The Dispatch
Degrees on the job
The number of degree apprenticeships is growing in the US, offering students the chance to simultaneously earn and learn, while also improving employee retention rates and addressing skills gaps in rural areas.
By Jamaal Abdul-Alim
"Just making sure that the learning that the apprentice got was as fully portable as it could possibly be – that was the goal."
"It would lead to greater loyalty and retention among employees, thereby reducing the cost of turnover and training new employees."
“The approach also appeals to apprentices, who not only get paid on the job, but paid to go to school as well."
In brief:
- Blending paid work with academic credit, states like Alabama are transforming traditional vocational training into portable, degree-bearing credentials that benefit students and regional economies alike.
- Programmes in nursing and industry use "last-dollar" scholarships to eliminate student debt. Employers see a 47% return on investment, with 90% of apprentices remaining after five years.
- This model offers a scalable solution to the global skills gap by making learning portable and affordable. By prioritising recognised qualifications, these partnerships ensure graduates gain higher lifetime earnings, proving that higher education and industry can successfully co-invest in a sustainable, professionalised workforce.
When Josh Laney became the inaugural Director of Alabama’s state apprenticeship agency in 2019, he wanted to create learning that was both portable and affordable.
In pursuit of those goals, Laney helped Alabama accomplish a third goal that wasn’t even on his radar – making the state a top provider of degree-bearing apprenticeships.
A new report, Mapping the landscape of degree apprenticeship: Expanding a promising model for mobility, published by New America, identifies Alabama as one of three states in the US that collectively provide more than a quarter of the nation’s 579 apprenticeships tied to degrees.
Alabama has 52 such programmes – largely in nursing, education and industry – making it the second overall provider of degree-bearing apprenticeships. The other two states, Illinois and North Carolina, offer 63 and 40, respectively.
Ivy Love, co-author of the report and a Senior Education and Labor Policy Analyst at New America, a Washington, DC based think tank, says all three states have resources and support available at the state level to “encourage the growth of degree apprenticeship programmes.”
Laney says turning Alabama into a top provider of degree apprenticeships was never part of a strategic plan.
“The degree itself was never the goal,” Laney, who is now Vice President of Apprenticeship and Work-Embedded Learning at the Competency-Based Education Network, or C-BEN – a network of colleges, employers and state agencies that focus on workforce skills development and assessment – tells QS Insights.
“Just making sure that the learning that the apprentice got was as fully portable as it could possibly be – that was the goal.”
By “portable,” Laney explains that he means a credential that is valued and recognised widely in a given field, not just at the company that provided the training.
To help apprentices secure those credentials, Laney turned to Alabama’s community colleges.
“We just always started with the assumption that there's going to be related technical instruction in an apprenticeship,” Laney says. “When we have to go find that instruction provider, if we can find a provider that offers that instruction and it is credit-bearing, then we should go with that.”
In examining the course requirements for various apprenticeships, it became clear that apprentices could earn associate degrees by taking an additional four or five courses. Laney shared that information with employers in an effort to get them see the value of covering the cost of tuition for their apprentices to earn a degree.
He told them it would help them achieve better marketing, because now the employer can tell potential apprentices that the company will pick up the cost of an associate degree. Plus, federal student aid could be used to cover the cost of tuition.
“So now there’s a good possibility neither [the employer] nor the apprentice are going to have to pay for that programme and you're going to wind up with a whole degree,” Laney explains.
And he says it would lead to greater loyalty and retention among employees, thereby reducing the cost of turnover and training new employees.
“They may have to put some money up front to cover the cost of somebody's tuition, but they're now going to fill a vacancy, and they're going to fill it with somebody who has learned to do the job their way, is loyal to them and grateful for the opportunity that they've been provided by this employer,” Laney says.
The approach also appeals to apprentices, who not only get paid on the job, but paid to go to school as well.
North Carolina takes a similar approach – requiring apprenticeship providers to cover the cost of tuition with “last-dollar” scholarships, an additional form of financial aid to fill gaps between a student’s available financial resources and the total cost of tuition. The payoff benefits the apprentice and employer alike, says Chris Harrington, Director of the state apprenticeship agency in North Carolina.
“The average apprentice earns $10,000 more than a peer doing the same job that didn't do an apprenticeship, post completion,” Harrington says. He adds that the salary advantage persists over the course of a person’s career and thus translates to roughly $400,000 more over the person’s lifetime.
Harrington cites a statistic that shows 90 percent of those who complete an apprenticeship are with the same employer five years later. The ROI for employers is 47 percent or higher, “meaning for every dollar invested, they're getting a $1.47 return,” Harrington says.
Jennifer Gilliland, Director of Health Sciences at Central Alabama Community College, says Alabama’s apprenticeships represent a “great opportunity” for nursing students because they allow them to work in their field and have it count toward their clinical requirements.
“We require them to work at least 24 hours a week as an apprentice, and part of that 24 hours a week counts as their clinicals, so the benefit to them is they're getting paid to go to clinicals."
It has also enabled her institution to solve one of its biggest challenges: lack of clinical instructors and clinical sites.
For every seven apprentices, Gilliland says, it means that’s one less clinical group the college has to plan for. The Alabama board of nursing allows schools to use one instructor for eight students, but Central Alabama Community College keeps the ratio at 7 to 1, Gilliland says.
Central Alabama Community College currently has 50 active apprentices in its nursing programme. Another 80 apprentices have completed their nursing programme – and passed nursing board exams – since August of 2022.
The apprenticeships also give small, rural hospitals a way to compete with larger hospitals that can more easily pay higher hourly rates.
“This has allowed them to gain access to a population of graduates that they train and they hope will stay in their facility,” Gilliland says, citing retention rates that fluctuate between 30 and 70 percent.
Since employers cover the cost of tuition, books and fees with “last dollar scholarships,” students who go through the nursing apprenticeship graduate debt-free.
“That’s the purpose of that – to allow them to come out of a nursing programme and not owe a dime,” Gilliland says.
Not all apprentices take advantage of the last-dollar scholarship, Gilliland says, because they don’t want to commit to the facility where they’re doing their apprenticeship. Facilities may require last-dollar scholarship recipients to stay on with the company for one or two years as a condition of receiving the last-dollar scholarship, she adds.
Shaun Dougherty, Professor of Education and policy at Boston College, says the extent to which the degree apprenticeship movement persists “probably depends on whether employers find that they get the value they expect or need to make it feasible in the longer-term”.
“I suspect that interest will be industry or occupation specific and will also differ in salience by location,” Professor Dougherty says. “In general, places with lower rates of postsecondary attainment, but growth in industries that require some postsecondary education or training stand to benefit the most from this model.”