Apprenticeships Are One Of The Trending Ways To College – But There’s A Hitch
“Those employers are really hard to find,” said Brittany Williams, chief partnership officer at Edu-REACH – which stands for Rural Education Achievement for Community Hope – a non-profit organization now working to find training for students in and around Hamlin, including. at the high school Cook attended.
It’s a case of demand exceeding supply
Apprenticeships include paid on-the-job training and classroom time. Expanding their use has bipartisan support and has been a rare topic of agreement among presidential candidates in recent elections.
They’ve also benefited from growing public skepticism about the need for college: Only 1 in 4 adults now say a four-year degree is very or very important to getting a good job, the Pew Research Center found. And nearly two-thirds of 14- to 18-year-olds say their ideal education would include learning skills on the job, such as in an apprenticeship, according to research by the ECMC Group.
But while many Americans may see training as a way to get a job, employers have often been slow to offer it.
Simply put, Williams says: “We have more students than we have employers.”
They exist right now There are 680,288 Americans in apprenticeshipsaccording to the US Department of Labor – 89 percent as of 2014, the first year for which this figure is available.
But that’s not even half of one percent of the US workforce. In comparison, there are more than 18 million Americans in college.
An emerging body of research across the country blames this disparity in part on employers’ reluctance to provide apprenticeships. Training people for work, after all, was a job that most of them previously relied on in colleges and universities.
Apprenticeships are likely to continue to be promoted under President Donald Trump, who pushed them in his first administration and appointed Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who is promoting the word. His opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, has promised to double the number of apprentices.
But employers find it expensive to stop, because instructors have to be paid and trained.
“What’s holding it back is the cost, in terms of the financial cost and the people who will interview the trainees,” said Nicole Smith, an economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “The way employers see them, they will invest this money and train these people, but they are not sure if they will keep it. There is no contract that says you have to stay. And who wants to train their rivals? There is no.”
In fact, 94 percent of students are apprentices stay with their employers when they are done with their plans, according to the Ministry of Manpower. And for every dollar invested in job training, the employer it gets an average return of $1.44the Urban Institute found.
“Students, on the other hand, cost money because they don’t know everything yet, and they still need to be trained,” said Robert Lerman, former professor of economics at American University, and chairman of Apprenticeships for America. . But on the other hand, they do things that you would have to pay someone else for anyway. So if employers do it right, they can get a lot of their money back very quickly.”
Still, getting tenants on board “is the stage we’re at right now,” Lerman said. “You have to go out and help the employer to change what they are doing in hiring and training employees, and that is not easy.”
Even large companies, he adds, need help setting up a plan. “And if that’s the case with them, you can imagine what happens with smaller companies. They don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
Orrian Willis works with many of those big companies as a senior human resources development specialist for the city of San Francisco. Even at large tech companies that have started apprenticeship programs, he says those efforts are small.
“We have seen some of the companies we work with post their courses on Indeed or LinkedIn and in a few days they have to take them down, because they received so many requests.”
All the recent publicity about apprenticeships means people “think they can go in and keep getting” one, said Kathy Neary, chief strategy and business officer at the Center of Workforce Innovations in northwest Indiana.
That is not true.
“We don’t have nearly enough seats to meet the demand,” said Jennie Niles, president and CEO of CityWorks DC, a nonprofit that provides internships to high school students in Washington, D.C. “The reason we don’t have the demand comes from CityWorks DC. employers because it is too complicated. Employers need to make it easy for them first.”
Requests to reverse the process
For one thing, employers are discouraged by red tape. The federal government recognizes so-called registered training, which requires employers to meet quality standards and provide worker protections and must be approved by the Department of Labor or a state vocational training agency.
“It’s a lot of paperwork,” said Williams of Edu-REACH.
The Department of Labor suggested regulations updates aimed at strengthening the protection of workers, among other reforms. Critics complained that this would make things worse, and the proposal was made it was quietly withdrawn last month.
The proposed laws filled hundreds of pages, threatening “skipping the program and introduce confusion and unintended consequences,” according to the non-profit organization Jobs for the Future. “Employers find the current apprenticeship system confusing and difficult already.”
The agency argued that the addition would make apprenticeships more difficult for employers and reduce rather than increase the number of apprenticeships available.
The first Trump administration created a new category of apprenticeships, called “industry-recognized,” run by employers’ organizations instead of requiring the existing level of government oversight. They were eliminated by the Biden administration, but some observers expect they may now be reintroduced.
There are also calls for more support for government funding for apprenticeships. Many states already offer apprenticeship tax credits to employers, ranging from $1,000 per year per student in South Carolina to $7,500 in Connecticut.
Apprenticeship advocates are calling for more funding for intermediaries like Edu-REACH and CityWorks DC that connect prospective apprentices with employers.
“We have to help guide the business by creating these types of experiences,” said Betsy Revell, senior vice president at EmployIndy, an Indianapolis-based staffing board that does this. “They need a lot of help to be able to understand it. They have never had to supervise a 16- or 17-year-old before, or help them identify subjects” that are usually part of learning programs.
Back in Hamlin, Texas, Joey Cook saw this firsthand, as a young student.
He says: “I see both sides. Although apprenticeship was a good option for him, “in businesses, they take faith in children who have never had a formal job.”
Until more employers close that gap, said Krysti Specht, who co-directs the Jobs for the Future internship center, “it doesn’t make sense to me to build a foundation of opportunities that aren’t there.”
