Joe E. Ross, President of Reach University: Turning Jobs Into Degrees

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Hello, I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO of Futuro Health, welcoming you to WorkforceRx, an exploration of innovation shaping the future of learning, work, and care.

Several recent podcast guests have touched on the new topic of apprenticeship-based degrees, a subset of the ‘learn and earn model’ that is gaining in popularity. Apprenticeship is still slow in adoption compared to our European counterparts, but there is a very interesting model developing at REACH University, and we are going to be talking today to Joe Ross, President and CEO of REACH University, the nation’s only nonprofit accredited university dedicated to championing the apprenticeship degree.

The model is described as an affordable pathway to opportunity for working adults in which they can earn a degree debt-free while also earning a paycheck.

Thanks very much for joining us today, Joe.

Joe Ross

Van, I’m so delighted to be here with you. Thanks for having me.

Van

Well, let’s start by having you remind us about the fundamentals in apprenticeship, and then please give a definition of what it means to have an apprenticeship degree.

Joe

Well, essentially an apprenticeship is a job first and foremost that’s paid and that is paired with some type of related instruction and some mentorship with the ultimate objective of the apprentice, the learner, obtaining a credential of some kind and then a promotion in their field without having to leave their home or their community and certainly without having to get out of the workforce to get ahead.

The apprenticeship degree is all of those things. It must start with a job. It involves instruction and mentorship and on-the-job learning. And it’s specifically for working adults on one hand, and it’s for employers and communities on the other that are facing post-COVID unprecedented labor shortages right now. We know we need teachers. As you know, we need nurses and allied health professionals and behavioral health professionals.

All told, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are about ten million high demand vacancies on one hand, and many of those require not just training but also a degree. But on the other hand, there are five times as many people – fifty million working adults — who could fill those jobs if only they had the right training and the degree. Rather than having to choose between a job and a degree, what an apprenticeship degree does is it turns your job into a degree instead of the other way around. So that’s essentially in a nutshell what an apprenticeship degree does.

Van

So Joe, help me with a little bit of a compare and contrast, because for example, in California, the community colleges have been long involved with apprenticeships and administering some of the apprenticeship grant funding. So, how would it differ from that traditional model versus one where it’s designed as a degree?

Joe

Right, well, community colleges have been at the forefront of workplace-based learning and training for the workplace. And frankly, if you look across the landscape of apprenticeship degrees, the community colleges are out in front. There are a number of community colleges providing training in connection with apprenticeship. Some of that training provides credit that stacks into a degree, and you get to what looks like an apprenticeship degree.

I think the big opportunity here really is for community colleges to do this at larger scale and to embed what is typically seen as a transfer degree — the liberal arts type of degree, those types of credits — into an apprenticeship. When you provide training and combine it with some of that general education and liberal arts education, which you can do, you end up creating a stackable credential. It prepares you for whatever job the apprenticeship is training you for, but it gives you the credits you need to, for example, move on. So, if you’re an apprentice to become a certified nursing assistant, for example, if your courses also include some of the courses that provide prerequisites for nursing, then you can move seamlessly into a nursing apprenticeship, earning your associate or BSN.

Van

So what is easier for the employer if they work through Reach University versus other venues for getting someone trained up?

Joe

Well, our flagship program at Reach University that we started four years ago is for school employees specifically. We’re looking at healthcare now as well and behavioral health, but we started with a focus on school employees without bachelor degrees. If you step back, there are 1.3 million classroom aides in this country. That’s at least four times the number of teacher vacancies. So you’ve got four to five times as many people working in schools without a bachelor’s degree than you have classrooms that need a teacher.

The question is, how do we work with school employers to turn some of these classroom aides and cafeteria workers and office staff and afterschool staff and coaches…how do we turn them into teachers without asking them to leave their job and to stay in their community? So what Reach has really become kind of focused on and modeled is this grow your own pathway for paraprofessionals and teachers. So that’s where we start.

But a lot of the communities we work in — rural communities that are education deserts – we’re approached by other employers saying, do you have something for us for the health care system or for maybe there’s a manufacturing facility? In fact, I was visiting the West Memphis School District and the assistant superintendent insisted that I visit her husband who was running an advanced manufacturing facility across the Mississippi River who wanted to do associate level apprenticeship degrees to attract and retain talent.

I think what we’re seeing is that employers who are facing workforce shortages unlike any they’ve seen in our lifetimes are rethinking their human capital strategy and higher education institutions who are facing enrollment declines are sometimes surprised by the employers who are willing to do things very differently. But in a nutshell, what’s different is that in the old way of doing things, employers came to the university looking for its graduates. In the apprenticeship degree model, the employers bring the students to the university. They bring their incumbent workforce. They’re recruiting people into the workforce. And so they’re bringing people at the front end and asking the university to partner with the employer in designing a job-embedded, workplace-embedded pathway that addresses the training needs of the employer.

There’s an opportunity there for the higher education institution to do that and also provide something that is still higher education so that the adult can actually have lots of opportunity for lifelong upward mobility.

Van

Joe, can I just clarify? So if my company does a good job in terms of providing the technical training, for example, is one of the things that is more accessible through Reach University the general education requirements of a degree that’s usually lacking?

Joe

So the basics of an apprenticeship degree, if people want to understand what this is, and this will answer your question, it is a fully accredited degree. Reach University is accredited by the same accreditor that accredits Stanford and University of California. It is not a bachelor apprenticeship, it’s a bachelor of arts. It’s not an associate apprenticeship, it’s an associate of arts, but it’s delivered in the context of the workplace being the campus.

What does it look like? What’s different? I sometimes refer to the differences as the ABCs. to help remember them. A stands for affordability. Apprenticeship throughout history has never asked the learner to go into significant debt. It’s asked the learner to put in some sweat, but not debt. And so you have to establish a price point that lives within affordability boundaries. The Department of Labor has, I think, set a marker for that in terms of what they’ll pay for a year of instruction or the IRS has set the $5,250 for an employer contribution. So affordability is the A.

B stands for “based in the workplace” from day one to the day of graduation. Like I said, it starts with a job and it ends with a better, higher paying job.

And C stands for credit for learning at work, which gets to your question. The thing about an apprenticeship degree is that it embraces on the job learning and on the job training. So, learning through doing plus in some cases what the employer is doing in terms of instruction as part of the degree across the world where there are apprenticeship degrees flourishing in the UK and France and Germany. You see as much as 70 % of the credits coming from on the job experience and on the job learning in apprenticeship degrees in the United States. I think we’re seeing a trend towards about 50 % of the credits, but sometimes more, coming from what’s happening on the job.

On the job, you’re learning skills that are relevant to your occupation, they’re relevant to what the employer wants you to know, but you wrap around that coursework that is also relevant in many cases. So you can have coursework that’s relevant on the job work and you can also wrap around the liberal arts courses that are made relevant, too, which I think is the beauty of this model.

The example I often use, is if you’re teaching project management, you could assign an excerpt of John Locke’s writing on property ownership and what that means for productivity and then ask someone to think about what that means in the context of project ownership and what that would mean for productivity. So there’s ways to actually bring what we call the liberal arts into the workplace and make them more interesting and more relevant. And when you do that, you’re giving someone access to not just connections around the work, but also, they have something on a transcript that gives them opportunity to make choices down the road, which is really important.

Van

Thank you for that example on how the credit for prior learning and how the liberal arts would wrap around it. On your point about the affordability, do employers foot the entire bill, the $5,200, or is there other funding that adds into the mix?

Joe

So look, in some industries it makes absolute sense for employers to foot the bill for an apprenticeship degree, assuming that it is designed by the education provider to be affordable. And as you know, many employers in the healthcare industry or the retail industry and the technology sectors are willing to provide the IRS limit, which is $5,250 a year in tuition benefits. Apprenticeship degrees can and should live mostly within that budget.

Like, it’s possible to deliver thirty credits for six to seven thousand dollars a year, or even five thousand dollars a year. So, that’s one way to pay it. But at Reach University in our teacher talent pipeline, we do not ask employers to foot the bill because many schools across the country are strapped. They do not have endless budgets and some of the opportunities for funding that arose during COVID are going away. So we don’t ask employers in the K-12 occupation to pay out of pocket, but we do ask them to spread the word about the program, to encourage their employees to enroll in the program, to support their employees by giving them some dispensation to do things like observe classroom teaching and the like.

So, it depends on the industry and I think that’s fine. Some industries will pay for it. Other industries will need to rely on what we call braiding funds. This braiding thing is almost becoming a cliche in this space. People talk about braiding. What does it mean? Essentially it means taking funds from one source like the Department of Education, such as the Pell Grant, and integrating that funding with Department of Labor funding or apprenticeship funding and integrating that maybe with a state fund and creating a new type of financial aid package that integrates all those things so that the learner doesn’t have to go into substantial debt or ideally doesn’t have to go into any student debt at all.

Van

We’re all searching for ways in which people can build their skills and education background without so much debt.

Joe

Yeah, absolutely.

Van

So, Joe, from the perspective of a student going through Reach University, who is also an employee first, talk us through their experience.

Joe

So we now have over 2,000 candidates in these apprenticeship degree pathways at Reach. We started with 67 four years ago, so it’s grown really fast. One of them that I love to talk about is Elizabeth Alonzo. She’s from a rural community in northwest Alabama called Russellville. And the thing that’s happened in Russellville is twenty years ago, 86 % of the population was Caucasian, about 14 % was African-American. Then it underwent a demographic transformation. Now 53 % of the population is Hispanic and there are Spanish speakers amongst the families. But until recently, there were no bilingual teachers in the school district.

So, a couple of years ago, the district hired Elizabeth. She had grown up in Russellville. English was her second language, and they hired her to be an English language aide.

She had earned an associate degree at the nearby community college. And when the district hired her, they basically told her to think of this school district as a transfer institution. You can turn that associate degree into a bachelor’s degree because they had partnered. We had just started working with the district to make an apprenticeship pathway. And so they were able to recruit her into a job as an English language aide and a classroom aide.

Her basic routine was she goes to work every day and then twice a week she would be in seminars on Zoom in the evening in class. She graduated this past spring with her bachelor’s degree. Today, I think she is the first bilingual teacher in the district ever. And so she’s teaching, and it’s an amazing story. She’s actually been profiled by Ed Week and several folks who are interested in what she represents in terms of what’s possible.

Van

Well, bravo. That’s a wonderful story. And is there any geographic limitation to where you can operate?

Joe

So, Reach University currently is operating in eight states. We’re operating significantly in the South, the American Southeast in places like Alabama, Arkansas, and Louisiana, which have significant education desert dynamics where you don’t see colleges or universities within commuting distance of large populations. But we’re actually headquartered in California, in Oakland. And so we actually are operating in both rural and urban parts of California from Siskiyou County all the way up north and we’re about to start in San Diego County on the other side of the state.

We can’t be everywhere. We’ve decided to not try to be a giant but instead try to prove that an apprenticeship degree has impact, that it’s sustainable, that it is replicable. We launched a center called the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree to bring together other institutions of higher education that are doing similar things so that we can all learn from each other. So if you’re not in one of our eight states, we probably know a university or college that is providing a program like the Reach University Apprenticeship Degree for teachers. Also, in other fields like allied health and healthcare, there’s a lot of exciting emerging apprenticeship degrees that are popping up. They didn’t exist a few years ago in the United States and they’re coming quickly, which is exciting.

Van

Joe, I’m curious, what was the hardest thing to solve in establishing the apprenticeship degree?

Joe

That’s great question. I think that for us, we had a deceptively easy job solving something that I recognize is actually quite hard for most higher education institutions. As I said earlier, an apprenticeship degree needs to be affordable, and it needs to be based in the workplace, and it needs to consider what’s in the workplace as credit worthy. All three of those things can be challenging for higher education institution to put together.

So, in reverse order, the credit for learning at work requires thinking about how you’re assessing learning on the job. You can’t just sort of give away credit ad infinitum without actually having assessment. So we struggled with how to do that and we made an effort through partners to look at technology tools that do that.

The workplace partnerships is another challenge.  Most universities are just not in the habit of working this closely with employers to recruit, to support, to retain candidates and to design programs. So that’s a challenge, but you can overcome it with some effort.

The first challenge though, is this affordability question. It is very, very, very hard for a lot of higher education institutions to figure out how to deliver a high quality program that lives within the boundaries of what I think the apprenticeship system would consider affordable. And so one of the things we’ve done is look for ways to sort of name opportunities. One of those opportunities, of course, is awarding credit for work. Another opportunity is attention to your cohorts to make sure that you have adequate cohort sizes.

Another is to really embrace professors of practice. So these are folks who are still in the field practicing what they profess. They have a full-time job in a workplace and they’re also a professor by evening or by weekend. There’s a lot of things to do around affordability that are challenging but possible.

And I’ll mention one more, which is a little bit in the details, but back to the liberal arts and general education question…it’s a question of innovation. It’s not that universities are beset by committees — although they are to some degree — but that’s kind of a hand wave response to why universities aren’t always innovative. There’s this book that came out by a college president entitled Whatever It Is, I’m Against It.  It is basically a book length complaint about faculty senates. I actually think that overstates and simplifies a more nuanced challenge for universities, which is that no single department in the university — the Department of Nursing, Department of Education — controls an entire degree. They control their part of the degree.

So, they can make their degree workplace based, but the rest of the degree is actually something that is part of a contribution across multiple departments that have their courses and their classes and their ways of doing things.  And so one of the biggest challenges for higher ed is figuring out how the various departments can get together to deliver the entire program in a job embedded way from day one to the day of graduation.

On that front, community colleges are a step ahead, I think, because they’re used to this. And so I think if you want to look at what will lead to universal access to apprenticeship degrees, my hypothesis is that if community colleges do this at scale, it will be like a domino effect. It makes it just easier for the four-year colleges to do it as well, because they can take transfers from the community colleges and focus on the upper division being apprenticeship-based while the community colleges handle the lower division.

That was probably more than you needed as an answer, but there you go.

Van

No, that was excellent. That’s the kind of detail that this audience is curious about. You mentioned cohort. Is the experience of the learner such that any week they can start, or is it timed to the academic calendar? What is that situation?

Joe

Well, there are a lot of ways to do this. I don’t think there’s a rule that says an apprenticeship degree has to start in the fall or spring semesters, although that may be the easiest way to start it for many universities and colleges. It’s frankly the way we do our apprenticeship degree for teachers because their work life is kind of on a fall, spring semester schedule. Now that may not be true for someone who’s working in a hospital system who wants an apprenticeship pathway to a degree in the hospital system. It would make more sense to have multiple starts, so to speak.

But essentially, whether you do it on a semester basis or a quarter or a trimester basis, or you start a new class every seven to ten weeks or every month — like Western Governors does — all of those schedules can be made apprentice-based. It just depends on the local context.

Van

Now, you mentioned expanding the focus from K-12 aides and now going into behavioral health. Tell us about what you’re planning to do there.

Joe

Well, it’s interesting. There are a lot of sectors right now that are experiencing shortages and I don’t really know why it is. I have a hypothesis that some combination of just natural economic drivers plus COVID at the margins has made it easier for people to live in other places. That means place-based employers have less of a captive workforce that they can rely on as they have in the past. So at the margins, I think a lot of place-based employers — schools, healthcare providers, social service agencies, service providers of one kind or another — I think they’re actually experiencing shortages that they’ve never seen before.

So, where there’s kind of an intersection of an apprentice-able job and what I call a degree-able job, I think there’s an opportunity to do apprenticeship degree. Apprenticeable means that there’s on-the-job learning opportunities. Degreeable in my mind means a degree is required or really, really valuable to both the employer and the employee, either because you need the degree for licensure or because the degree is a really attractive way to make a job attractive to a prospective employee and engages them in sort of a long-term retention pattern.

So we’re looking at behavioral health as one of those fields where there’s a skyrocketing need for people across different job categories in behavioral health. Of course, it’s helpful to have people with master’s degrees in social work and licensure. That’s a part of the need. Frankly, many of the MSWs in this country are too expensive and as a result, the people who go into that line of field don’t tend to look like the communities that they’re serving. There’s just a huge degree of under-representation in some of these fields because those master’s degrees are frankly treated as cash cows by some institutions instead of opportunities to get someone into public service careers. So we are looking at that.

But our attention is also drawn to the other side, the entry-level side of that spectrum, right? So you have something that’s now emerging called the Youth Mental Health Service Corps. This is for folks who are early in their career and they’re going to spend some time in case management or some type of outreach related to behavioral health. If you can pair an associate degree with that service, you actually, I think, have a better chance of engaging a young person in that career. Because if they spend one to two years in a service field like that and they also get an associate degree and it has those courses that enable them to then stack into, say, a bachelor’s degree in psychology that’s also apprenticeship based, well now they’re ready to jump into the licensure stage after that.

So that’s what we’re looking at and I think ultimately we’ll always be oriented around this undergraduate part of the spectrum So is there a behavioral health field and credential that renders an associate degree as a starting point, but then you want to finish it with the ultimate license and in this case we expect that will be a Masters of Social Work with licensure.

Van

Fantastic. Of course, we’re super interested in this area. In our second year of life, Futuro Health did a lot of investments to help out with behavioral health, so we have about  five certificates in that area, and want to definitely stack into any degree path that you have.

Joe

Mm-hmm. And those should be part of degrees. They absolutely should count, right? The training you’re doing, I’m sure, is outstanding and there’s no reason a university or college shouldn’t count it as part of an academic program that gives someone the upward opportunity that they deserve.

Van

Joe, the other thing is an employer could put out scholarships at the master’s level, but if somebody doesn’t have exposure to behavioral health by then, it’s not a good investment because they don’t know what they’re fully getting into, right?

Joe

Correct. Correct.

Van

So, it’s a good for them to tiptoe into the field, get some experience, you know, get a certificate, because then they know what they’re getting into as a commitment for an occupation.

Joe

I couldn’t agree more. So if you look at these occupations, they take years of experience and training and so you have to think about the pipeline across the whole life cycle of someone’s learning experience. That can actually begin in high school with career technical education experiences and that can stack into an associate degree, which can stack into an apprenticeship based bachelor’s degree and ultimately an apprenticeship based master’s in social work or nursing or one of those other fields.

Van

Well, Joe, I wanted to give you a chance to call out and celebrate any outcomes that you’re seeing so far.

Joe

Well, let me just say as a caveat, it’s early for us. We have a four-year undergraduate program. We really started just four years ago. Some people are transferring in and graduating in two years or three years, so we have early data. First, we’re seeing incredible retention in the program because it’s not just an educational pathway, it is a job and it’s a job where people live in their home community. So after the first year, we’re seeing well over 90 % semester-over-semester retention through the program.

The first year, for people who know college credit, is lower. It’s not nearly as low as the typical first year retention, which can be as low as in the forties for people who’ve never been to college before. So we’re much higher. We’re double that. But after that first year, it’s really, really high retention. We’ll see how those folks, once they’re credentialed, what their retention as employees and as professionals is, but everything indicates it’s going to be much stronger than other pathways. So retention is big.

Second, we’re beginning to see our first graduates. As I said, some have transferred in and they’re already out there in the field. In our first cohort, 100 % of them got jobs in the schools where they were working and we’re still well over 90 % of folks who were graduating from the program stepping immediately into jobs as teachers. Although one of our recent grads in Arkansas actually came to work for Reach University, so she’s counting against the statistic a little bit, but she’s doing an amazing job here at Reach.

And finally, one of the huge benefits of an apprenticeship degree is, as I said, demographic representation. Paraeducators are much more likely to look like the students they serve in a given community than the teachers. So when you turn paraeducators into teachers, they too look much more like the students they serve. And we’re absolutely seeing this, the incredibly close match between our candidates and the students in the communities where they’re serving and where they’re from. It’s striking, it’s exciting, and I think it’s going to change what schools look like in a really positive way.

Van

Well, we’re definitely cheering you on. This is exciting. So let’s close out, Joe. If an employer or higher education institution wants to get started with an apprenticeship degree program, what would you recommend they do?

Joe

Well, there’s some organizations that are famously getting out there. You had Apprenticeships for America on the podcast a few weeks ago, and we at Reach launched the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree, which is supporting both employers and higher education institutions in getting together. They need to get together to build these programs. Universities are looking for new models. Employers are looking for new talent strategies. So if folks who are listening are interested in launching an apprenticeship degree where you work or where you live, I invite them to reach out to us here at the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree at Reach University. It’s www.ncad.org

And folks can reach out to me directly by emailing president@reach.edu. I’ll put you in touch with the right people. We’re not always able to provide Reach University degree programs everywhere, but we certainly have a network of providers who are interested or already getting into apprenticeship degrees and so we can connect dots for folks who are interested.

Van

Well, your work is super exciting…creating this model in higher education and workforce development anchored in the place of the job. So, thank you very much for your innovation and for joining us today, Joe Ross.

Joe

Van, thank you so much for having me. I have followed your work for a long time and so it’s really kind of an honor to be here on the podcast with you. You’ve had a secret fan in me and people talk about you all the time in California as a trailblazer and innovator when it comes to training and the healthcare workforce. So, thank you for having me on your podcast.

Van

That’s high praise from an innovator. Thank you so much, Joe. I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan with Futuro Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of WorkforceRx. I hope you will join us again as we continue to explore how to create a future-focused workforce in America.