Earn and Learn Alternatives to Higher Education: Discussing ‘Apprentice Nation’ with Ryan Craig 

Gil Rogers sits down with higher education expert and evangelist for student success, Ryan Craig.

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Who is Ryan Craig?

Ryan is a recognized thought leader and author advocating for an outcomes-focused view of higher education.

In this Episode

Ryan Craig, Managing Director at Achieve Partners and author whose latest book is titled ‘Apprentice Nation,’ joins FYI host Gil Rogers for a conversation about the value and role of apprenticeships in the American economy, strongly arguing for a shift in the current mentality of ‘college for all’. The discussion also navigates the reasons why America has not yet become an ‘Apprentice nation’ and emphasizes the need for higher public investment to boost such programs. 

Looking at employer perspectives, Ryan recognizes the importance of partnerships and intermediaries that facilitate the setting-up of apprenticeship programs, and he makes a strong case for integrating real work experiences into educational systems to enhance their future relevance and appeal. This episode shines a spotlight on the transformative role higher education institutions could assume by becoming full-service apprenticeship providers. 

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Episode Transcript

Earn and Learn Alternatives to Higher Education: Discussing ‘Apprentice Nation’ with Ryan Craig

Publishing Date: February 13, 2024

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome back to FYI, the For Your Institution podcast, presented by Mongoose. I’m your host, Gil Rogers. And today, I sit down with Ryan Craig, Managing Director of Achieve Partners, and discuss his latest book, Apprentice Nation: How the “Earn and Learn” Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America. Let’s listen in.

All right. Ryan, welcome to the podcast. How are you today?

[00:00:31] Ryan: Great to see you, Gil. Great to be here.

[00:00:33] Gil: Awesome. I appreciate you taking the time. I know you’re extremely busy with this book out and everything else that you do. Truly appreciate you taking the time.

[00:00:42] Ryan: I will come to the opening of an envelope to talk about apprenticeships.

[00:00:45] Gil: So, for those who are listening, we were talking before we started recording about I was at the post office for a long period of time earlier this week. And so, maybe we could have had you speak there, too. Who knows?

[00:00:54] Ryan: Give me the date and time.

[00:00:56] Gil: Awesome. Awesome. Well, so today we’re going to talk about your new book, Apprentice Nation: How the “Earn and Learn” Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America. That’s a lot to unpack and talk about. But before we hop in there, I’d love for our listening and viewing audience just to get to know you a little bit. You know, what’s your background? How’d you get to where you are? Why did you write this book? And so, we’d love for you to share some of those for us.

[00:01:22] Ryan: It’s not the first, but it’s my best. If you only buy one book from Ryan Craig-

[00:01:27] Gil: There we go.

[00:01:29] Ryan: … or if you get the, the book from your book club. So, yeah, my background is in higher ed. I started my career at Columbia University in the late ‘90s and went from there to helping to build a number of education businesses, online universities, and was fortunate enough to launch my own private equity fund over a decade ago, called University Ventures.

We’ve done a lot. We, ultimately, began to focus at the intersection of education and employment. And that’s what I write about a lot in the Gap Letter, my bi-weekly newsletter. And about seven years ago, we, sort of, pioneered this new model of combining… our term is “last-mile training,” with a staffing company. We were the employer. We weren’t just a training program. We were the employer. And the model is a high, train, and deploy. And it’s really just taken off. We created a whole industry around hire, train, and deploy, which is apprenticeship, in a word. It’s an apprenticeship model, where our company serves as the, the employer, and then ultimately then deploys the talent once they’re trained and productive off to clients.

And it’s just been a remarkable journey for us, in terms of the thousands of lives we’ve helped transform and the way in which our companies have helped close the skills gap in areas like cybersecurity and software development, data analytics, healthcare IT, Salesforce, Workday, a number of healthcare fields. So, we’ve proven that it works.

And so, my prior book, which was called A New U, was, sort of, a guided tour of this emerging landscape of last-mile training providers, coding boot camps, and so forth. And there’s a little bit in there if you look closely on apprenticeship. But we’ve come to the conclusion that apprenticeship is the way, apprenticeship is the model. It’s more complicated. It’s going to require public investment to become an apprentice nation. We are definitely not an apprentice nation today. In fact, we’re last among developed countries in the apprenticeship league tables. But it’s well worthwhile, because apprenticeship provides, I think, a big part of the answer to how to renew the American dream.

[00:03:37] Gil: I always love having mission-driven and big-idea people on the podcast. And I think we’re going to have a really great conversation. So, to get us started on this journey, for the general public who might be, obviously, we have a, a wide range of folks who listen to this podcast. A lot of folks are from enrollment management, admissions, marketing. But we have a pretty wide swath of folks. And that means that, sometimes, we want to make sure we define terms for people before we hop in, right? And so, I know for a lot of folks, I’ll be honest, I had a conversation about your book with some family members a couple of weeks ago when I was… I had folks over for a birthday party and whatnot. And because in my circles, I’ve got the nieces and nephews who are all looking at colleges and looking at plans and what they should do.

And, and so, I think, to get us started, can you help us to understand the vernacular a little bit? Obviously, there are differences between things like internships and co-ops and apprenticeships, right? And what the core difference between an internship and an apprenticeship and what that [crosstalk 00:04:40].

[00:04:39] Ryan: Great place to start. A lot of confusion around this. So, it’s real simple. An internship is a work experience, hopefully paid—too many of them are unpaid, but hopefully paid—that a student will undertake over the course of a program of study. So, it could be over the summer, could be during a term, particularly if you’re at Northeastern or Drexel or one of those schools that runs a co-op program where they commit to giving you multiple paid work experiences in field before you graduate, which is fantastic. Ultimately, after an internship, it’s temporary, and you go back to your program of study. So, that’s internship.

An apprenticeship is a job. And first and foremost, it’s a full-time job that you take. So, you can’t have an apprenticeship while you’re a full-time student, because an apprenticeship is a full-time job. So, you’re being hired by an employer. They’re paying you. And during the job, you have both formal and informal training built in.

And the beautiful thing about apprenticeship is you’re not expected to have specific skills or experience before being hired. That’s the whole point of the apprenticeship. Apprentices are hired based on their potential, based on their interest. Many of our apprentices are hired because they’re diverse. It’s a great way to diversify a non-diverse tech workforce. They’re not hired for skills or experience. So, it truly is a, in my view, the only pathway to economic opportunity that provides a true level playing field, meaning you don’t have to be able to afford tuition or be willing to borrow money. It’s a job that pays a living wage from the get go. And at the end of which, you’ll have multiple career pathways.

Not to say that you’ll never pursue a post-secondary program again. Hopefully, you will. So, it’s not specifically an alternative to college, but is a pathway to employment that doesn’t require skills or experience.

[00:06:25] Gil: Got it. And that’s extremely helpful. And I think one… well, something that’s interesting, and you mentioned tech careers a lot, one of the things you… and earlier you mentioned that we are far from an apprentice nation today, but you could argue that we were an apprentice nation at one point, with pre-tech jobs. And I think that’s where a lot of the confusion comes in with people, is when they think about apprenticeship, they think only about construction jobs, right?

I know my initial thought always, kind of, goes… I have a cousin who’s an electrician. And so, he did his apprenticeship, and he was a journeyman, and he did that whole path. But it’s not just those jobs, right? I think that’s [crosstalk 00:07:01].

[00:07:00] Ryan: Well, that’s the, that’s part of the problem, is it? People who make that association are, it’s not inaccurate, because today, as a country, we have 500,000 civilian apprentices, and about 70% of them are in the building trades. So, odds are, if you know an apprentice, they’re probably an apprentice electrician, plumber, welder, and so forth.

What the book is about is why apprenticeship is so important and how we can scale it across all industries and professions, so that young people have as many earn-and-learn opportunities, as many apprenticeship programs and apprentice jobs, as there are, for example, places in freshman classes around the country. So, you should be able to say, “You know, I’m not actually interested in taking on student loan debt. I’m going to work for a few years at an apprenticeship, and then maybe I’ll go do a post-secondary program after that.”

So, that should be the goal. But as you correctly say, we are not there, we are not there, today. But, 100, 200, 300 years ago, that was the pathway, right? Our founding fathers, they all were, they were apprentices. And really, since the last 60 years, has been a story of college for all, which worked for a period of time. But then, when college began surpassing $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 a year, and cost of living began skyrocketing, suddenly, you have to be willing to take on $50,000, $100,000-plus of student loan debt to gain a degree. And that’s not something that, particularly, the students we should most care about, first-generation, underrepresented, low-income students, should be burdened with. They should have earn-and-learn opportunities in order to attain a desirable career. So, it’s worth investing in. And we haven’t invested so far.

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[00:09:36] Gil: Yeah. So, let’s talk about that for a minute. I recently interviewed Charlie Melichar, who’s a consultant that works in advancement and alumni relations at colleges and universities. And one of the things we’ve centered on around a lot of the conversations that I have here on the FYI podcast are, we’re not really saying groundbreaking revolutionary things. We’re just re-synthesizing common sense, right?

And I think that one of the things that I got from your book is that there’s, on the surface, it seems like it all makes sense, right? Like, earn to learn, don’t have to have prior experience, there’s a pathway to a career. And yet, we’re not investing in this at a rate that is pushing the needle in the direction it needs to be. And I guess the question is, what are the barriers? What’s getting in the way, keeping us from doing that?

[00:10:20] Ryan: Well, I think the biggest barrier is that apprenticeship has been lumped in in the minds of pretty much everyone in the workforce and education policy world with every other short-term workforce development and training program funded by WIOA and the Department of Labor. And those programs are generally viewed as ineffective. And no other country funds apprenticeship out of that same bucket. Every other developed country that’s way ahead of us, on apprenticeship, for example, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, they’re 10 to 15 times better. The UK, Australia, Canada, France are about eight times better than we are on a per capita basis in terms of number of apprentices in the workforce.

They all have a separate funding mechanism for apprenticeship because they recognize a couple things. One is that apprenticeships are different because they’re not training programs, they’re jobs, first and foremost. They’re jobs that require employers, so it requires a different way of thinking about it, different funding mechanism.

Second is they have formula-based funding, in the same way that we have formula-based funding for higher ed, where the funding flows with the student, right? Pell grants and Stafford loans flow with the student. Those countries, they have apprenticeship funding that flows with the apprentice. So, the employer gets paid. The cost of the training is covered. They get paid for every employer hired and trained. We do not have that in the U.S. We have funding at an extraordinarily low level. So, just to give you a sense, we spend over $500 billion a year, federal and state, taxpayer dollars. On higher ed, we spend less than 1/1,000 that total on earn and learn, on apprenticeship.

And if you look at how much public support a apprentice receives compared to a college student, for every dollar of public support the apprentice receives, college student is receiving $50. So, I don’t know whether the right answer is 1:1, 2:1, or 10:1, but I can tell you that the ratio shouldn’t be 50:1 or 1,000:1.

And we are way out of balance, relative to all the other developed countries that are ahead of us. They spend an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude more on earn and learn then we do. And when they spend it, it’s not offering grants like the Department of Labor has been doing, where they’re trying to pick winners, pick groups that are likely to create apprenticeships. It’s formula-based. So, if you’re successful, you hire an apprentice, the cost of the training, it’s covered and you get an incentive. You get a bounty for every apprentice you hire and train.

So, that’s the message here. If there’s one thing that we can do better, it’s fund more and fund differently, and we’ll create a very different ecosystem.

The other point is that, nowhere where apprenticeships are they thriving because employers in those countries, like Germany or those sectors, like the U.S. building trades, are employers more far-sighted or benevolent in those sectors. That’s not why we have apprenticeships in those sectors. We have apprenticeships in those sectors because there are intermediaries that are doing the heavy lifting of setting up and running these programs. And they’re either required to do so by law or they’re incentivized to do so through funding.

So, Germany, the reason Germany does so well is that you have these massive chambers of commerce that have been around for centuries that are actually required by law to do the heavy lifting of setting up and running the programs for employers.

In the building trades, unions play that role. The UK, 25 years ago, it looked a lot like the U.S., relatively small apprenticeship sector, mostly in construction. Today, they’re doing eight times better than we do. And it’s very common in the UK to launch a career in financial services, tech, healthcare, as an apprentice.

So, how did they do it? Through funding, they incentivize over 1,000 intermediaries to get into the game of setting up and running apprenticeship programs. So, now, you have these 1,200 intermediaries in the UK organizations—mostly for-profit, but also nonprofit—that are in the business of knocking on employers’ doors, offering to set up and run apprenticeship programs for them, which is complex. There are a number of things that an employer would need to do to set up and run an apprenticeship program that are reasons why employers say, “No, thank you.” But when an intermediary comes along and says, “Hey, we’ll do it for you. And by the way, the cost of our work is covered,” that makes it much easier for employers to say “yes” to apprenticeships and “yes” to hiring apprentices.

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[00:15:22] Gil: So, going to take a little bit of a left turn here. And we’re… I want to turn attention to the higher education institutions directly, right? And I’m going to do a little bit of name-dropping here. So, we’ll put these links in the episode notes. But in the past few months, on this podcast, we’ve had Jeff Selingo come on and talk about the need for change in higher education. We’ve had Brian Rosenberg talk about resistance to change in higher education. We’ve had Paul LeBlanc come in and talk about systems that need to change and how the higher education system, as a whole, is behoven to its own system, in a lot of respects, and it’s not behoven to students, right?

And so, there’s a common thread across all of these authors that I’ve had the privilege of having on the podcast over the past few months. I’d love for you to share some of your thoughts on the curriculum at higher education institutions. And because I feel like, at some point, in this entire ecosystem, the institutions of higher education that are so prevalent do have a role to play in this conversation, and the strong, smart ones will find a way to be a part of that conversation.

[00:16:30] Ryan: Yeah, I say in the book, I’m just waiting to figure out who’s going to be the ASU or Southern New Hampshire of apprenticeship. The, the difference between, for example, online learning and apprenticeship is that this isn’t just about training or delivering an educational program. That’s part of it, but there’s a whole, sort of, employer-facing infrastructure that needs to be set up around marketing, apprenticeship programs to employers, selling apprenticeship programs to employers, account management for those, those programs, obviously, recruiting apprentices, hiring apprentices, mentoring apprentices.

So, these are functions that your typical, even an ASU or a WGU, isn’t going to have already available, but could. And Apprenticeships for America, right now, is working on a white paper trying to chart a course for how post-secondary institutions, particularly community colleges, can become what we call high-intervention intermediaries, meaning that they’re basically providing turnkey apprenticeship programs for employers, which is really the key here. Employers aren’t particularly interested in working with the community college, where all the community college does is just simply we’ve developed the curriculum, or we develop the curriculum and we’ll deliver the curriculum for the formal classroom related technical instruction component of the apprenticeship program.

That still leaves the employer with nine of ten functions to do themselves, which is too much of a heavy lift for almost everyone. So, the question is, how do you get community colleges and universities to do more than just delivering the training, to do all this other stuff that’s involved with apprenticeship so they can truly become apprenticeship service providers and build a large business around apprentices and apprenticeships?

And I think it, it’s really, it’s important. It’s not just today. Think about where we’re going to be in 5 or 10 years with AI and what AI is going to do to entry-level jobs out there. In my mind, and I talked about this in the book, we have an experience gap already, where lots of entry-level jobs are asking for the equivalent, either explicitly or implicitly, 3, 6, 12, 24 months of experience for what used to be entry-level jobs. And AI is going to turn that experience gap into a chasm.

What we’re going to find is that the, the grunt work and menial work that entry-level workers used to do as they learned the ropes is going to be expected to be done by AI, and so entry-level workers are expected to be much more productive doing much higher value work from the get go, which they won’t be able to do without experience. So, we’re going to see that experience gap explode. And it’s going to mean graduates are going to be much less likely to get good jobs, much more likely to be underemployed, unless you have something like a well-developed apprenticeship pathway or apprenticeship programs or partnerships with apprenticeship programs.

So, internships, great. Work integrated learning, great. But I’ve seen lots of entry-level job descriptions that say, “We require experience, and internships don’t count.” So, you know, not defending employers, but this is the labor market we’re living in today. So, we’re going to need universities to be much more proactive about figuring out ways to integrate real-work experience into their programs of study for students to get good jobs. And obviously, apprenticeships can be a big part of that answer.

[00:19:45] Gil: Well, and you hear a lot, read a lot about skills, right, and skills-based curriculum, skills-based education. And this is a cornerstone of that, right, where it’s got to be integrated into the fabric of education post high school, right, and how we think about how we’re preparing people for the workforce. And I think just, I don’t want to harp too much on the higher ed institutions, but I will. The… when we think about the… and you have a section in the book about the challenges of higher ed institutions, in general. And a big part of that is faculty and the curriculum, right, and the curriculum not necessarily being aligned with workforce needs. And I would love to spend a little bit more time on your thoughts around what institutions need to do and how they can, given their current setup, be better at being a part of this process.

[00:20:41] Ryan: Yeah, look, I mean, I think it’s challenging. The reality is that most faculty have worked in education their entire careers and don’t have much exposure to the industries or sectors or job functions where students would like to work. And so, I think that there was an APSIA report that came out last week that talked about partnerships and the fact that too few universities are actually reaching out and trying to partner with employers, partner with apprenticeship programs, partner with learning and design companies that can help translate their academic programs to a skills-based program, think about turning degree programs upside down, incorporating industry recognized credentials and certifications into degree programs.

These are all the things that are hard for colleges and universities to do and require leadership, but can be done. And I think, unless you’re one of the top 20 brands in higher education, you’re going to need to do them, if you want to retain or grow and grow enrollment.

[00:21:41] Gil: Well, yeah. I mean, you think about it from just a revenue perspective and overall headcount enrollment outcomes, that’s the path most of these institutions are going to follow. I think, to your point, the U.S. News “top 20,” and I know we both like to harp on the U.S. News rankings, or not harp on them and just set them aside and not worry about them, but the schools outside of that bubble are being hit with enrollment cliff, demand cliff, and questioning of the value of education. You can question the value of education until you’re blue in the face, but our prints in Yale are not going to suffer enrollment, right?

[00:22:14] Ryan: I mean, yeah, I don’t care, if no one’s heard of your college or university, but if you can effectively guarantee a good job or career at the end of a program, that’s going to go a long way to solving whatever enrollment challenges you want. So, the idea that, somehow, every graduate of this program will be hired as an apprentice, that’s a great value proposition.

So, how do you execute on that? So, these are the things that I talk about in the book.

[00:22:38] Gil: Yeah, and the… I mean the challenge on higher ed being that we have a really hard time with marketing and positioning of higher ed in general. And so, to say everything comes in an apprenticeship without an understanding of the value of apprenticeships, right? So, we have to sell the category and then sell the individual institution.

[00:22:54] Ryan: Right.

[00:22:54] Gil: So, you mentioned at the top, if you’re going to only buy one book by Ryan Craig, buy Apprentice Nation, right? If there’s one takeaway from the book that you want the audience to bring with them as they prepare to read the book, what is the one thing that everyone should take away?

[00:23:11] Ryan: Yeah, I’d say that, with digital transformation, generative AI, and the direction of travel of the economy, colleges and universities are going to have to do a heck of a lot more to integrate real-work experience into their programs if they want to thrive in the 21st century. And that is not in the DNA of most academic institutions and will require some significant investments and organizational changes.

[00:23:37] Gil: All right, we will leave it there. The book is Apprentice Nation: How the “Earn and Learn” Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fair America, by Ryan Craig.

Ryan, thank you again for joining us. We appreciate it.

[00:23:51] Ryan: Gil, great conversation. Thank you.[00:23:53] Gil: Awesome. And to our listening audience, all of the links to resources that we have mentioned will be in the episode notes. And we will see you next time on FYI.

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