“Community colleges may prove the saving grace of college-level learning in America,” wrote historian Sean Trainor in a 2015 article in TIME magazine.
Today, almost a decade later, two recent reports echo this notion in their call for community colleges to up their game and make a major contribution to improving the futures of young people and working-class Americans who don’t have college degrees.
Both reports describe the role these institutions should play in expanding America’s workforce education and training efforts, especially by greatly increasing the number of employer-connected apprenticeships and creating a new learning campus that combines paid work and education.
The first report from a group of economists is Toward a Potential Grand Bargain for the Nation, commissioned by the Center for Collaborative Democracy and published by the Bipartisan Policy Center. Its chapter on “Growth and Mobility” describes five strategies to improve economic growth and upward economic mobility. It includes a proposal for creating a more highly skilled workforce that involves community colleges and apprenticeships.
The approach described in the Grand Bargain has its complement in a report from Apprenticeships for America on How Community Colleges Can Help Scale U.S. Apprenticeships. It is written by four experts on community colleges and apprenticeships.
Both reports fit into a larger conversation in America on how young people and workers can be better prepared for careers and social and economic mobility. Vice President Kamala Harris has described this larger context as “an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and the chance to succeed.”
She also has defined the problem we face doing this and a practical solution: “For far too long, our nation has encouraged only one path to success: a four-year college degree. Our nation needs to recognize the value of other paths—additional paths, such as apprenticeships and technical programs.”
I call this approach to creating additional paths to success opportunity pluralism. Creating more earn-and-learn apprenticeships through community colleges is a pivotal way to realize an opportunity economy where opportunity pluralism flourishes.
Today’s Apprenticeship Landscape
The federal government’s authority over apprenticeship programs began in 1937 with the National Apprenticeship Act. It also gave states the option to register and oversee programs. Today, about half the states exercise that option.
These registered apprenticeships provide individuals with on-the-job training, pay for work and classroom instruction, and a nationally recognized credential when the program is complete. This approach has received bipartisan political backing at the federal level from Democratic and Republican administrations and in states as diverse politically as California, Colorado, Tennessee, and Texas.
Today, 27,000 registered programs enroll around 600,000 individuals, with roughly 70% in construction trades. That’s only 0.3% of the U.S. workforce, the bottom of apprenticeship enrollment among developed countries.
Federal financial support is growing for apprenticeships and other workforce training programs. But it’s far short of the billions of federal dollars spent on postsecondary education and training. A Progressive Policy Institute analysis of fiscal year 2022 shows that out of $139.5 billion allocated for federal postsecondary education and training, only $28.2 billion, or 20%, was spent on workforce development.
Apprenticeships and Community Colleges
The Grand Bargain proposal for investing in workers’ education and training through community colleges calls for expanding work-based learning, especially through apprenticeships. It also would expand other employer and occupational-connected training like sectoral programs. Doing this requires two elements: more education and training partnerships between community colleges and employers and additional federal and state financial support.
Financial support could come in the form of employer tax credits for training and federal and state program funding that is linked to pay for performance in achieving outcomes like program completion and job placement. While not often the case with economists, they add a word of caution: “Economists do not have a good understanding of how to ‘scale-up’ these programs, so we recommend additional experimentation with rigorous evaluations.”
The Apprenticeships for America report argues that community colleges are uniquely positioned to experiment, scale up apprenticeship programs, and work with analysts to evaluate how these programs are working. It describes a four-part framework that community colleges should use to expand apprenticeships that includes:
1. Working with employers to design and deliver related technical instruction or RTI, which is made-to-order classroom instruction for apprentices.
2. Adding value to RTI by, for example, offering structured apprenticeship degree pathway programs or including the college’s career guidance and support services in apprenticeship programs.
3. Sponsoring federally registered apprenticeship programs, relieving employers of the application process.
4. Creating apprenticeships across industries and occupations, reducing costs to employers.
The report includes other recommendations.
For example, rules for federal Pell Grants to students should allow them to use financial aid to pay for quality short-term workforce training programs not now eligible for support. Additionally, federal and state programs that fund apprenticeships should change from one-off grant programs to recurring formula grant programs. These would support a larger array of occupations and industries and use a pay-for-performance contracting model, similar to recommendations found in Grand Bargain.
An Opportunity Economy
Vice President Harris’s idea of an opportunity economy for all Americans has earn-and-learn apprenticeship pathways as central to that economy’s education and training agenda. Both reports recommend that community colleges play a major in creating these earn-and-learn apprenticeships. They assume a viewpoint that fosters opportunity pluralism, an education and workforce training approach that creates multiple pathways to jobs and human flourishing rather than a singular, preferred college degree pathway.
This opportunity program is built on an opportunity equation with three related elements that form the basis for individuals pursuing pathways to opportunity: Knowledge or what individuals know + Relationships or whom they know + Identity or who they are = Opportunity.
Community colleges can be that saving grace where apprenticeships make the workplace the new learning campus for young people and working-class Americans.