The apprenticeship struggle continues, getting skills marketplaces over the hump, and $7.1 billion in grants listings.
Plus, Workforce Pell's problem-ordering problem and AI in apprenticeship.
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Happy Holidays, and a programming note.
Today will be my last newsletter of the year, Congress and all sorts of things pending. Thanks again for reading.
Paid subscribers will get a grants listings-only email next Friday and January 2.
Have a great rest of your 2026, and I’ll see you here for what could be an awfully big January for workforce funding.
Behind today’s paywall.
The Department of Labor paves the way for funding AI-related apprenticeship projects, with a welcome change.
A soberer assessment of Alabama’s talent marketplace and what it means for a new Department of Education funding challenge.
The bluntest instrument statistic I can generate to capture my concern about Workforce Pell.
Editorial note: Hey, if you’re looking for something…
I teased on social media that I had found a new batch of unannounced DOL workforce awards, based on federal spending records. I found additional information on my absolute final fact check that appears to connect this money to a preexisting program in a way I don’t quite understand just yet.
Accordingly, I’m going to hold on the piece I had written to gather more information and revise. Sorry for the tease to nowhere, but I try to avoid confusing an already-confusing funding environment while getting out information that just doesn’t seem to find the street otherwise. I’d rather take some time to get things right and give you a clearer picture of where this money is going.
Toplines.
News you should know about money and things getting people to work.
New apprenticeship numbers are out. They’re still not great.
Since the shutdown ended, I have been keeping a close eye on DOL’s official tally of registered apprentices. It turned out that the White House and DOL had spent much of the year playing up a number of new apprentices that actually was behind pace from the Biden Administration and likely meant it would be next decade before America hit the Trump Administration’s goal of one million active apprentices.
These numbers tend to jump unexpectedly because of a long time horizon for when data filters into DOL’s apprentice-tracking systems, which aren’t the best on data hygiene anyway. But I also was a bit surprised we hadn’t seen an update sooner given that the rap on the Administration’s apprenticeship actions—talk but no real action—is getting media attention outside our little niche.
Well, the updates came this week, including the first numbers for the fiscal year that started on October 1, the first full one of Trump II. Here’s the good news for all of us who think apprenticeship is good: active apprentices were finally greater than 700,000—around 703,000 to round up—during the fiscal year 2025, which ended in September, sneaking past 5 percent year-over-year growth from fiscal year 2024. Fiscal year 2026 numbers are just a thousand fewer apprentices as of now.
Here’s the bad news for the Administration, politically: the 2025 figure is still three quarters of a percent point lower than the last full year of the Biden Administration, fiscal year 2024. That’s with another noticeable reduction of fiscal year 2024’s active apprenticeship numbers, which were at 679,000 on September 23, 670,000 on September 24, and 668,000 today. Even with the latest markdown, the White House still looks like it was bragging about being offpace earlier this year, and the Administration looks behind the last full years of the Biden Administration’s growth for apprenticeship, which correlates to now-canceled federal funding.
We also still won’t meet one million apprentices until 2032 using the rosiest estimated pace of growth I can conjure: 5.79 percent, the average of the past three fiscal years. As of today, it’s reasonable to assume that pace is a little too optimistic due to labor-market cooling, the aftereffects of Trump White House infrastructure funding cuts that have eliminated apprentice jobs, and the possibility of congressional funding cuts for workforce programs that funnel into Registered Apprenticeship. This week, an analysis by the advocacy group Apprenticeship for America had a similar projection as mine, not seeing the one-million mark passed until around the year of the Brisbane Olympics.
The Administration still seems a bit out of sorts on how it’s getting to one million, including whether there will be a plan to do so as directed in an April executive order. It’s told press that an August workforce plan that explicitly said it wasn’t the plan for apprenticeship is the plan for apprenticeship—an apparent error parroted by the chair of the Senate HELP Committee several weeks ago. A DOL request for information published last week discussed the Administration’s intention to “develop a plan to reach and surpass one million new active apprentices in RA programs” while not acknowledging that an executive order called for that plan by August.
It remains bad that these numbers keep jumping around even though the hay should have been well into the barn by now for fiscal year 2024. When 9,000 Biden-year apprentices disappeared in a single day in September, I heard from plenty of people who thought the Administration was manipulating the data. I still think apprenticeship data gathering is too unpredictable to make that call, but if DOL keeps reducing the Biden figures while posting pretty modest gains on its end, that notion isn’t going to go away.
Roundup.
A few odds and ends to be aware of around workforce this week:
The kids are AI-ight. Sort of. The College Board published more last week from its survey on AI use among high schoolers. My takeaway is that “AI literacy” may not be the bigger issue so much as AI access, along with AI resistance. Private schoolers appear likelier to have access to AI, which may not be available on public school networks. High achievers are more likely to use AI, as are kids from more educated backgrounds. And students of color also appear more likely to be frequent AI users than White students. All this will be very interesting to track as Trump II shapes its AI funding. More on that behind the paywall.
The young-ening of apprenticeship. AFA’s analysis, which I mentioned earlier, had a lot to chew on, but the thing that drew my eye is that AFA concluded apprentices are younger than they used to be even if most are older than 25. I have mixed feelings because I think apprenticeship is an awesome (and still under-used) way to help the older golden workforce training population get over the hump for the living wage.
This week’s grants listings number: $7.1 billion.
The number remains healthy, and I added a new state to the listings for the first time.