Voices of Reach is an ongoing spotlight series featuring leaders at Reach University and its national initiatives who are helping expand access to work-embedded higher education across the country.
Senior Director of National Apprenticeship Degree Strategy, National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree (NCAD)
A Career Built on Closing the Gap
Bri Barnes-Eldert has spent her career making higher education more accessible, affordable, and better aligned with the realities of working learners. As Senior Director of National Apprenticeship Degree Strategy at the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree (NCAD), she is the longest-standing member of the NCAD team and works with higher education institutions and state systems nationwide to build the shared infrastructure needed to scale high-quality Apprenticeship Degrees nationwide. She helps institutions move from concept to implementation by building the shared language, partnerships, systems, and operational capacity required to launch and sustain high-quality Apprenticeship Degrees with fidelity.
Early in her career, Bri saw how much educational access is tied to economic mobility, dignity, and choice. During a college service-learning experience in Birmingham, Alabama, she met a woman whose reflections on missed educational opportunities stayed with her. The experience helped clarify a throughline in Bri’s work: expanding access to education is not abstract. It changes what people can pursue, provide, and imagine for themselves.
Bri's leadership role at NCAD has evolved, much like the work, and now combines partner-facing capacity-building support, strategy, and relationship-building. Every day looks different, and currently, she's in the midst of a multi-month engagement with the Alamo Colleges District in Texas, following a number of “firsts” in registered apprenticeship milestones with NCAD partners.
In this latest project, she's helping five colleges co-design a shared framework for launching Apprenticeship Degree programs. If the work is successful, it could also create a replicable model for how large community college systems build degree pathways across multiple institutions. The district serves 100,000 candidates, and if these programs succeed, the potential reach into the San Antonio labor market is huge.
The framing Bri uses to explain the relationship between Reach and NCAD is rooted in how President Ross and Dr. Smith explain it:
Reach is the nation’s Apprenticeship Degree proof point, offering a gold standard in affordability, workplace-based learning, and credit for learning at work.NCAD is the nation’s field-building engine, grounded in Reach University’s proof points and focused on building the shared infrastructure needed to scale Apprenticeship Degrees with quality and fidelity. The long-term goal is for NCAD partners to independently run programs after NCAD's initial capacity-building and mentorship, while still having access to NCAD’s community resources and strategic counsel when new challenges arise.
That philosophy—build capacity, not dependency—guides Bri. She lives the value of owning both the work and the outcome. She's not simply delivering a product to partners; she works alongside them until they are ready to do it themselves. Then she ensures they know that NCAD remains a thought partner and resource when the next hurdle arises. And there’s always another hurdle. One Illinois college she recently visited had worked on its program for six years and had reached a new crossroads. That, she said, is the nature of this work.
Bri's career has been pulled between two forces: social work and higher education. She holds a bachelor's degree in social work and spent years working inside community colleges. In South Denver, she ran pre-apprenticeship programs for high school youth. Those years gave her an inside view of where the systems work—and where they fall short in supporting the people who need them most.
Her connection to the mission isn't just professional. She once wanted to pursue a master's in social work to become a licensed clinical social worker. A large unpaid internship requirement made it impossible for her at the time. The barrier wasn't ability. It was access. "This work would have supported someone like me," she said, "and learners like me." The Apprenticeship Degree model is built for people navigating that kind of choice.
She is also doing this work while caring for her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter at home. For her, that makes long-term goals feel more within reach. She wants her daughter's generation to hear about Apprenticeship Degrees from the start, just like they hear about college. Not as something you discover at 25 when you are already trying to catch up. That’s what growing and succeeding together can mean across a generation.
Turning Jobs Into Degrees, One System at a Time
Bri is thinking in a 20- to 25-year timeframe. If this work takes hold, people will leave education with little to no debt. They will have stable wages and access to services such as healthcare, mental health support, and high-quality food. That’s not a slogan. It’s what she’s working toward, one partnership at a time.
For Bri, getting it right means partners can sustain the work without NCAD, and still want them as a thought partner. It means large state systems declare specific commitments to Apprenticeship Degrees, not just apprenticeships. They should have concrete plans for how they’ll make access real. Five years from now, it means candidates and partners will say the work was worth it.
Together, NCAD and its partners are working toward 10,000 Apprenticeship Degree enrollments by the end of the decade, with a long-term vision of three million Apprenticeship Degree starts by 2035.