Apprenticeships are a Trending Alternative to College — But There’s a Hitch
“Those employers are really dang hard to find,” says Brittany Williams, chief partnerships officer at Edu-REACH — it stands for Rural Education Achievement for Community Hope — the nonprofit group that now works to discover apprenticeships for college kids in and round Hamlin, together with on the high faculty Cook attended.
A case of demand outrunning provide
Apprenticeships mix paid on-the-job training with classroom time. Increasing their use has bipartisan help and was a uncommon topic of settlement between the presidential candidates within the latest election.
They’ve additionally benefited from rising public skepticism in regards to the want for school: Only 1 in 4 adults now says a four-year diploma is extraordinarily or crucial to get a good job, the Pew Research Center finds. And practically two-thirds of 14- to 18-year-olds say their ideally suited schooling would contain studying expertise on the job, as in apprenticeships, in accordance to a survey by the ECMC Group.
But whereas extra Americans may even see apprenticeships as a path into the workforce, employers have typically been gradual to provide them.
Put merely, Williams says: “We have more learners than we have employers.”
There are currently 680,288 Americans in apprenticeships, in accordance to the U.S. Department of Labor — up 89 p.c since 2014, the earliest 12 months for which the determine is accessible.
But that’s not even half of 1 p.c of the U.S. workforce. By comparability, there are greater than 18 million Americans in school.
An rising body of analysis nationwide blames this imbalance partly on reluctance amongst employers to present apprenticeships. Training folks for work, in any case, was a job that the majority of them beforehand relied on faculties and universities to do.
Apprenticeships are seemingly to proceed to be inspired below President Donald Trump, who pushed them in his first administration and whose nominee for schooling secretary, Linda McMahon, is a vocal booster. His opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, promised to double the variety of apprenticeships.
But employers discover them costly to arrange, since apprentices have to be paid and mentored.
“What’s holding it back is the cost, both in terms of the financial cost and the people who are going to engage the trainees,” says Nicole Smith, chief economist on the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “The way employers see it, they’re going to invest this money and train these people, but they have no guarantee of keeping them. There’s no contract that says you have to stay. And who wants to train their competitors? Nobody.”
In truth, 94 p.c of apprentices stay with their employers after they’re completed with their packages, in accordance to the Labor Department. And for each greenback invested in an apprenticeship, an employer realizes an average return of $1.44, the Urban Institute discovered.
“The apprentices, on the one hand, are costing money because they don’t know everything yet, and they’re having to be mentored,” says Robert Lerman, a former professor of economics at American University, and chair of Apprenticeships for America. “But on the other hand, they’re doing things you’d have to pay somebody else to do anyway. So if employers do it right, they can recoup a lot of their investment pretty fast.”
Still, getting employers on board “is the stage we’re at now,” says Lerman. “You have to get out there and help an employer change what they’ve been doing in recruiting and training workers, and that is not easy.”
Even large firms, he provides, need assistance launching a program. “And if that’s the case with them, you can imagine the case with smaller companies. They don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
Orrian Willis works with a lot of these large firms as a senior workforce improvement specialist for the town of San Francisco. Even at large tech corporations which have started apprenticeship packages, he says, these efforts are small.
“We’ve seen some of our partner companies post their apprenticeships on Indeed or LinkedIn and within a few days they have to take them down, because they’ve gotten so many applications.”
All the latest publicity round apprenticeships means folks “think they can roll right in and go ahead and get” one, says Kathy Neary, chief technique and enterprise engagement officer on the Center of Workforce Innovations in northwest Indiana.
That isn’t proving true.
“We don’t have nearly enough seats to meet demand,” says Jennie Niles, president and CEO of CityWorks DC, a nonprofit that provides apprenticeships for high faculty college students in Washington, D.C. “The reason we don’t have the demand from the employers is because it’s so complicated. Employers first and foremost need it to be easy for them.”
Calls for streamlining the method
Among different issues, employers are discouraged by purple tape. The federal authorities acknowledges so-called registered apprenticeships, which require employers to meet high quality requirements and supply employee protections and have to be permitted by the Department of Labor or a state apprenticeship company.
“It’s a ton of paperwork,” says Williams of Edu-REACH.
The Labor Department proposed updates to the regulations aimed toward strengthening employee protections, amongst different modifications. Critics complained this may solely make issues worse, and the proposal was quietly withdrawn final month.
The recommended guidelines crammed a whole lot of pages, threatening “to overwhelm the system and introduce confusion and unintended penalties,” in accordance to the nonprofit Jobs for the Future. “Employers find the existing apprenticeship system to be confusing and cumbersome already.”
The group argued that the additions would make apprenticeships a good tougher promote to employers and cut back as a substitute of improve the variety of apprenticeships obtainable.
The first Trump administration created a new class of apprenticeships, referred to as “industry-recognized,” run by commerce associations of employers as a substitute of requiring the present stage of presidency oversight. They have been ended by the Biden administration, however some observers count on they could now be reintroduced.
There are additionally requires extra help for presidency subsidies for apprenticeships. Many states already offer employers tax credits for apprenticeships, from $1,000 per 12 months per apprentice in South Carolina up to $7,500 in Connecticut.
Advocates for apprenticeships need extra funding for intermediaries comparable to Edu-REACH and CityWorks DC that join potential apprentices with employers.
“We have to help steward the business through building these types of experiences,” says Betsy Revell, senior vp at Make use ofIndy, the workforce board in Indianapolis, which does this. “They need a lot of help figuring it out. They’ve never had to supervise a 16- or 17-year-old before, or help them identify coursework” that’s usually a a part of apprenticeship packages.
Back in Hamlin, Texas, Joey Cook has seen this himself, as a younger apprentice.
“I can see both sides,” he says. While an apprenticeship was a nice path for him, “for businesses, they’re taking a leap of faith on kids who have never had a legitimate job.”
Until extra employers bridge that hole, says Krysti Specht, who co-directs Jobs for the Future’s heart for apprenticeships, “it doesn’t personally make sense to me to create a groundswell for opportunities that don’t exist.”
