.) Harper got a $2.5-million grant from the Obama administration to start apprenticeship programs like the one in insurance, which was the first of its kind.

One participant in the program is Dane Lyons, a 38-year-old Navy veteran who never went to college. He has spent the past six years as a car salesman, a job that required lots of work on nights and weekends. With a wife and two boys at home, he wanted a job with more-regular office hours. A counselor at Harper recommended applying for the apprentice job at Zurich.

One of the risks for companies starting apprenticeship programs: People might get their training, then leave. Al Crook, head of human resources at Zurich North America, says his team sought to mitigate that risk in a couple of ways. First, any employee who quits during the apprenticeship program or up to one year afterward has to repay the tuition to the company. Second, in a strategy that might seem counterintuitive, Zurich shared details about how it set up the apprenticeship with other insurance companies, like Aon and the Hartford. Those companies started their own programs, reducing the incentives to poach employees from one another.

But perhaps Zurich shouldn’t worry about poaching; studies have shown that apprentices tend to stay at the companies that supported their education. “Zurich afforded me an opportunity to better my life, and because they provided me that opportunity, I have a strong sense of loyalty,” says Mr. Lyons. “I intend to make a career here.”

Today a number of states — led by their work-force boards, local businesses, and community colleges — are expanding apprenticeship programs in a variety of new disciplines. In Washington State, for example, Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, recently devoted $1 million to expanding youth apprenticeship programs, with new ones in manufacturing emerging in Tacoma and Yakima last month.

Tidewater Community College, in Norfolk, Va., has supported apprenticeship programs for the local shipbuilding industry since the early 1970s. In 2015 the college broadened its approach, establishing an institute to support new apprenticeship programs in manufacturing, information technology, and even public-parking management.

The California Community Colleges system last year established the California Apprenticeship Initiative, devoted to introducing apprenticeships to new industries and new companies. The state has given $30 million to support more than 450 students and 108 employers in cybersecurity, health care, food safety, and public transportation.

Van Ton-Quinlivan, the system’s vice chancellor for work-force and economic development, says apprenticeships are key to helping people who have been left behind by shifts in the economy.

“We have a sizable stranded-worker population now,” she says. “The reality of these adults is that they need to pay the bills even as they build skills. So the more we can blur the lines between where education is delivered and where training and skill-building occur, the better. That person is going to be more focused and will have an easier time keeping food on the table.”

In Colorado, businesses have faced stark challenges finding skilled workers to fill positions. Ellen Golombek, executive director of the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, notes that the state’s unemployment rate had hovered around 3 percent in 2016. In April it fell to a record low of 2.3 percent. While that’s good news for the state, thousands of jobs go unfilled every week.

In 2015, Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, formed the Business Experiential-Learning Commission, with Noel Ginsburg and Ms. Golombek at its head, to study what the state’s businesses needed to form a trained work force. Some postsecondary education was required for 80 percent of the jobs in the state. “But when employers really started thinking about what they needed, in many cases they didn’t need that four-year degree,” Ms. Golombek says. “Yet that was a vetting component for getting your foot in the door.”

What’s more, young people were showing up at Colorado businesses having never before held jobs, and lacking the soft skills or workplace experience that employers wanted. “They spent a lot of time building their résumé for college,” she says. “And so they did some volunteer work, they did a lot of clubs, they did a lot of sports, and they did a lot of academic stuff.” But how to talk to colleagues, dress for work, show up on time — those skills were sometimes lacking.

Mr. Ginsburg persuaded a contingent of business people, state officials, and college and school-system administrators to go to Switzerland to study how apprenticeships worked there.

At the beginning of the trip, the governor and others contended that the Swiss apprenticeship model would never work in the United States, given the social and political differences between the countries.

By the end of the trip, the group had resolved to start a version of Swiss apprenticeships in Colorado. CareerWise was established as a nonprofit group so it would be insulated from state politics, and it was supported by foundations like the Daniels Fund and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

In one meeting, Howard Wolfson, program director for education at Bloomberg, told Mr. Ginsburg that his foundation was supporting CareerWise because he felt that apprenticeships were one of the best ways to solve income inequality. (The business executive hopes that CareerWise’s budget will move from foundation support to business support over the next decade.)

Kim Hunter Reed, who recently left the U.S. Department of Education to become executive director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education, has been an avid supporter of the apprenticeship program — particularly for the way that it can keep at-risk students engaged. Studies have shown that high-school students who tie their education to career and technical skills are more likely to graduate, to be employed after graduating, and to enroll in college.

“If a student understands the relevance of what they are doing in their aspiration for work, then you’ve got them,” she says. Apprenticeships “have the relevance built right in.”

CareerWise is still nascent, and Mr. Ginsburg acknowledges that there are plenty of ways that the effort could fail. For now it has recruited fewer students for the fall than was hoped. Organizers say parents and high-school counselors have expressed worries about graduation rates, college careers, and safety. Some parents were concerned that an apprenticeship meant that their kids were not on a path to college.

The nonprofit group might also be challenged in signing up enough employers, who might not see a return on investment in supporting apprentices. The businesses that have signed up might not give the apprentices real work to do, which would discourage interest among students.

The program makes demands that some employers or school systems might find burdensome: Classes, held at community colleges, could cost $4,000 per apprentice in each of the three years of the program; if the high school can’t cover that cost, the employer must. The employers also must have employees supervise and train the students and must provide a dedicated mentor, who acts more like a friend and guide.

Although factors like those could derail the apprentice program, Mr. Ginsburg believes that CareerWise, once it is established, will be irresistible to employers that are having trouble finding skilled workers: “Companies will want it because they will be afraid they won’t be able to compete.”

Students, too, might find it irresistible. During CareerWise’s pilot phase over the past several months, Colby Dunn, a high-school sophomore who lives in Grand Junction, Colo., got an apprenticeship at DT Swiss, a manufacturer of high-end bicycle gear. He makes $3,000 bike wheels. It’s a plum job for the 16-year-old, whose mother works at a greenhouse and whose father is a cook at Burger King.

With pay roughly similar to what high schoolers typically earn in other jobs, the apprenticeship offers more: He’s getting training on a manufacturing line, in a precision industry. As well as a paycheck, he’s earning college credits that he can use at Western Colorado Community College to get a degree that might lead to work as a mechanic or engineer. He got to meet Governor Hickenlooper, who praised him and other young apprentices.

What Colby likes most about the job is that he’s working alongside adults, solving problems and building skills in teamwork, collaboration, and communication — skills that many employers say are essential.

“They have been treating me like I’m an actual employee,” he says, “and not some kind of teenager.”

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