Unpacking apprenticeship degrees and building for Workforce Pell, with Joe Ross of Reach University.
An interview about keeping apprenticeship affordable, preparing for Workforce Pell's uncertainty, and avoiding reinventing the wheel on apprenticeship regulation.
Apprenticeship degrees are an intriguing idea. How people get trained—and what we think of as “college”—likely will be forced to evolve out of necessity due to diminished funding, fewer students, and a mess of other political and financial pressures.
Put very roughly, the idea behind an apprenticeship degree is that you get a college degree by going to work, doing your job, and picking up skills and responsibilities along the way. In theory, it could be a more affordable workaround for workers interested in working for employers who stubbornly (or regulatorily) stick with degree requirements.
Political leaders find apprenticeship degrees intriguing too, although they don’t seem to have an idea for how to get them from “intriguing” to “a thing a lot more people can actually do if they want.” Apprenticeship degrees got brief namechecks in the Trump workforce blueprint1 and the House report2 on a spending bill that would halve American workforce spending and the concepts of warm cookies, children giggling while stomping in mud puddles, and comfortable socks.
To better understand how to turn an intriguing idea into a practical reality, last week I spoke with Joe Ross. Joe is the president and CEO of Reach University and the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree, which, as you might gather, has been at the forefront of this whole apprenticeship degree thing. He also co-hosts the Apprenticeship 2.0 podcast, on which I was a guest in August.
Below, we talk about how the apprenticeship degree is more about responding to issues with college than apprenticeship, building for Workforce Pell, and regulating the apprenticeship degree at a time when Registered Apprenticeship appears in regulatory lockdown.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nick: I feel like my readers are obviously very familiar with a college degree, and I have a lot of readers familiar with apprenticeship. For folks who have those references, can you unpack what is the apprenticeship degree and how you merge those two things together from a mechanical standpoint?
Joe Ross: My proposition is that an apprenticeship degree is actually a different thing from a traditional degree and it’s a different thing from a traditional apprenticeship even though it lives in both worlds.
I usually refer to my distinguishing definition as “the ABCs of apprenticeship degrees.” Just like the ABC song, this is not going to end with C, but I’m not going to go to Z, right? A stands for “affordability.” My one-liner here is, “Apprentices have always been asked for their sweat but never for their debt.” I think a definitional principle should be that there is no student debt in an apprenticeship degree just like there’s no student debt in an apprenticeship. There may be a nominal contribution out of pocket but it is nominal and the cost of instruction in an apprenticeship degree should be borne by the employer or by other sources of tuition support. Could be a local county, could be the Department of Labor, could be a legislator, but it should not be a tuition burden that a learner carries with them.
B stands for “based in the workplace from day one to the day of completion.” Like any apprenticeship, an apprenticeship degree starts with a paid job and it is designed to end with a better paid job. The workplace is the learning place; colleagues are classmates and mentors. The employer is in the front seat when it comes to designing the overall learning experience with the academic provider.
C stands for “credit for learning at work,” which has kind of a double meaning. It does mean learning literally at work through on-the-job practice. It also means learning put to work. “Learning at work” meaning theory connected to practice.
If I just stopped there, probably someone who’s familiar with apprenticeship would say, “You’ve basically described an apprenticeship.” Maybe if you add in a little bit more on mentorship, you’d be done. So, let me go on. An apprenticeship degree, if you will, also has a D, which is the degree itself. It does render an academic credential at the associate, bachelor’s, master’s, potentially the doctoral level. It’s a degree without compromise. It’s not an associate apprenticeship. It’s an associate of arts.
It’s intended to actually carry the best of what we expect higher education to provide in terms of long-term durable skills, critical thinking skills, the capacity to be a member of civic society, to be creative, to be entrepreneurial, to remix ideas—all the things you expect from a degree. Also, it’s expected to provide the short-term, near-term, immediate job skills you need right now to succeed in a position the employer is hoping you for you to step into. Finally, I would say there’s an E here, which is that you’ve got orientation around employers and employees. Employers are involved in the design. There’s employee voice in the process.
The case I’m making is that it’s different from traditional degrees, it’s different from traditional apprenticeship, but it draws on both.
Nick: I want to zoom in real quick on how I appreciate the debt-free part because it’s something I’ve been thinking about. As we’re talking about getting to one million apprentices, something lost in the weeds is that apprenticeship may not necessarily be a debt-free proposition for a lot of workers due to the cost of tuition for related instruction required by federal regulations. If we’re going to try to get people into more apprenticeships, that could be a bit of a turnoff. Yet, I have been hearing different things all year about policymakers’ willingness to pay for that.
Who should be helping pay for related instruction and other costs in your opinion? Is it better on the employer end? Is it better on the government end? And how should that structure be built in?
Joe: The affordability thing I think is the hardest thing for higher ed to get itself around. It’s the hardest thing. You [asked] how it’s paid for, so let me start there. We have found at Reach University that a modest candidate participation [cost] actually provides some skin in the game and seems to work quite well.
We made a commitment that no one pay out of pocket more than $75 a month, or $900 a year. Of course, a participant is earning a paycheck. Typically, they can afford $75 a month, but what is a sort of modest contribution for a candidate is going to change over time. I certainly wouldn’t want to see that expand to $200 a month or $300 a month and see education providers saying, “Well, it’s less than your car payments, so go ahead and do it.”
[The cost] has to be braided together with a combination of things. Pell provides a significant source of resources to put together the cost of a program. If the Pell grant were predictably awarded at sort of a set amount, it might just be enough. Right? On average at Reach University, we currently get about $4,000 a year in Pell [per candidate]. That plus the $900 candidate contribution is enough for me to run a model around. I could do that every day of the week. But you can’t use one person’s Pell for somebody else’s lack of Pell. You can’t allocate someone who gets a $7,000 Pell award to subsidize the cost of someone who gets nothing in Pell.
I think that in some sectors employer contributions are really obvious answers. The health care companies are typically providing an employee education benefit up to the IRS maximum, which is $5,250 a year. If that were intentionally allocated towards work-based learning and apprenticeship degrees, that itself should be enough to run lots of programs. That could also be braided together with funding from the Department of Labor, or from a federal grant that’s awarded to a local community, or through a state setaside at the governor’s level, or through a workforce board. I think the challenge we’re seeing is that there are a lot of people that have given up on workforce boards, especially colleges that are trying to do apprenticeship degrees. [The boards are] different in different places and some workforce boards are supporting local training that works with apprenticeship degrees and others haven’t or are supporting other initiatives.
I want to come back to the affordability side of it because degrees typically cost more than $5,000, $6,000, or $7,000 a year. And there’s no reason that they should cost more than $5,000, $6,000, or $7,000 a year, but they do. You can run a high-quality program that is consistent with the economics of traditional apprenticeship and related instruction [for that amount]. I think that is the challenge for higher ed in this new era—how to run high-quality programs at a reasonable cost that the market can bear rather than running programs with the assumption that there’s unlimited student debt without underwriting.
Nick: How do you feel about where you guys are on Workforce Pell and your ability to be in that game? Because I expect those payments probably are going to be closer to $2,500 per program program, not the $7,000 you were talking about a moment ago.
Joe: I think predictability is a real challenge for for anyone in in in in a market, right? And so to the extent that a Workforce Pell award is predictable, the market will respond in a way that economically makes sense.
As an example, if I was told anyone in this certificate program is going to receive $2,500 in Workforce Pell, I can build a model around that and I can run that and I can make that one-year certificate stackable into an associate degree, which could be stackable into a bachelor’s degree.
What paralyzes the players on the field is not knowing whether you’re actually even going to get $2,500 per participant because there may be qualification requirements that make what you’re actually going to get a big unknown.
Nick: Registered Apprenticeship can be applied very rigidly and it can be very rigid in terms of when things are sequenced. I’ve seen folks try to adjust the sequencing of activities and getting pushback from registration agencies. Do you guys want to be more in the Registered Apprenticeship game, or do you want to be something else? And do you want to be regulated at all? Because I think the other question is, “Regulation for what and to what end?”
Joe Ross: I think it’s important to define what it is [in regulation] because whether at the federal level or in the various states apprenticeship degrees may become eligible for various kinds of public funding. As a policy priority, one thing we are thinking a lot about is defining an apprenticeship degree carefully in a way that doesn’t allow entrance by those who are seeking to sort of take advantage of something without actually delivering what we’re trying to deliver.
That brings me back to like this idea that we could articulate a definition that has specifics around affordability, around being based in a paid job, around really recognizing credit for work for a substantial portion of the program, around rendering a degree of true value around employer engagement and employee engagement in the model. I think a definition like that would keep out bad players who are trying to take advantage of a new source of revenue that they can squeeze to the nth degree.
Nick: With my usual caveat that things change fast in a Trump administration, everything I’ve seen and heard feels like we’re probably not getting some dramatic reinvention of what Registered Apprenticeship is.
From your perspective, I’m wondering about the idea of having an apprenticeship degree as a regulatory add-on. Like is that something you guys would be comfortable with? Something along the lines of a separate status that does not change what is the core of Registered Apprenticeship, but has Registered Apprenticeship features and requirements built into a special registration for an apprenticeship degree—if we’re assuming that the core of Registered Apprenticeship is locked in amber for the next few years?
Joe: it’s a good question. My instinct if all things were possible would be that an apprenticeship degree should be recognized as a distinctive thing, then the various states could decide whether and to what extent they want to fund it through state appropriations or through federal Department of Labor dollars. I don’t know if that’s realistic. I think that just as it’s hard to change registration for the whole system, I think creating a new category could be equally challenging. Again, who knows how things will play out?
Nick: I mean, I was there in Trump I for IRAPs. It was trying to create a new category. It was challenging.
Joe: Exactly. I think the best bet is to modify the current registration system to accommodate the differences in different occupations and to accommodate those fields that that are suited for an apprenticeship degree with with some flexibilities rather than inventing something knew out of whole cloth.
I think part of what we’re working on is a set of proposals for registration that would enable the the Registered Apprenticeship system to accommodate apprenticeship degrees as a component of that system. Even though apprenticeship degrees can live separate from a RAP, concurrent with a RAP, they can occur before a RAP and after a RAP. They are themselves something that deserves registration.
If there’s a way straightforward way to do that, I think it’s worth a go rather than trying to convince the powers that be to invent a whole new class or category.
Card subject to change.
Thanks to Joe for a great conversation. As you read this, I’m out in Arizona for the Competency-Based Education Network’s conference in Phoenix, which has been a ton of fun.
Looks like we’re at the end of the shutdown. I’m reviewing the full-year funding bills and will have any key insights for paid readers on Friday.
We’re also very close to rounding out the year and terrifyingly close to the first anniversary of this newsletter. I have many zany plans. Terrifyingly zany.
Specifically, the blueprint says the Administration will pursue “[a]dditional targeted approaches . . . to expand the use of degree apprenticeships, including identifying appropriate flexibilities that will make these models more viable.” There isn’t much in the way of clues as to what those “targeted approaches” will be.
“The Committee encourages DOL to support apprenticeship degree programs where institutions of higher education integrate the awarding of affordable college degrees with the hallmarks of registered apprenticeships. The Committee further encourages DOL to prioritize funding for apprenticeship degrees in future Funding Opportunity Announcements.”
Separately, the report says: “The Committee encourages the Department to collaborate with the Department of Education in supporting the establishment of apprenticeship degree programs at 4-year institutions of higher education to align workforce development efforts and post-secondary education in industries such as advanced manufacturing, information technology, healthcare, and energy.”
Neat. Unless an apprenticeship degree is plugged into Registered Apprenticeship, DOL can’t spend its most plentiful source of apprenticeship funding on apprenticeship degrees. That’s not impossible, but as Joe and I cover in the main text above, the bureaucratic structure of apprenticeship make it challenging. I have seen and heard some incredible impracticality—divorced from the actual law or industry practice—on the sequencing of instruction and work by apprenticeship officials that holds up registration, including in very red states.