The Department Of Labor Takes Small Steps Toward Expanding Apprenticeships

Next month, a new Department of Labor rule aimed at making it easier for businesses to set up apprenticeships will take effect. America’s apprenticeship programs, which lag much of the developed world in size and scope, is ripe for expansion. Though the Department of Labor rule is a small step, it could help bring apprenticeships into the mainstream as an alternative to a traditional college education.

Seven in ten American students enroll in college shortly after graduating high school, where they pay thousands of dollars to sit in classrooms for four years or longer. Upon graduation, many do not find jobs that utilize the skills they learned in college.

An apprenticeship, by contrast, allows people starting their careers to work and earn a wage while cultivating the skills they’ll need in the workforce. Apprentices develop a set of specialized skills through both work-based learning and classroom instruction, and are mentored by more senior workers in their field. At the end of the program, which can last anywhere from one to four years, the apprentice obtains an industry-recognized credential and a direct pathway into a career.

Many businesses find apprenticeships an effective way to train skilled workers. But some report that the process of registering an apprenticeship with the Department of Labor is fraught with unnecessary paperwork and restrictive requirements. The Department’s new rule hopes to expedite the development of apprenticeships by authorizing third-party organizations to approve new “industry-recognized apprenticeship programs,” or IRAPs.

These third parties may include business associations, community colleges, and nonprofit organizations. These groups are more in tune with industries’ needs and have more expertise in education and training, and so may be a better position than the government to recognize and oversee new apprenticeship programs. The Department of Labor hopes that the rule will lead to the recognition of over 9,000 new apprenticeship programs over the next ten years.

The new rule does not make a significant investment of taxpayer dollars. Businesses will still be responsible for paying apprentices’ wages and funding their training. But the rule will confer legitimacy on new apprenticeship programs and, through the third-party recognition entities, will create a network from which businesses can seek assistance in designing and setting up their IRAPs.

New apprenticeship programs can’t come soon enough. According to Robert Lerman, apprentices constitute just 0.2% of the American workforce. Per capita, Canada has 11 times as many apprentices as the United States, while Britain has 14 times as many and Germany 19 times. Moreover, in other countries apprenticeships are generally a substitute for a traditional college education. But in America, most people who have completed an apprenticeship already have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Joseph Fuller and Matthew Sigelman estimate that there are over three million jobs that could be served by apprenticeships. Occupations that are not heavily licensed, don’t require a college degree, demand a narrow but specialized skill set, and have above-average job tenure are well-suited to apprenticeship expansion. These include plenty of mid-level roles in health care, such as transcriptionists and medical equipment technicians. Fast-growing occupations such as solar photovoltaic installers could also be served by the apprenticeship model.

Apprenticeships could also expand to jobs that require a college degree on paper, but in which a work-based learning experience could supply the requisite skills just as well. These jobs include graphic designers, human resources specialists, executive secretaries, and architectural drafters. Many students of these subjects would be grateful for the chance to learn the necessary skills while earning a wage.

Of course, it’s unlikely that the new Department of Labor rule will revolutionize the training process for all those jobs. The rule does little to level the playing field between traditional college education, which benefits from federal and state subsidies worth thousands of dollars per student per year, and work-based learning, which receives only token government support. The rule also doesn’t actively try to integrate apprenticeships into the American postsecondary education system, in the way that the model is integrated in many other countries. It is a small step and nothing more.

But the streamlined process for getting new apprenticeship programs recognize will give us a sense of what sort of business interest there is in apprenticeships and inform future policy decisions around the matter. In the meantime, even small steps toward developing alternative workforce training beyond high school are welcome. Rather than accumulating tens of thousands of dollars of debt at a traditional four-year college, young people should have the opportunity to learn skills and earn a wage at the same time.