John Colborn, Executive Director of Apprenticeships for America: Raising the Visibility of Apprenticeships

Van Ton-Quinlivan

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

In this episode, we’re going to continue to explore the potential of apprenticeships as a path to economic success. It’s an approach that has been growing in the US over the last decade, during which the number of apprentices doubled and the number of registered programs increased by 40%.

Apprenticeships for America (AFA) is a leading force in the space and I’m happy to welcome its executive director, John Colborn, to the podcast to help us deepen our understanding of the current landscape as well as innovations that will impact the future of learning and work.

John has over thirty years of experience with community -based and national nonprofits, including being director of the Aspen Institute’s for America’s Future program and vice president of Operations at the Ford Foundation. He’s also served as an employer sponsor and developer of apprenticeship programs in IT, manufacturing, healthcare, and social services.

Thanks very much for joining us today, John.

John Colborn

It’s great to be here, Van.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

I’m delighted to have you. Well, I should note that I’m a member of Apprenticeship for America’s Advisory Council, so I’m familiar with what you’re doing. But for the audience, can you give us an overview of AFA and what priorities you have as executive director?

John Colborn

And we’re very grateful for your partnership, Van. So let me just say, you know, we come to apprenticeships as fans, as you can imagine. We really believe that apprenticeship broadens the avenues of opportunity for workers, job seekers and people entering the workforce and it also contributes to creating a competitive workforce for the employers that sponsor apprenticeships. So, we think there’s a lot to like about apprenticeships and we also think that they’re wildly under leveraged in the United States, especially when compared with other industrialized economies. So, we think there’s a huge opportunity to grow apprenticeship in the United States and we’re dedicated to doing that through public policy, through improvement of practice, and by spreading the word about apprenticeship.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Well, we appreciate you being at the helm of AFA. How do apprenticeships fit into the broader discussion about rethinking post -secondary pathways given the student debt of traditional higher education right now?

John Colborn

Yeah, so you know, one of apprenticeship champions has described apprenticeship as ‘college without the debt.’  There is something about this moment in history where, you know, I think really for sixty years since the passage of the Higher Education Act, there’s really been a singular message for young people thinking about their careers and where they want to go and job seekers thinking about how they can secure opportunity for themselves, and that’s been go to college and it’s been remarkably successful.

College enrollment’s significantly up. College degree attainment is significantly up. That’s been great. But we seem to be getting to a place where maybe we’re reaching some diminishing returns on a singular approach to the college degree. And I want to be clear, anyone who feels like they want to go to college should be able to go to college. This is not a question of opportunity. But having just one choice for every single job seeker and young person entering the labor market seems like a mistake.

What we hear from people is that not everyone likes the college environment. Not everyone wants to be in a classroom for another four years. Not everyone is interested in the degree offerings that come out of colleges or the career options that come out of college and we hear from employers over and over again that the kind of learning that people are getting in colleges isn’t always well suited to their needs in the workplace. So we think apprenticeship is a really helpful additional pathway to traditional college experiences and we think that the economy will be better off and that students and workers will be better off with more choices around post -secondary education.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

So is this an either/or situation, John, where it’s either you go to college or you do an apprenticeship, or is there a role for colleges and universities in the apprenticeship programs?

John Colborn

You know, you’re absolutely right. It is not either/or. In fact, in the in the world of apprenticeship, we have a component of apprenticeship called related technical instruction. That’s the classroom based component of every apprenticeship program and community colleges and other institutions of higher education are frequently partners in delivering those services.

In addition, there is a growing recognition of opportunities around something called degree apprenticeship that combines the college degree with a practical hands -on experience so that individuals in degree apprenticeship programs end up at the end of their apprenticeship experience both with the skills and abilities to do a job, but also a college credential.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

What would that look like in terms of a degree apprenticeship? I go to work first and then apply to the degree apprenticeship program after the fact? Am I trying to do both at one time? Like apply to the college and work?

John Colborn

Right. Exactly, and honestly, it can vary. But let me discuss what is one of the most rapidly growing apprenticeship occupations right now, which is school teachers. What school districts across the country are realizing is that the shortage of school teachers has a solution very near at hand and that’s the paraprofessional staff that are already working in schools.

What these schools are doing is putting the paraprofessionals — the teachers’ aides and folks working in the cafeterias and other folks who are already in the school — to work in a teaching role and at the same time enabling them to go to school so that they can get the four -year credential that’s necessary to become a full -fledged school teacher.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

And just to make it clear for the listeners… the employer, in this case the school district, is giving time off or it’s not really time off. It’s ‘time on’ where you’re to school. Right?

John Colborn

That’s exactly right. It’s time on. On the clock training. And I will say some of that varies from school district to school district. It’s going to be different in different places. But the general model is that the employer would pay for the college degree and that the employer would provide at least some recognition of time off or at least scheduling flexibility so that people can access those resources.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

That’s a great example and it gives an idea of how you cast the net wider when it comes to talent shortages.

John Colborn

Yeah. Think about it. There’s now apprenticeships in nursing that involve college degrees. There’s apprenticeships in engineering that involve college degrees. So there’s many, many folks who are really looking at how to flex the apprenticeship model and integrate it with traditional college pathways to provide both the college degree and the work experience that propels people into their careers.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

That’s a very exciting concept, John. And can I ask you, since you know the world of financial aid so well, would then all the normal financial aid mechanisms apply to an individual in terms of supporting their studies while they’re working?

John Colborn

It’s a complicated story, and in fact, our financial aid system is really poorly equipped to deal with the degree apprenticeship circumstance. We’re about to issue a report on community colleges and their role in apprenticeship and one of the things that we take on in that report is just how broken our higher education financing system is as it relates to apprenticeship.

So, we have a lot of work to do there in terms of making sure that students who are pursuing a college degree through apprenticeship have equal standing, at least from a financial perspective, as students who are not in that circumstance.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

So, when you’re working and if your employer has tuition support, it’s usually around $5,250 a year.

John Colborn

Yes, the IRS limit for the tax deduction.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

And then most degree programs will take longer than a year. If it’s a two year program, it could be $5,250 in year one and $5,250 in year two, but that may still leave you with student debt, because your tuition may be more than just the $10, 500 combined.

John Colborn

Yes.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

So, what would you like to see in terms of financial aid structure to support a learner in this arrangement?

John Colborn

Yeah, so one of the challenges is that for a lot of financial aid calculations, the tuition support is considered first money in, and is actually asked to reduce the availability of other kinds of aid. We think that is backwards, candidly. But we think there’s actually relatively small tweaks to our financial aid systems that can help address some of that.

We also believe that the IRS limitation on tax deductibility or non -taxability of tuition assistance is set way too low. That’s a number that comes from fifteen years ago or something like that. There are a handful of states that are starting to inaugurate different kinds of financial aid strategies for people who are in apprenticeship. Washington state has just passed something like that and there are other states that are doing work in that space.

So, we think this is definitely a solvable problem, but it definitely will take some creativity to rework some of the financial aid structures to be able to be supportive of work in this space.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Well, we’re glad that AFA is focused and thinking about these hard issues on the behalf of all of us. So, we talked about the financing aspect of adoption of apprenticeships. What are the keys to wider adoption by employers do you think?

John Colborn

In the United States, roughly 0.3 % of our workforce is engaged in apprenticeship of one sort or another. Just to give you an example, a country like Britain has a little over 2.3% of its workforce in apprenticeship. Canada and Australia are similarly at the sort of 1.9% to 2.5 % range. So, we are really at the very, very low end of apprenticeship uptake in the United States.

We asked ourselves, what were the things that those countries did to be able to drive the growth of apprenticeship? And there were really two things and they were related. The first is they invest wildly more resources in their apprenticeship systems than the United States does. In the United States, funding has grown considerably, so I guess we should be thankful for that. But the United States at the federal level invests something like about $300 million a year in apprenticeship. Just think about how that compares to our higher education investment. It’s about a thousand to one differential between the support that goes into higher education and goes into apprenticeship.

On the other hand, if you look at those countries that I mentioned that have much higher levels of take up on apprenticeship, they put in ten times, twenty times, 160 times per capita what we spend on apprenticeship. So. we have a long ways to go just to do a basic level of investment in apprenticeship.

What we find when countries provide that sort of support for apprenticeship is that these really critical institutions called apprenticeship intermediaries start popping into being. These institutions are solution providers in the apprenticeship ecosystem. They work with employers to establish their apprenticeship systems, to manage those programs for them, to work with apprentices, recruit apprentices, provide support for apprentices, make sure that the mentoring systems are in place, arranging for the related technical instruction, negotiating with colleges and universities to provide the classroom instruction…they have all these sort of helper roles that then make apprenticeship possible.

Then, really critically, they do one other thing, which is they are out pounding the pavement, talking to employers about the benefits of apprenticeship and getting employers to sign up as apprenticeship sponsors. Without the funding and without these apprenticeship intermediaries, we worry that we may be stuck on our current trajectory of modest growth and not get to the full potential that we think apprenticeship offers for the United States.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

What would give us the momentum that you’d want? Is the volume of funding the key lever?

John Colborn

We think it’s more funding, but it’s also different funding. The way most of that $300 million is spent is in two ways. One is that a check is written to state governments, and governments use that to establish their apprenticeship systems and sometimes re -grant those funds to apprenticeship providers in their states. Then there are national grants that are let from the Department of Labor, usually on the order of twenty, thirty and even forty national grants a year. That is not a recipe for scaling apprenticeship in the United States.

We argue for something called pay for apprenticeship or pay for success funding. The idea here being that you don’t have to write a grant proposal to the Department of Labor and hope you’re one of twenty, thirty or forty people selected for funding. Once you find somebody and put them into apprenticeship, with certain standards and certain retention expectations, you get a check and every time you do that, you get another check.

Think of this as almost like a Pell Grant for apprenticeship. Those apprenticeship intermediaries and sponsors can know that there is a reliable source of funding…that if they set up an apprenticeship and get somebody placed into that apprenticeship, they will have some support for the work that they’ve done.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

I really like the certainty aspect of the pay for apprenticeship model. It eliminates all that effort to write competitive grants.

John Colborn

We have all been there. We have a wonderful program that we got started with some remarkable funding from a foundation or from a government and then we’re looking two years out at the end of that grant and what’s gonna happen then, right?  I know from the apprenticeship programs that I’ve been involved in helping start, we had exactly that issue. It’s really, really hard to think about sustainability.

Then think of a community college that might be doing work in this space. They’re funded on these sort of soft money grants. Are they going to make long -term investments in their apprenticeship program? Not if they’re smart, right? Because the apprenticeship program could be gone in two years. So, we really need to be thinking about much more reliable, much more steady, and frankly, much more funding going into apprenticeship to be able to drive the growth that we think that there should be in the United States.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Well, at this moment, let me invite you to do some call -outs of good apprenticeship programs and what we can learn from them. You mentioned the teaching program, but what else is out there?

John Colborn

We are really excited about the teacher apprenticeship just because of the speed of uptake we’ve seen. It speaks to the power of apprenticeship because here was a real problem that school districts all over the country were having — which is finding school teachers — and a real solution right at hand. Through remarkable efforts of a variety of organizations who have been working nationally to promote teacher apprenticeships, we’ve just seen this explosion of interest in teaching apprenticeships. But there’s many, many other examples.

Let me just say that one area where we’ve seen, unexpectedly, a lot of growth in apprenticeship is in the information technology area. If you think of it, it’s kind of perfect for apprenticeship because employers in that area are really looking for people who bring portfolios, who have experience. The college degree is a little less important, candidly, than what you can show you can do, so apprenticeship really appeals there. In that space you’ve got groups like Apprenti out of Washington state that has really pioneered the use of apprenticeships in information technology, working with the industry to create pathways for a variety of different occupations.

I am also very excited about some of these degree apprenticeship areas in nursing and in engineering. We’re seeing a lot of growth and interest in that. What it really responds to is the feedback we hear over and over again from employers which is that the folks coming out of college programs may have a lot of great book learning, but they just don’t have the experience to be productive in those entry -level roles. What the apprenticeship model really provides is a way to build that experience as you go.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Wonderful. Now, I have to ask the obligatory AI question. John. What impact could AI have on apprenticeship model?

John Colborn

I think there’s sort of two ways to think about that question. One is at the operational level. Like, how is that going to change the way we do mentoring or change the way we do instruction? My sense is we’ll follow the direction of other folks who are going to create on that. Are we going to learn new ways to do instruction? Almost certainly, right? Are we going to learn better ways to provide support and mentoring assistance for apprentices? Yeah, we’ll probably benefit from some of the advantages that come from AI.

For me, I think there’s a second side of that question, which is how is AI reshaping labor markets and what does that mean for models like apprenticeship? Of course, we’re all looking in very murky crystal balls, so it’s a little hard to say for sure. An argument that holds true for me is this notion that increasingly, entry level and lower level employees are going to have much wider scope to the impact of their work. AI is going to really give them sort of projective capability in terms of being able to be upstream and downstream on different kinds of work processes.

Think of, for example, the paralegal and what AI is going to be. Now a lot of people will say, AI is just going to do away with the paralegal. But my take is no, the paralegal is actually going to have a bigger role. It might do away with some lawyers, but the paralegal is suddenly going to be in a position to be able to look at the kinds of analysis that AI can bring on a contract and make sure that there aren’t conflicting elements in that contract.

I think this is true up and down and across the labor market…that folks in these entry level sort of junior or paraprofessional roles are going to have greater impact on the work processes that they’re engaged in and that says to me then that the preparation that those folks need is need is going to be all that more important.  The ability to be able to bring real world experience — not just whatever the algorithm came up with — but actually having seen this played out over time in the workplace and with customers, is going to be that much more important. So, I feel like that is, in some ways, holding up the idea of apprenticeship as a place where you get real world experience, where you are building the sort of humanity of that job and are getting increased exposure to both technical and applied uses of knowledge to be able to then take that much more advantage of AI in your work.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

John, as we’re thinking about what can be done to promote apprenticeships, you talked about the federal level and more investments, but also investment in the pay for apprenticeship type of structure. What can states and other layers of government be doing to support the adoption of apprenticeships?

John Colborn

We’re actually just about to issue a report on this, so I don’t want to step on our release. First off, we think there’s a lot that states can do. One of the things we did for the report is we looked at different kinds of policy choices that states can make and do those correlate in any way to growth in apprenticeships across the states?  I’ll give you just a couple of examples to tease the report.

One thing that we asked ourselves is, what can governors do to improve the climate for apprenticeship and to actually see growth for apprenticeship in their states? And we asked, well, maybe it’s just really good to talk about it in state of the state addresses. It turns out talking about apprenticeship isn’t really good enough. There’s very little correlation between talking about apprenticeship and seeing growth. But when a chief governmental officer like a governor or a mayor sets a target and publicizes that target, that has a lot to do with growth of apprenticeship.

So when, for example, in the city of New York, the mayor set a goal for apprenticeship, or in the state of Maryland, where the governor set a goal for apprenticeship, or in California, where the governor has set a goal for apprenticeship, that really seems to drive the growth of apprenticeship. It focuses attention on it and gets leaders from across government thinking about their role in helping to achieve that goal. There’s accountability. There’s reports that have to be made every month to the governor about whether or not you’re making progress on that goal. So, all of those things seem to line up to coincide with states where we see lots of growth in apprenticeship.

I’ll give one other example. When states start walking the talk — when they actually start thinking about how they are embracing apprenticeship in their workforce or asking vendors to embrace apprenticeship in their workforce — that also seems to be correlated with above average growth in apprenticeship. We think there’s about five or six other sorts of things that states can do, so read our report coming out in September.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

All right. So, September 2024 is the launch of the report and it’ll be made available on the AFA website, I assume.

John Colborn

That’s exactly right. https://www.apprenticeshipsforamerica.org/

Van Ton-Quinlivan

All right. So, ten years from now, tell us your most optimistic view on the impact of apprenticeship.

John Colborn

Well, let me give you this sort of cold facts and figures answer, and then I’m going to give you a softer answer. The cold facts and figures answer is we have a North Star at Apprenticeships for America that we want to grow apprenticeships eightfold over the next ten years. If we do that, we find ourselves about at the same level of apprenticeship as countries that kind of look like us, such as France and England and Australia and Canada. So that is a significant growth objective to get to and we know it’s going to take a lot to get there.

But let me give you a little bit more on the ground sense of what that could look like.  I was talking to a colleague from England and he was describing the equivalent of their common applications process for college and just like us, you go onto a website, you work on your common app, you fill out information about you, your family, your interests, and so on. Then you get to that page in the process where you select the colleges and universities you want to send your common app to.  Except in England, on one side of the page are the colleges and universities, and on the other side of the page are the apprenticeship programs you might want to consider.

The notion that there could be that level of choice is the future we’d like to see. That a young person who’s entering the workforce could actually decide, “Do I want to go to college or should I go and do an apprenticeship for a little while? I might go to college later, but maybe I’ll do the apprenticeship now. Or maybe I’ll go to college now and then I’ll do an apprenticeship.” The idea that people could have choice –  that we’re not stuck in this sort of college for all, there’s only one pathway and if you don’t succeed in that pathway, you’re just a failure — that to me is the future that we see at Apprenticeships for America that we think widens those pathways to opportunity and creates the workforce that we’re gonna need to be competitive in the next century.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

John, you certainly inspired us in your visualization of the future of work and the future of learning all being in one. So, thank you very much for spending time with us today.

John Colborn

Absolutely, absolutely. I’m looking forward to having your participation, Van, on our advisory board and in all of our work going forward. And of course, I’m a great fan of your work. So, I’m happy to be here.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

I’m big fan, too, of John Colborn. 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.