American Apprenticeship Degree Initiative
Summary
In 2023, Reach University committed to launching a first of its kind in the United States, American Apprenticeship Degree Initiative that will serve as a comprehensive Technical Assistance provider for state systems, colleges and universities, and industry partners to yield 3 million apprenticeship degrees by 2035. The Apprenticeship Degree model enables employees across various industries including health care, manufacturing, and education to accelerate their advancement and income generating potential within their jobs while simultaneously earning a higher education degree equivalent.
Approach
Reach is launching the American Apprenticeship Degree Initiative (AADI) , a learning hub, research center, and clearinghouse for best practices, to further its technical assistance and collective impact objectives. AADI will facilitate cohorts of institutions, organizations, and employers looking to adopt apprenticeship degrees, and provide a forum for best practice sharing, problem-solving, planning, and launching innovative job-embedded degree pathways.
What: Apprenticeship-based degrees offer a (a) salary, (b) degree without student debt; and (c) tight linkage between postsecondary education and job skills currently needed in the workplace without compromising on the critical thinking and problem solving and communication skills that traditionally come with a degree.
Through AADI, Reach University seeks to enable institutions across the country to build pipelines of diverse talent to meet the needs of the local employers, while providing working students with the opportunity to get paid while they earn a debt-free undergraduate degree. This work provides a unique opportunity to diverse job seekers who wish to attain career-enhancing degrees and credentials while maintaining their employment.
AADI will serve as a comprehensive Technical Assistance provider for state systems, colleges and universities, and industry partners to yield 12,000,000 apprenticeship degree candidates by 2035. This will account for over 50% of nationwide enrollment in higher education and will provide sustainable Grow Your Own (GYO) strategies for both urban and rural communities across the country.
Expertise and Skills: AADI will be led by Dr. Eric Dunker, an Aspen Fellow who led the launch of several successful apprenticeship degree initiatives and the nation’s first community college founded through collective impact co-located with K-12, a four-year partner, a regional workforce center, regional industry, and a small business development center. AADI staff will bring the requisite experience to work effectively with states, colleges, and industry on scaling job-embedded degree pathways.
Action Plan
Reach will enable IHEs to adopt Reach’s apprenticeship-based degree model. AADI’s facilitator and staff will familiarize partner cohorts with the following foundational elements needed to build a successful Apprenticeship Degree Initiative:
Pillars for an Apprenticeship Degree Program
Designing an Apprenticeship-Based Degree Program
Financing an Apprenticeship-Based Degree Program
Leading a Change Management Process for Faculty & Securing Internal Approvals
Accreditor Program Approvals
Implementing an Apprenticeship-Based Degree Program
Year 1: Launch
Promotion, media, convening, developing networks, beginning initial technical assistance work with initial committed partners, building AADI team.
Years 2 through 5: Field Building
Formalizing approach, determining metrics for success, capacity building, developing evaluation methods, moving stakeholders through technical assistance to implementation
Years 6 through 10: Changing Systems and Critical Shifts
Ensuring efficiency, establishing AADI as a leader in the field, high level collaborations alongside foreign and domestic agencies, industry, higher ed, leaders, and media outlets. Refining existing partners with cutting edge technical assistance work as implementation of apprenticeship degrees begin to scale and take a foothold in American higher education.
Years 11 through 12: Achieving Goals and Apprenticeship Degree Scale
Sustaining apprenticeship degree movement with on-going technical assistance, working with regional apprenticeship degree champions in spreading the movement, influencing state higher education finance systems to incentivize apprenticeship degrees at scale, working with federal department of financial aid to accommodate apprenticeship degrees in policy, etc. Student loan debt will go down dramatically for the first time in American Higher Education due to the spread and influence of no-debt apprenticeship degrees. Sectors with historical shortages of workers will now have sustainable talent pipelines in both urban and rural America with demographics that represent the local community.
Background
Every year, millions of Americans are forced to choose between a degree and a job. As a consequence, nearly 40 million Americans have exited a college pathway without finishing. Approximately $280 billion in student debt is carried by people with no degree. The undergraduate completion rate is 44% overall; 26% for Black students; 18% for Hispanic students; and 20% for first-generation college students.
Instead, imagine a world where effort and merit, not money or connections, determine who gets ahead, and where nobody is forced to choose between holding a job and pursuing a degree. Reach University is the regionally accredited non-profit institution dedicated to pioneering the “apprenticeship degree” – a fully job-embedded pathway where half the learning comes from on-the-job work and half comes from related college courses – to address the nationwide teacher shortage. Learners earn a living and turn their job into a degree, not the other way around, with zero student debt.
Building on the promise of this model, Reach University and its commitment partners will announce at CGI 2023 the launch of the American Apprenticeship Degree Initiative (AADI) to enable IHEs, state systems, employers, and organizations across the country to adopt and promote apprenticeship degrees – across multiple sectors.
By advancing the apprenticeship degree as the ultimate convergence of higher education and workforce development, this commitment seeks to solve critical shortages in high demand fields like teaching, advanced manufacturing, and healthcare (where millions of vacancies are projected by 2030 (BLS, 2023) ) , mitigate the growing student loan debt crisis, and provide a roadmap for colleges and universities to ensure equitable outcomes for students pursuing career advancement and higher education.
Progress Update
Partnership Opportunities
Reach University is eager to engage in field building activities while pioneering this innovative work. Reach will need to develop metrics for success, evaluation frameworks, and build capacity to ensure efficacy and ongoing improvement. Financial resources toward capacity building efforts will enable AADI to become a north star for agencies, IHEs, and industries committed to ensuring equity and upward mobility through apprenticeship degrees.
As Reach University promotes the launch of AADI and its ongoing work, wide scale promotion of AADI’s mission through CGI, social media, marketing, conferences, white papers and other media support would be greatly appreciated.
Lastly, to further this work AADI will need to connect with and develop a large network of labor, community, NGO, governmental, industry, and academic leaders. Introductions to these changemakers through participation in roundtables, forums, consortiums, and conferences will meaningfully impact higher education and the future of work
Financial Support: It is important that entities participating in AADI cohorts commit to “showing up” at the leadership level during regularly scheduled planning sessions, in addition to identifying opportunities for philanthropic support to offset the time and indirect costs of engaging in this work. Partners will dedicate a partial FTE staff member to the work required. AADI will also require that partners have a regional strategy to scale and share their implementation success upon the concussion of the TA work. When they reach their philanthropic goals, the platform hopes to provide $50,000 to each partner to support their participation in their cohort. For the statewide work, they will work to provide system level strategies to incentivize and finance IHE’s to implement apprenticeship degrees.
Best Practices: AADI will engage the participants in best practices for providing apprenticeship degrees using the Reach Method and AADI derived principles to ensure efficacy and success.