This opinion piece was originally published in Work Shift in part of Paul Fain's coverage of how a growing number of national, state, and regional institutions of higher education are utilizing Apprenticeship Degrees and work-based pathways to serve adult learners. 

Is the Workplace the New College Campus? 

Image courtesy of Work Shift. 

Three hundred years ago, Latin was the primary language of instruction at Harvard. Two hundred years ago, the land-grant state university was not yet a thing. And before Penn State’s 1922 foray into radio-broadcast courses, distance education meant the USPS.

Now a quarter way through the 21st century, higher education is again in need of a reboot. Post Covid, colleges are closing one per week. More than 40M U.S. learners have started college but never finished. Nearly two-thirds of those learners would complete their degree but can’t afford to. Student debt now sits at almost $2T. Americans are losing faith in higher education.

Enter the apprenticeship degree, where students can earn a debt-free, four-year degree entirely embedded within a full-time, paid job. In the U.K., with government tax incentives, the apprenticeship-to-degree model has surged in eight years from zero to 50K new enrollments, making progress toward an expected 20% of postsecondary starts within the decade. As I have previously written, I believe the apprenticeship degree is just what American higher education needs to meet the moment.

Not everyone is convinced. Without U.K.-style mandates, will there really be enough demand for the apprenticeship degree to make a difference? And is it even a way to bring a four-year education to more learners—or is the apprenticeship degree simply vocational training dressed up as a bachelor’s? Some would say it can’t, or shouldn’t, happen here.  

At Reach University, where I am president, we made a public commitment in 2023 at the Clinton Global Initiative to lead U.S. higher education to a moonshot goal: 3M apprenticeship degrees by 2035. As the nation’s only nonprofit university dedicated solely to apprenticeship and job-embedded learning, Reach’s academic programs directly serve thousands of degree-seekers each year. Clearly, I think we’re on to something—and here’s what I’d tell the skeptics. 

There are understandable questions about demand. But as it turns out, even without the type of government tax incentives the U.K. has employed, the U.S. has seen consistent and growing interest in apprenticeship degree programs. For two consecutive years, economic and workforce development has been the No. 1 policy priority for state higher ed leaders. Indeed, nearly two-thirds of high school graduates not (yet) attending college are interested in apprenticeship-like pathways. In some sectors, demand for apprenticeships is exploding.

At Reach, we see this surge in the K-12 workforce firsthand. In the fall of 2020, we started with 68 apprenticeship degree candidates. Today, we have 2,300 enrollees working at 343 employers across eight states. 

This growth extends beyond K-12—and beyond tech giants like Google and Microsoft who have historically offered college credit for training. The apprenticeship degree is now taking hold in industries as diverse as automotive maintenance, retail, and food services. Southern New Hampshire University is powering the “Walmart Academy” for entry-level talent, and McDonald’s and Jiffy Lube are building pathways to translate on-the-job know-how into academic degrees at local colleges. 

To help meet surging demand for apprenticeship degrees, Reach in February launched the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree (NCAD) to support those in higher education seeking to design their own job-embedded degree programs and to help employers build “grow-your-own” pipelines that draw on talent in the existing workforce.  

Initial partnerships are bearing fruit and interest continues to grow. Already, NCAD is working with 50 partners across colleges and universities, state leadership, employers, and funders.   For instance, Michigan recently awarded $66.3M to Talent Together Michigan, a superintendent-led teacher apprenticeship intermediary, to scale registered teaching apprenticeship degrees statewide. Colorado Mountain College and CareerWise Colorado have developed a scalable teacher apprenticeship program with plans to expand to over 100 apprentices in 20 districts by 2025. And CommonSpirit Health, one of the country’s largest nonprofit health care companies, has launched multiple apprenticeship degrees ranging from surgical technology to pharmacy technicians, serving over 300 apprentices.  

The Biden Administration, several state governments, and major funders like Bloomberg Philanthropies, are now also in on the game. With Western Governors University’s announcement last week of a major shift toward the apprenticeship degree, interest will do nothing but rise.

So the model is in place. Demand is here. And the apprenticeship degree is spreading. 

But is this a good thing? Would further expansion of the apprenticeship degree mean a watering down of higher education? Hardly. To the contrary, when done right, the apprenticeship degree is an academically rigorous approach for millions of Americans for whom higher education is currently out of reach.

To help ensure quality is not sacrificed for scale, Reach has developed a road-tested model—the essential “ABCs” of the apprenticeship degree: to be most effective, programs should be Affordable, Based in the workplace, and providing Credit for learning at work. 

With a true apprenticeship degree, students and employers get the best of both worlds: the near-term job readiness that comes with employer-centered training and the critical thinking skills one gets from traditional higher education. These programs are marked by intensive academic coursework, with evening and weekend seminars directly connected to work-based skills. It is genuine theory-to-practice. Students could read John Locke, for instance, on the productivity benefits of property ownership and connect this to the idea of individual ownership of projects at work. The critical thinking comes authentically from the application of knowledge.

As the nation continues to find itself with widespread labor shortages and millions of adult learners hungry to fill open jobs, the apprenticeship degree offers a significant step forward in closing the talent gap and delivering opportunity for all. With the apprenticeship degree, we have a glimpse of what future generations may see as the transformation that defined the 4th century of U.S. higher education: the era when America’s workplace became its college campus.

Interested in getting started with your Apprenticeship Degree? Join us. 

Joe Edelheit Ross is president and CEO of Reach University. Previously he was president of the California County Boards of Education association.