Apprenticeships are a trending alternative to college — but there's a hitch

Joey Cook was 17 and a junior in high school when he heard about a way to learn a profession while getting paid: by landing an apprenticeship, a path into the workforce that everyone was suddenly talking about as an alternative to college.

"I didn't want to go get an associate degree," he says. "I didn't want to get a bachelor's degree." Cook wanted a certification in heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, an in-demand field in his rural Texas hometown of Hamlin.

An apprenticeship would lead to that. But when he began making inquiries, he was told that if he wanted an apprenticeship, he'd have to find it himself.

His disappointment was brief; a local HVAC company happened to be looking for apprentices, and hired him. "It was perfect timing," Cook recalls. He sailed through the training and now, at 20, is working at the company full time.

But Cook's experience also spotlights a big hitch in the movement for apprenticeships, even as they're being pushed by policymakers and politicians of all stripes and expanded beyond the trades to jobs in tech and other industries: Demand for apprenticeships is outpacing their availability.

"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 organization that now works to find apprenticeships for students in and around Hamlin, including at the high school Cook attended.

A case of demand outrunning supply

Apprenticeships combine paid on-the-job training with classroom time. Increasing their use has bipartisan support and was a rare subject of agreement between the presidential candidates in the recent election.

They've also benefited from growing public skepticism about the need for college: Only 1 in 4 adults now says a four-year degree is extremely or very important to get a good job, the Pew Research Center finds. And nearly two-thirds of 14- to 18-year-olds say their ideal education would involve learning skills on the job, as in apprenticeships, according to a survey by the ECMC Group

Put simply, Williams says: "We have more learners than we have employers."

There are currently 680,288 Americans in apprenticeships, according to the U.S. Department of Labor — up 89 percent since 2014, the earliest year for which the figure is available.

But that's not even half of 1 percent of the U.S. workforce. By comparison, there are more than 18 million Americans in college.

An emerging body of research nationwide blames this imbalance partly on reluctance among employers to provide apprenticeships. Training people for work, after all, was a job that most of them previously relied on colleges and universities to do.

Apprenticeships are likely to continue to be encouraged under President Donald Trump, who pushed them in his first administration and whose nominee for education secretary, Linda McMahon, is a vocal booster. His opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, promised to double the number of apprenticeships.

But employers find them expensive to set up, 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 at 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 fact, 94 percent of apprentices stay with their employers when they're finished with their programs, according to the Labor Department. And for every dollar invested in an apprenticeship, an employer realizes an average return of $1.44, the Urban Institute found.

"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 big companies, he adds, need help 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 many of those big companies as a senior workforce development specialist for the city of San Francisco. Even at big tech firms that have started apprenticeship programs, he says, those 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 recent publicity around apprenticeships means people "think they can roll right in and go ahead and get" one, says Kathy Neary, chief strategy and business engagement officer at 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 offers apprenticeships for high school 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 process

Among other things, employers are discouraged by red tape. The federal government recognizes so-called registered apprenticeships, which require employers to meet quality standards and provide worker protections and must be approved by the Department of Labor or a state apprenticeship agency.

"It's a ton of paperwork," says Williams of Edu-REACH.

The Labor Department proposed updates to the regulations aimed at strengthening worker protections, among other changes. Critics complained this would only make things worse, and the proposal was quietly withdrawn last month.