When he arrived in the United States from Mexico as a 15-year-old, he knew only basic English phrases — conversation starters like “What’s your name?” and “How old are you?” Things got even harder a few months later when his family moved from California, where most of his teachers were bilingual, to Alabama, where hardly anyone was.
So Gallardo can relate to the students in the English Learner class at Albertville High School, where he works as a bilingual aide to students whose families have immigrated to Northeast Alabama seeking work in its poultry-processing plants.
“At the beginning, they can be really shy, thinking the teacher won’t understand them,” Gallardo said. Having a translator who has lived through a similar experience puts them at ease, he said.
Now 32, Gallardo is one of eight bilingual employees of the Albertville school district working toward a teaching credential through Reach University, a five-year-old nonprofit college focused solely on apprenticeship degrees. The group, which started classes last fall, includes bilingual aides, like Gallardo, but also receptionists, school-lunch workers, and even bus drivers, who get their teaching done outside their regular work hours.
Apprenticeship degrees, as the name suggests, combine paid on-the-job training (an apprenticeship) with a college degree. Popular in parts of Europe, the degrees are just taking root in the United States, where they’re concentrated in the education sector. But advocates argue they have the potential to expand into many other fields, opening up higher education to Americans who can’t afford to stop working to attend college.
“It could be a path to upward mobility for millions,” said Eric Dunker, chief growth officer and head of Reach’s National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree, which made its debut last year with the goal of promoting the degrees to other groups. The center hopes to see three million apprenticeship-degree enrollments by 2035.
Though the degrees are new — and mostly untested — the model has drawn interest from members of both political parties. President Trump recently pledged to provide support to more than one million apprentices.
Proponents of apprenticeship degrees see them as a solution to a range of problems plaguing both higher education and the economy, including shrinking college enrollments, spiraling student debt, and persistent labor shortages. They’re a way for employers to fill jobs, colleges to fill seats, and students to graduate debt-free.
But several hurdles could hinder the model’s growth. Among them: inconsistent state and federal funding, high barriers to federal recognition, and resistance from faculty members worried about diluting the traditional degree.
“The appeal is clear, but the execution is difficult,” said Ryan Craig, author of Apprentice Nation: How the “Earn and Learn” Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America.
The district, which has seen a nearly 20-percent growth in the number of English Learner students over the past three years, has struggled to recruit bilingual teachers to its classrooms. Yet many of its employees without college degrees speak Spanish, a reflection of the migration that has transformed Albertville over the past three decades.
Back in 1990, Albertville’s population was 98-percent white. Then a flood of immigrants began arriving, mostly from Mexico, seeking jobs in the small city’s several poultry-processing plants. By 2010, a quarter of the population was Latino.
The influx of outsiders with unfamiliar customs and uncertain legal statuses created tensions in Albertville, which were chronicled in a two-part series on This American Life in 2017. Some residents suspected the foreigners of stealing jobs from Americans or driving down wages; others grumbled about their unkempt yards, uninsured driving, and brightly painted businesses, the series reported.
Today, though, there are signs that the Spanish-speaking population has settled into Albertville. Roughly half of the businesses downtown have Spanish names — El Regalo gift shop, Pico de Gallo Guatemalan restaurant, and La Reyna Bridal exist alongside Local Joe’s BBQ and Bootleggers Pizza and Pints. Along the highway into town, the billboards advertising personal injury lawyers command “Call Me,” but also “¡Llámame!”
Yet educating the children of the still-growing immigrant population remains a challenge for the district. This year, 37 percent of its 5,700 students are English-language learners, as are half of the children in kindergarten through second grade. The majority, but not all, speak Spanish. But only seven of the district’s 371 teachers — less than two percent — are bilingual.
While many English Learner students eventually test out of the program and go on to thrive in regular classes, their outcomes, as a group, are worse than those of native speakers. Last year, nearly three quarters of the students retained in third grade for failing to meet the state’s literacy benchmark were in English Learner programs.
Reeves and other district leaders know that they won’t be able to close that gap without hiring more bilingual teachers. But finding them in this corner of Alabama has proved challenging. A recent recruiting trip to Jacksonville State University turned up only two bilingual graduates, according to Julie Ann McCulley, the district’s chief academic officer.
By collaborating with Reach, which offers its employees evening classes and credit for on-the-job learning, the district hopes to develop its own bilingual teachers. Aides like Gallardo, who already has an associate’s degree, could advance to higher-paying teaching roles in just two years.
Gallardo, who graduated from a local community college in 2019, said he’d planned to return to college for a bachelor’s degree but found he couldn’t afford it. When he heard that Reach would cost him only $75 a month, he decided he could swing it. (Though the official price tag is $12,374 for two semesters, students are expected to pay only $900, regardless of whether they qualify for federal aid. The rest of the bill is covered through grants, scholarships, and philanthropic support.)
It’s too soon to say whether apprenticeship degrees will solve the bilingual teaching shortage in Albertville or make a dent in the estimated 50,000 teacher vacancies nationwide. Most programs, including Reach, have been around only a few years and have yet to produce significant numbers of graduates.
But Albertville’s assistant superintendent Todd Watkins has one predication: “The establishment is not going to like it.”
“Reach is pushing a lot of boundaries,” he said.
In the United States, most of the growth in apprenticeship degrees has been in teaching, with nursing a distant second. That’s partly because the federal government has made teaching apprenticeships a priority, offering funds to programs that apply for formal recognition. Between 2021 and the start of this year, 49 states received federal approval to offer “registered apprenticeships” in teaching.
But it’s impossible to say how many apprentices have enrolled in or graduated from degree programs, since the United States — unlike the United Kingdom — does not track these numbers centrally. For teaching, the best numbers come (or used to come) from the Educator Registered Apprenticeship Intermediary, which had its funding terminated by the Trump administration in early May. At the time, there were 4,746 teacher apprentices, not counting those in programs without formal federal recognition.
Once this administration is finished tearing things down, it’s going to start building things up. And I think apprenticeship is one of the things they’re going to get behind.
“There are all these interesting things happening, but it’s a little scattered,” said Ivy Love, a senior policy analyst at New America who is conducting a landscape analysis of apprenticeship degrees. So far, she’s finding that the degrees are more common at community colleges, which tend to have tighter connections with local employers than four-year institutions.
Advocates of apprenticeship degrees describe them as “the best of both worlds,” combining the practical experience of work-based learning with the market power of a college degree.
“Credentials are still the coin of the realm,” said Pam Eddinger, president of Bunker Hill Community College, which is working with the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree to start three programs, beginning this fall.
For colleges, converting a traditional degree program to an apprenticeship degree is no easy task. It requires colleges to design the curriculum with employers — a stretch for many faculty members — and, in many cases, to award academic credit for on-the-job training — an even bigger stretch, said Craig.
In Reach’s programs, half of a student’s academic credit is earned through on-the-job training, assessed using a learning-outcomes rubric. While a traditional student might demonstrate mastery of classroom management through a test or paper, for example, a Reach apprentice might apply the strategies in the classroom, in real time.
Colorado Mountain College, which worked with NCAD to design its teaching-apprenticeship degree, has taken a similar approach, allocating 45 percent of each course to on-the-job training.
“There’s less seat time with instructors and more time spent in the field practicing,” said Liz Qualman, director of teacher education at the college. “They’re still learning theory and putting theory into practice.”
Qualman acknowledged that some faculty members have raised concerns about apprentices’ “depth of knowledge” or the strength of their relationships with professors. She said the program is exploring ways to maintain those relationships, perhaps by having faculty members teach two courses in a row.
Recognizing job training for academic credit requires “an important adjustment to the way colleges think about learning,” said John Colborn, executive director of Apprenticeships for America, “which is to say that it doesn’t all happen in the classroom.”
That may be, but some skeptics worry that cutting the time students spend in the classroom might make it harder for them to advance in their careers.
“If the curriculum is too narrow, it could swim against the power of the degree, which is a broad set of experiences and skills that prepare you not just for the first job, but down the road,” said Michael Horn, an author and adviser on the future of education.
Gallardo translated the directions, then asked the students, “¿Están listos?” — are you ready?
The students broke into pairs and walked around the classroom, reading printouts of imagined text conversations that Nelson had taped to desks. In one example, speaker A handed speaker B an item they’d found on the sidewalk, and speaker B thanked them profusely.
“¿Qué significa eso?” a girl from the Dominican Republic asked Gallardo, pointing to the word “sidewalk.”
“Sidewalk is ‘el camino,”” he told her.
Another student, a boy from Mexico, wanted to know what “how can I repay you?” means.
“Cómo te puedo repagar,” Gallardo answered.
Reach University formed in the summer of 2020, when two nonprofits offering teacher credentialing and training merged and began offering apprenticeship degrees. Today, the accredited university works with 460 school districts across eight states and is expanding into health care and behavioral health. Nearly 400 students have completed a teaching degree to date.
While the program is still in its infancy, its early results are encouraging. Though more than 70 percent of students are low-income, 79 percent of them stick around for a second year, and nearly three quarters graduate on time — beating the national six-year graduation rate of 64 percent.
But if apprenticeship degrees are going to expand into other fields, they will need more reliable and robust funding — and an easier path to receiving the money, experts say. The United States spends a fraction of what its European competitors spend on apprenticeships and requires programs seeking work-force-development dollars to go through a long, sometimes costly, process of becoming “registered apprenticeships.”
In the United Kingdom, large employers are charged a levy that they can tap to pay their apprentices’ tuition. In the United States, no similar incentives exist for employers, and many companies are reluctant to hire and pay a less productive worker for an extended period of time, Craig said.
Advocates were encouraged earlier this year when President Trump issued an executive order that called on agencies to “refocus young Americans on career preparation” and promised a plan to support more than one million apprenticeships per year.
But their hopes dimmed this month when the president released a budget that proposed a $1.64-billion cut to work-force programs, and abruptly cancelled a $13-million contract to support states and districts in developing educator apprenticeships.
Still, some supporters of apprenticeship degrees remain optimistic that the administration will come through with funding and policy changes that benefit the programs.
“Once this administration is finished tearing things down, it’s going to start building things up,” predicted Craig. “And I think apprenticeship is one of the things they’re going to get behind.”
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