Twenty years ago, Arlie Price was forced to leave her bachelor’s degree program to support her family, settling into a career as a paraprofessional in Arkansas with no viable path toward upward mobility. Unexpectedly, two years ago, an opportunity arose: Arlie’s school district partnered with Reach University to offer an Apprenticeship Degree program through which she could turn her current job into a degree and become a teacher. Arlie’s story is not unique; it’s the story of thousands of Reach University graduates who are taking advantage of the Apprenticeship Degree pathway.
When Reach University President Joe E. Ross highlighted Arlie’s story most recently, it was at a presentation before the National Academies of Sciences on Reach’s upcoming expansion into the behavioral health field.
Why was President Ross talking about a budding teacher’s journey in a presentation about a new program in behavioral health? As President Ross tells it, Reach’s existing Apprenticeship Degree in teaching provides the perfect template for its new behavioral health vertical.
Reach's Apprenticeship Degree in teaching was inspired by potent questions: What if no one had to make the choice between a job and a degree? And what if the teacher shortage could be addressed by enabling paraprofessionals to earn job-embedded degrees within the schools where they already work? With nearly 3,000 enrollees to date, Reach's first five years have shown that these things are possible. Now, Reach has distilled the model down to its essential elements, allowing for the degree to be replicated in arenas like healthcare.
What are the hallmarks of a successful Apprenticeship Degree program? It’s the ABCs that make it a high-quality path through higher ed: the degree is “Affordable,” and radically so; it’s “Based in the workplace,” so from day one candidates retain their paid job; and it provides “Credit for work,” with half of the learning coming on-the-job. Through its National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree (NCAD), Reach has distilled five design elements that make the program work: it efficiently utilizes on-the-job hours toward credit, builds professional capital, guarantees affordability, embeds flexibility for working adults, and maintains relevance to the workplace.
Now, Reach will take these learnings to the health care and care professions, where the labor shortage reaches the millions while, at the same time, there are 50 million working adults who wish they could complete a bachelor’s degree. As President Ross highlights, in nursing, there are 200,000 open positions each year and 10 times as many people working as patient care assistants and CNAs in the same workplaces. If just a fraction of those frontline health care workers could turn their jobs into degrees—like Reach has seen its teaching paraprofessionals do with such success—the nursing shortage could be relieved.
Ready to join us? Email partnerships@reach.edu