Apprenticeship 2.0 | The Origin & Future of U.S. Apprenticeship Degrees in Higher Education

On a very special episode of Apprenticeship 2.0, Joe Edelheit Ross, president of Reach University, is joined by Dr. Mallory Dwinal-Palisch, Reach’s founder and co-leader. Together, Mallory and Joe co-founded the U.S. Apprenticeship Degree and are at the forefront of refining and scaling its core tenets — affordability, employer-based university learning, and earning credit for work —across Reach’s states of operation and all of traditional higher education.

Let’s put a quarter in the Apprenticeship 2.0 jukebox and uncover the origins of our nation’s first and only on-the-job university, the process of scaling Apprenticeship Degrees, and why Reach University and its National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree are equipping peer colleges, states, and employers with the playbook to deploy their own Apprenticeship Degree programs. 

The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity. To hear the full episode, please listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get  your podcasts.

Joe: So welcome to the podcast, finally, Dr. Mallory Dwinal-Palisch, the founder and chancellor of Reach University.

I've heard you tell the story of how you came up with the various ideas that came together and informed the coming together of Reach University. Let’s put a quarter in the jukebox and I’ll ask you to tell the story of how did you come up with all of this?

Mallory: All right. But be warned, I came with laundry money. I got all my own quarters.

So I started out professionally as an academic at Oxford University, which is where I was doing my doctoral research on rural teacher labor shortages. 

And I kept getting frustrated over and over again with two big problems. One, the data was hot trash. As an economist, you are only as good as your data set and we could not get any real consistent databases that would allow us to extrapolate teacher supply.

And so being able to make any approximations on where the labor market was going was, to a certain degree, a lot of smoke and mirrors. 

The second and way more important challenge that I kept running up against was the “so what” factor – even when some findings were glaringly obvious, no matter how shoddy the data was. 

For example, the fact that we were never going to fix teacher shortages, especially in rural areas, but really anywhere until we got serious about changing how universities train those teachers. And so even with bad shoddy data, we saw that loud and clear as day.

Was any university going to do anything about it? Was anyone going to actually follow those reports and do anything to change those outcomes? And the answer seemed pretty clearly to be no.

So I reached the end of my doctoral research, completed my dissertation. And kind of just felt like, “what am I doing here?” And so I left, became a classroom teacher with Teach for America and started going through the experience myself of being a first-year teacher.

I think the most polite way that I could put it is that I got my *** kicked. I was a terrible first-year teacher. I was not doing great work. And I was constantly getting bailed out by the paraprofessionals, the classified staff in our building every single day, who were getting paid a third what I was getting paid, who had none of the formal authority, but were absolutely the ones running the show.

And so at that point, it became pretty clear to me between what I'd seen in the research and what I was experiencing in the building that, “Hey, we need an apprenticeship model because higher ed did not train me to do this work well.” There are a bunch of people in my building who have become way better teachers than I am, just by being in the building every single day, but who can't access a degree and can’t become teachers and we need to invert that. The work should be the training, and the job place should be the campus, and not our current higher ed system. So at that point, I started my own charter high school,  where the whole point was to experiment with this labor model. 

The whole point of the charter school was to experiment with a world in which you could have an apprenticeship-based system for bringing up what we were calling “socio-emotional learning coaches” in the high school setting. People from the community who had the potential to be great teachers and turn that into an apprenticeship that upskilled them into becoming teachers.

But the big challenge we kept having, again, going back to the first genesis of all of this, was that our local two- and four-year institutions would not play ball. They would not support these people, even when the employer was willing to pay their tuition and give them flexibility. 

We could not find any university willing to help these people out and recognize what they were doing on the job and find a way to award credit for that, which brings us to Reach.

Reach was initially meant to be the place to prove out that that was possible, that you could take those individuals who had all the potential in the world, who had all the ability and the desire to become teachers, and find a way to turn that job, whether it was as a paraprofessional in a K-6 classroom, or as some sort of coach, or instructional aid in a secondary school classroom, and create a world in which that job leads to the degree, and not the other way around.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Joe: There's so many places to go from here, but I'm just going to get a little nerdy and technical, because I want to hear the greatest hits about a couple of things that make it possible for Reach's model and for the Apprenticeship Degree to work.

Can you talk to us about how you have reimagined the Carnegie Unit and why that matters to what we do and what other universities should be thinking about?

Mallory: When we first, and I say we, because you entered this scene well before I did, and I know you heard the exact same problems. But everyone kept hand-waving and ringing their hands around like, “Oh, we would love to give credit for work. But the Carnegie Unit, the Carnegie Unit.” 

And so it originally started out with this mystical Carnegie Unit. It was sort of the Oz behind the curtain. And clearly we had to get rid of that. And then we pulled back the curtain.

And that, by the way, felt daunting because the Carnegie Unit is the bedrock for higher education. That would be like saying, “We've got to get humankind off of its addiction to oxygen.”

Then we went in and actually looked at what the Carnegie Unit says, and realized that this is absolutely not only not an impediment to us being able to give credit for work. This could actually become the tool for accelerating it. It's hidden in plain sight. 

And so the Carnegie Unit  looks something like this:

By statutory design, the Carnegie Unit has a 2:1 ratio. For every one hour of seat time, you're supposed to have two hours of what we call, “academic preparation.” And for every one hour of seat time should be about 15 hours per credit.

So if you have a three credit course, you should have 3 x 15 or about 45 hours of instruction from a professor of some kind. And then you should have about 2x that, again, so another 90 hours of going out and preparing for that. And we've always assumed in the Academy that “preparation” means that we are reading textbooks, we are doing problem sets, we are writing essays. But there's no reason that has to be it. The Carnegie credit says nothing about what academic preparation is, just that it needs to happen for a ratio of 2:1.

And so at that point, we looked around and said, but what if the preparation is going and doing this work on the job? And then that seat time is not a professor professing or opining, but a professor helping you make sense, right? What if that time is sense making of, “Hey, what did you see on the job?” 

And so what we realized is that when you actually went to the source text of what a Carnegie credit is and what the Carnegie Unit is, it is a perfect vehicle for Apprenticeship Degrees and for making sure that the work out in the field is actually by a factor of two to one, the foundation and the focus of a degree.

Which was great news because it meant that not only could Reach University offer Apprenticeship Degrees, but that again, every institution in America, which is already running on the Carnegie credit, could do the same if they wanted to. 

And Joe, I'd actually love to pause here before we go any further with me. And you need to give a little bit of your background. And I want it to include in particular, your experience with the Reach Institute prior to us joining up. But also you have some experience working with these universities, right? I'm thinking about your work with NYU bringing job-embedded degrees and five other institutions. You've got your own battle scars here.

Joe: OK, I saw how you did that. But I think what this is building to, and I think there is a thing called the Apprenticeship Degree right now, and it's affordable in an unprecedented way, it's based in the workplace from day one to the day of graduation, and as you were just describing, it renders credit for learning at work. 

All right, so we'll come back to those topics and just take a segue. I will share a little bit about how we collided and the origin of that.

But the story for me starts about the same time that you were here at Oxford.This was 12 to 14 years ago. While you were at Oxford, I was in Oakland trying to run after school programs that were transitioning from traditional after school to what was called “extended learning time,” which meant three extra hours, not just of playing games and hanging out with middle school kids, but also giving them extra English Language support, extra math support…

And when we transitioned to that mission of trying to do things that were academic, our staff, which were all AmeriCorps recent college graduates, were not really here for it. 

They wanted to hang out with kids, but they didn't want to teach them math or English. And I had this challenge: how do I recruit people who want to be teachers to actually serve as after-school assistants?

I was asking around and I was hitting my head against the wall and one of the people who worked for me said, “Well, if you want to recruit people who want to become teachers, then turn them into teachers.” And I was like, “Well, how would I do that?”

He said, “Well, take the after school program and make it like a teacher residency.” 

I started asking around and the idea was “They're in the school already. How do we turn that experience in the school during the day and after the day into a teaching credential?” 

I started knocking on the doors of traditional higher ed. I won't name their names, but it was in the San Francisco Bay Area, all the typical, usual suspects. And they were all like, “Well, we might be able to do something, but it's going to cost 30, 40 or 50,000 dollars. Or even if we were able to do something philanthropic and cost you less, training classes were offered when my staff was working in K-12 schools. 

And I was about to give up and then I was introduced to Page Tompkins, who was the executive director of the Reach Institute for School Leadership. I said, “Look, I've got these people, they're in the school until 6pm every day, they're recent college graduates. They are AmeriCorps volunteers, and I want to figure out how I can cause this experience to lead to them having a teaching credential.”

And he said, “Well, I think we could do that. We'll provide the seminars after the day is over for them in the evening.” 

And I said, “That's great. They may not be able to commute.” And he said, “Well, we'll bring the faculty to the school campuses.”

I said, “That's great.” And then I asked him how much it would cost. And he said it would cost $3,000 a year.

Job-embedded, affordable, credit for work effectively. And so we signed up the Reach Institute, and I think we created the first ever after school-to-teaching pipeline in California. Certainly the first ever that really looked like a teacher residency. And I learned from Page this expression “job-embedded.” I hadn't heard of it before.

But he said, “What's happening here is it's job-embedded so that you can combine theory, the stuff you learn in the university, with what's happening on the job, called practice. So you connect theory with practice because they're in the workplace and it's job-embedded, it's job-embedded, it's job-embedded.” 

I went on to work in higher education and technology, and I ended up having an opportunity to work supporting NYU in their effort to create an online innovative degree program.

And I said to them, “You should make it job-embedded and you should connect theory and practice by doing all the things that I'd learned from the Reach Institute”. And they picked it up and they actually built a program that they literally called the “Embedded Master of Arts and Teaching,” it's changed its name since then. 

But I went through a long period of time based on that thinking about what if workplaces were university campuses as a thing? And I'd heard that in Germany this was a thing there called the Berufsakademie. Unlike you, I didn't do much about it at the time other than howled at the moon. I said, “This is the way everything should be. We should have people getting degrees by doing their job.” And then we met.

So I'm going to put it back on you because we actually encountered each other in a very different context. And you weren't talking about a university right away. That was something that had up your sleeve. You were trying to get a charter school started.

Mallory: So you and I met because you were sitting on the San Mateo County Board of Education. You're one of the Board Trustees. And I was applying to open a new charter school in San Mateo County.

And the whole goal of this school, called Oxford Day Academy, was, “Can we use the Oxford Tutorial Method as a way of accomplishing two things at once? So can we deliver excellent, rigorous academic experience for our learners, for our students by allowing them to go out and experience the real world and then connect it to academic practice through these discursive, Socratic-style Oxford Tutorials? And can we deliver an exceptionally rigorous academic experience for students who are traditionally presumed to only be capable of learning through rote memorization and through the drill and kill model? We can do that. 

We can do right by students. And at the same time, we can sort of go meta on ourselves and use that same combination of workplace learning plus theory being connected through discourse to upskill adults from our community to become those great teachers to build the school that supports those kids.

So it was this sort of two prong approach of a small lab school of only about 100 kids in which learners who are both students and learners who are the adults training to become the teachers are all connecting theory with practice through this discursive Oxford-style Tutorial.

Joe: I've seen so many people come to a board meeting in my life. Your charter had not made it through the district level, so it came to our board at the appeal.

And that room was packed with family members from the community. This was in East Palo Alto and Bellhaven who wanted this school to exist. And it was packed with other folks who were worried about it.

Mallory: The board had never approved a charter school. It had actually declined to approve many large charter school chains that were well-established, such as Rocketship, KIPP, Summit, really high-performing charter schools that are great institutions and went on to get approved at the state and do really well by students. 

What I was told was, “Hey, listen, this is not for the faint of heart. This is a board that's reasonable, but this is not a board that you can just come in and make the normal rah-rah-ree charter school pitch. There has to be a reason here for it. I think what was really interesting is that it did draw a lot of strong emotions on both sides.

There were a lot of families who are really excited about it. There were a lot of people who were not just opposed to it because it was a charter school but found this idea to be fundamentally dangerous and were angry and upset. 

I think that's worth noting because what it comes back to is Apprenticeship Degrees. We're seeing the same thing in higher ed here today. There's a lot of strong feelings on both sides. “Well, this is not what a degree is. This is compromising on the degree.” 

I think the lesson that we learned is not by trying to go to that normal conversation, the normal conversation we have in K-12, in higher ed, wherever it is in the edu-speak. This is about really going back to some brass tacks, common sense, and going back to what the data says.

Not only did Oxford Day Academy get approved at the county level, we were unanimously approved as the first charter ever approved. And then we were unanimously re-approved three years later, which is shorter than normal because everyone was like “Yeah, this is really different.”  We were then unanimously reapproved again and unanimously reauthorized every year since. 

And I think the reason that matters is that while there are a lot of strong emotions around this, when you actually take a look at the research and you dig into empirically what we’re talking about, and the precedent from Europe and the precedent from around the world, it’s just straight up common sense. 

Even here in America, we have Apprenticeship Degrees. We just call them things like medical residency, nursing practicums, right? We now even have the teaching residency movement.

When you go back to the literature and the actual fundamental pillars of what an Apprenticeship Degree is, which I think is worth double-clicking on here, it's pretty unobjectionable, right? No matter how strong the feelings are, it's pretty much beyond reproach from what both the literature and the data and just plain common sense would tell you.

Joe, I wonder if that would be a good point to talk about. What actually is an Apprenticeship Degree? What are those pillars?

Joe: The three definitional things that we're beginning to talk about, and you can think of them as the ABCs because I like things to be easy to remember.

Mallory: The sloganeer strikes again. Sidenote to everyone listening, Joe is what we call the sloganeer because Joe's always got a real quick pithy tagline for anything.

Joe: So “A” stands for affordability. We'll summarize them. “A” stands for affordability, “B” stands for based in the workplace for the entire course of the program, and “C” stands for credit for learning at work.

So the ABCs. We've talked a little bit about the “C.” I went right into the Carnegie Unit. So this is credit for learning at work. How do you do that? And you were trying to do it at the high school level, and now we're doing it at the college level and the university level.

Learning at work has a double meaning. It means learning literally at work, because you're in the workplace and what you're doing on the job and what you're learning on the job counts for credit. It also means learning at work, meaning human knowledge and learning put to work. 

So whether you're awarding credit for someone connecting theory with practice by doing something on the job or they're actually learning something on the job, unpacking the Carnegie Unit, which I made you talk early on about, is how you mechanically get there. 

Going to the “B” based in the workplace: This is actually, I think, just as groundbreaking. Imagine that every degree program starts with a job and culminates in a new job. It started with a job first, and that workplace is the college campus from the beginning to the end. And that really changes the dynamic between a university and employers. 

In the old way of doing things, employers will come to a university looking for the graduates. And in this new way, the university and the employer work together from the beginning, and the employer brings the students to the university effectively. And then they get upskilled.

Mallory: Joe, before you get into “A,” I think we've also got to talk about how much credit for work and how much of that is being ignored for us.

Joe: Back to “C.” Credit for work. How much credit for work?

Mallory: How much? Are we talking about three or four credits? Are we talking about one class, a practicum? Are we talking about a whole semester of student teaching? When we talk about credit for work, Joe, what are we talking about with Apprenticeship Degrees?  

Joe: So, I think it's interesting. It's not a semester. It's not a summer internship. It's not an externship. It is the whole experience so that half the credit in a degree program is coming from the workplace, half. And that was a marker that you, Mallory, put out there first.

You put those words into the universe saying half the credit in a degree program, if it's an Apprenticeship Degree program, it should come from what's happening on the job. The other half can come from seminars that are Oxford-style Tutorial or otherwise in the evenings and the weekends that are flexibly arranged around a learner’s life.

But if half the credit comes from the work, not only is it more relevant and more impactful, deeper learning, but it's a lot more flexible and efficient for all, you know, in all the ways that the traditional higher ed may not be.

And what's interesting about that 50% marker is it actually makes everyone nervous. It did originally. You know, how are you going to count that? Is it allowed? Is it legal? And now what are we seeing?

I'm seeing other institutions who we have talked to because we give away everything we do. We tell them what we do. We show them our syllabi. We show them our practices. This half the learning coming from the workplace seems to be lighting a fire beyond Reach.

Mallory: Yeah, there's an article in NPR about how Southern New Hampshire University was going to be giving up to 50 percent of the credit for the work that people were already doing at places like Walmart Academy or inside of McDonald's U. 

I got to say, I get it. I see it. My sister is a store manager at Starbucks and she was going through her training at  the same time I was going through business school.

Looking at the rigor of what she was having to learn around SKU management and inventory control and managing P&Ls and all of those things, you look around and you say, of course, these people should be getting credit for this work. It's as rigorous, if not more so, than what they're going to be doing in a sterilized classroom down the street. I am excited to see this movement where universities are letting go, let's just name it, letting go of their arrogance. This assumption that if it didn't happen in the Ivory Tower, it couldn't possibly be as good or as rigorous. 

Actually, again, going to the source material, looking at the training and saying, you know what, this is uncannily similar to what we were going to teach. Why don't we just give you credit for the learning that you're doing on the job, for up to half of the degree itself.

Joe: Give me the most abstruse philosophical thing, and I think you and I can make it something you can do on the job. So one of the examples I've talked about is, okay, you want to learn philosophy because it's part of your general education program. Great.

Give me the writings of John Locke. John Locke talks about property ownership being really essential to cultivating the property. That's his theory. We can debate it or not. But challenge someone to talk about what that means in the workplace, in the context of project management, right? You can take so much of actual traditional stuff that happens in higher ed and you can apply it to what's happening in the workplace.

And people can think about it and do things that arise from that that are important. In fact, there are workplace-based training programs that you and I have been exposed to that actually use these great books to build practices and training around how to do management in the nonprofit world. And it's based on those old books.

So you can go to that extreme, but you do not have to, right? Because there is so much really relevant stuff happening in schools and in hospitals and in other workplaces that covers the content of degree programs that are traditionally offered in the Ivory Tower without having to study John Locke.

Mallory: There we go. There you go. We got “B” and “C” covered. Back to “A.”

Joe: All right. So let's go to “A.” “A” is a big one. “A” stands for affordability. It does not stand for accessibility. So “A,” affordability. Why are we not saying accessibility?

The root cause of the lack of accessibility in American higher education is affordability. We have a $2 trillion student debt problem in this country right now. Most degree programs cost at least $20,000 and some cost $80,000 to $100,000 a year. If we want people to turn their job into a degree, it can't be that it's going to turn them upside down financially, so it wasn't worth it in the first place.

So affordability. For us, that has meant $75 a month. That was also something you set out. $75 after non-debt aid for every person in our program. And that has been a huge compelling selling point.

Mallory: By the way, a controversial one, right? I think just going back to, again, I think we might still be, to date, the only institution in the United States who had to hire a lawyer to convince the U.S. Department of Education to let us take student loans, like Perkins Loans, etc…, off of our PPA.

Joe: Let me explain what's going on here. So three years ago, we got eligible for what's called Title IV Federal Financial Aid. We were a brand new university. Mallory, you were leading the charge here. We were a new, unusual university, and we were successful. We were given the approval to give out the Pell Grant. And with that came this litany of things called the Stafford Loan and all these other loans, and they gave it to you as a bundle. And we had never planned to rely on student loans.

And two things happened. One, one of our candidates who was only going to get charged $75 a month, took out a several thousand dollar student loan, and we were flummoxed by that. 

And second, I, this was me, I had this idea for a day before you basically hit me over the head.

I had this idea that one of the ways we could solve for the financial dynamics in one of our graduate programs was to raise the tuition by just a little bit, because now there were student loans available, and your eyes went red. You were right.

It was so tempting. The fact that I was tempted to raise tuition because student loans were now available to us, I think says everything about how we got here right now in higher education.

So what we did is something we thought would be really simple. We went back to the Department of Education and said, we don't want to give out student loans. How do we not give out loans?

Mallory: Including, by the way, we don't want to give out TEACH grants, which are technically grants, but convert to loans if you're not careful. We don't want to do any of that. We basically just want Pell. That's really all we want here.

Joe: Yeah, they were like, “Yeah, what is wrong with you? What are you doing? Is there something we should know about?”

They basically said, “Go back to where you came from. If you want to do this, you're going to have to explain it to yourself. Explain to us. In writing, you're going to have to basically ask for special dispensation not to give out student debt.” 

And so we had to hire a law firm to write an appeal to the Department of Education to let us off the hook so that we could not put our candidates in student debt. S 

And this talk about where I think higher ed, the biggest obstacle for higher ed becoming truly embedded in the American workplace without student debt is really this “A,” the affordability piece. Getting affordable is the big thing to get over when it comes to the culture. I think we're going to get there.

We've been trying to get other universities and colleges, and many are, to take up the Apprenticeship Degree model that's affordable, based in the workplace, and the awards credit for work. But it feels like affordability really is the tallest sort of stick in the way, doesn't it?

Mallory: Yeah. So, give me your crystal ball. 5, 10, 20 years from now. Have we crossed that Rubicon? What happens with affordability? What's the big thing to come here in higher ed?

Joe: So, I think higher ed's demise is always being predicted too soon, right? I think it's basically a story of higher ed is dead. Over the centuries, higher ed has always been called into question for being irrelevant or too expensive or this or that – and it has changed.

300 years ago, Harvard was teaching in Latin, and 200 years ago, there was no such thing as the case study method in any business school, and the medical school program didn't exist. And I think in this century, higher ed is going to, because it faces a challenge of confidence and an affordability crisis, it is going to find a way to survive. I would say that higher ed is a cockroach, it never dies, but I've been told that it's not a good analogy, so let's call it a phoenix and say that it will be reborn.

I think that with 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States, and one closing every week, many will realize if we're affordable and job-embedded and apprenticeship-based, we can go after the 50 million working adults who say in survey after survey, they wish they had a college degree but don't. Instead of chasing the three million people coming out of high school every year, who frankly would prefer now to go get a job anyway.

So my prediction is we'll get there, but there's going to be some winners and losers, and I think the winners are going to be the ones who adopt Apprenticeship Degrees.

Mallory: I'm going to say my crystal ball is that there are going to be winners and losers in higher ed, and they're going to be the ones that get savvy around this [financial] piece. They get savvy around how to braid funds to unlock affordability, and that is going to mean that they do have to fundamentally rethink data because data is the barrier right now.

Let's talk about, first of all, what we mean by “fund braiding.” Jobs for the Future did an awesome job with this report in which they demonstrated all of the different types of funding that exists out there. They put them out onto a pie chart across government-subsidized or government-covered workforce training and education training for the post-secondary level. We're not talking about K-12. Pell is only about 50% of the equation.

When you go back and look at other things like WIOA funding for youth, for dislocated workers, for other adults, when you take a look at registered apprenticeship funds, when you take a look at all of these different training funds that exist out there, Pell is only about 50% of the equation. What I think we're going to start seeing is rather than higher ed braiding together Pell plus debt, those institutions are going to go by the wayside because the consumer is getting smart and taking a look and they're saying, “Hey, look, debt is not going anywhere. It's just going to accrue interest. It's going to lock me into a cycle in which I never escape being financially on the hook for this thing I did at 18.” Those institutions are going to go by the wayside.

The ones that are going to make it are going to be the ones that pivot and say, "Okay, we can't live on just Pell but what braided funds because it can’t be coming out of the consumer's pocket anymore. What does it take for us to become eligible to be the recipients of these other funds?" For things that are coming for workforce training or for people going through the military, accessing their G.I. Bill funding, and so on and so forth. Those are going to be the ones that win.

The way we do this at Reach and the way that I encourage everyone to think about this is by braiding together starting with WIOA funding and not because it's the easiest, kind of the opposite. In my mind, WIOA funding represents the highest-level watermark in terms of what it takes to demonstrate from the beginning that you are doing the ABCs, that you are working closely with the employer, that people are getting credit for that work, that there is a job waiting for them on the other side, and that all of this is done in a way without the trainee going into any sort of debt or having to take on their own financial burdens to make this happen.

If you can prove that out, this gets to the data piece in a second, but if you can access these WIOA funds that you can braid together with Pell and other forms of workforce dollars and make it such that at $75 a month maximum, you've got learners who are earning a real, rigorous, legit college degree. No asterisks, no qualifiers, the exact same degree as anyone else without ever leaving the workforce and without going into a dime of student loan debt. Those are gonna be the ones who win.

Those are gonna be the institutions that get great work outcomes for their people on the other side, right? In terms of gainful employment. And they're gonna do it in ways that don't require those individuals to go into debt. So those are gonna be the winners.

Now that gets to data. And as you know, data is something we take very seriously and actually started an entity called Craft Education, which we call TurboTax for Apprenticeship Degrees that is free to any institution in America to use, with the idea being that this is the tool that allows you to collect all of that data in a seamless, pain-free way so that you can parse those reports out and without having to spend your whole time learning about different reporting codes across 50 different regulatory bodies, braid funds together to offer true Apprenticeship Degrees at no debt and no real financial burden to the trainee.

And so my crystal ball is that groups that take advantage of free tools like that, if you're interested, come find me. But those who take advantage of fund breeding outside of debt options will be the winners.

Joe: I think one of the reasons why we don't have Apprenticeship Degrees yet, but we will soon, all over the country, is because the technology is catching up to the opportunity. And with that technology, you can do things like this that we couldn't really easily do before. So data is really critical, not just to assess learning in the workplace, but as Mallory, you just described, to make it straightforward and easy as TurboTax to draw funding so it stays affordable. Easy as ABC.

Mallory: And if we go back to the two challenges that baffled me when I was doing the doctoral research. One of them is what we spent the majority of this time talking about, right?

Which is actually shifting higher ed to be more job embedded. But that first problem of, and how do we get good data so that we can actually see whether we're talking about teachers or nurses or social workers or any profession out there, how do we actually more appropriately forecast what our labor needs are so that we're not training a bunch of people, but building really a bridge to know where they get out there and we find out that, oh, actually we don't need those jobs in the same way that we did, or we need those jobs but not in the area you live. One of the things that's most promising is I'm seeing states like Indiana start thinking about, “How do we take all of this compliance data and not just utilize it for documenting things so that our individuals can keep drawing funds, but actually use it?” 

They just won a SLEDS grant, State Longitudinal Data System grant, that I think is so impressive of, let's also capture that data and use it to build out these disaggregated supply and demand databases that allow us as a state to more effectively marshal resources and capital, to not just train a more educated workforce, but to ensure that we're training them in the areas that we can see are going to be the places where we need new people to come fill jobs.

And so I think it is going to be that combination of employers and government leaders first figuring out, “Hey, what do we need?” And then higher ed coming along and saying, great, we'll train people in that and we'll do it in a way that's affordable and that is based in the workplace.

That's where we're headed. I think we, I'm the eternal optimist, but I think we can get there.

Joe: And I think actually you are pushing, you're pushing us there. All of us at Reach University, I think, are surprising people by the degree to which what we're doing is not about Reach becoming a giant, but about changing higher education. 

And so when we set out last fall to announce at the Clinton Global Initiative that we think 3 million apprenticeship degrees are going to be awarded 10 years from now, we didn't mean that Reach University was going to award 3 million apprenticeship degrees.

We meant that higher ed was going to be able to do that. We wanted to help and make it possible.

Mallory: That's right. That's right. We're seeing other institutions do this all across the country in their own ways.

Joe: And we're helping them. And we're helping them do it, actively helping them do it. More on that coming soon. But it's really exciting because there are players in higher ed, and certainly employers are already there, who really want the century of the Apprenticeship Degree to start right away, right now.

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