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. I didn’t want to get a bachelor’s degree,” said Cook. He wanted to get a certification in heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, an in-demand field in his rural western Texas hometown of Hamlin.
An apprenticeship would lead to that. So when he ran into the school superintendent at a basketball game, Cook asked about one — and 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,” said Cook, who 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,” said 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.
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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 election just ended.
Apprenticeships have also benefited from growing public skepticism about the need for college: Only one in four adults now says having 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 educations would involve learning skills on the job, as in apprenticeships, according to a survey by the ECMC Group. (ECMC group is affiliated with the ECMC Foundation, one of many funders of The Hechinger Report.)
But while more Americans may see apprenticeships as a path into the workforce, employers have been generally slow to offer them.
Put simply, Williams said: “We have more learners than we have employers.”
There are 679,142 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.
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“Apprenticeship in America remains massively under-scaled,” the advocacy group Apprenticeships for America pronounced in September. In Indiana, which is encouraging apprenticeships in high school, “there is no data that there is sufficient organic employer demand for these programs,” an independent fiscal watchdog found.
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 of them. 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,” said 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 Department of Labor. 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,” said 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,” said 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 when we have worked with large corporations, they want help in setting it up. 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.”
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Orrian Willis works with many of those big companies as a senior workforce development specialist for the city of San Francisco. A lack of available apprenticeships “is definitely a pinch point,” he said. Even at big tech firms that have started apprenticeship programs, “They’re really 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.”
Meanwhile, apprenticeships continue to be hyped, including by people who recommend them as an alternative to college. The problem is, “If you get people to apply for apprenticeships without increasing the number of apprenticeship offers, you’re just creating waiting lists,” Lerman said.
All the publicity about apprenticeships means people “think they can roll right in and go ahead and get” one, said Kathy Neary, chief strategy and business engagement officer at the Center of Workforce Innovations in northwest Indiana.
That isn’t proving true.
In Washington, D.C., “We don’t have nearly enough seats to meet demand” for apprenticeships for high school students, said Jennie Niles, president and CEO of the nonprofit CityWorks DC. “But 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.”
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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,” said Brittany Williams, in western Texas.
The Labor Department proposed updates to the regulations aimed at strengthening worker protections, among other changes. But critics complained this would only make things worse. The proposal was quietly withdrawn last month.
The suggested new rules filled hundreds of pages, threatening “to overwhelm the system and introduce confusion and unintended consequences,” according to the nonprofit Jobs for the Future. “Employers find the existing apprenticeship system to be confusing and cumbersome already.”
The organization argued that the additions would make apprenticeships an even harder sell to employers and reduce instead of increase the number of apprenticeships available.
The first Trump administration created a new category of apprenticeships, called “industry-recognized,” run by trade associations of employers instead of requiring the existing level of government oversight. They were ended by the Biden administration, but observers expect they may be reintroduced.
“If you look at apprenticeship programs, most of the resources that are geared toward them are really based on registered apprenticeships,” said Smith, at Georgetown. “But there’s many unregistered apprentice programs that maybe we should figure out how to incentivize, too, to mop up some of this demand.”
There are also calls for more support for government subsidies for apprenticeships. Many states already offer employers tax credits for apprenticeships of from $1,000 per year, per apprentice in South Carolina to up to $7,500, in Connecticut.
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Crusaders for apprenticeships want more funding for intermediaries such as Edu-REACH and CityWorks DC that connect prospective apprentices with employers.
“We have to help steward the business through building these types of experiences,” said Betsy Revell, senior vice president for career-connected learning at EmployIndy, 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 is typically a part of apprenticeship programs.
Back in Hamlin, Texas, Joey Cook has witnessed this himself, as a young apprentice.
“I can see both sides,” Cook said. An apprenticeship was a great path to a job for him. But “for businesses, they’re taking a leap of faith on kids who have never had a legitimate job.”
Until more employers bridge that gap, said Krysti Specht, who directs Jobs for the Future’s center for apprenticeships, “it doesn’t personally make sense to me to create a groundswell for opportunities that don’t exist.”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556 or [email protected].
This story about apprenticeships was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.