Degree Apprenticeships Programs Are Expanding, Helping More Students Earn While They Learn
Credit: 10'000 Hours / DigitalVision / Getty Images- Degree apprenticeships combine traditional education with paid, hands-on work experience.
- The goal is to provide students with both a college degree and practical job skills with little to no debt.
- Degree apprenticeships also benefit employers developing a pipeline of skilled, job-ready employees.
- Despite growing interest, widespread adoption in the U.S. faces hurdles, including limited awareness and inconsistent employer participation.
College degree programs and apprenticeships have historically been rigidly divided, at least in the U.S.
In recent years, however, that divide has begun to disappear — good news for students wondering how to afford college, land a good job, and gain real-world experience.
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Degree apprenticeship programs blend traditional college coursework with hands-on work experience, empowering students to earn a salary, avoid loans, and graduate with both a degree and career-ready skills.
But even as the emerging degree apprenticeship model expands across institutions and industry, it’s still considered fairly niche in the U.S.
Vinz Koller, vice president of the Center for Apprenticeship and Work-Based Learning at Jobs for the Future (JFF), told BestColleges that this model is still finding its footing in the U.S. While apprenticeships are fairly common in Europe, U.S. companies still place a heavy value on a degree, making these dual-purpose programs increasingly valuable for people in all types of professions.
“Just college alone is not what [leads to positive outcomes]; you need a diversified portfolio,” Koller said. “You need to have skills available that fit everyone.”
History of Degree Apprenticeship Model
In the U.S., educational currency still flows through the traditional degree.
However, the popularity of apprenticeships has continued to grow over the past decade.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the number of new apprentices has grown 64% since 2012, and the Labor Department and state partners reported that registered apprenticeship programs enrolled about 940,000 people in 2024. Of these participants, about 660,000 were active as of the end of the fiscal year, while roughly 110,000 apprentices completed their programs and 165,000 dropped out.”
Koller said the degree apprenticeship model stems from America’s desire for skilled workers but insistence on holding a degree credential.
Apprenticeships offer a form of hands-on learning that the traditional degree program often can’t, while the classroom instruction that comes with the traditional higher education pipeline trains future workers on the soft skills needed to succeed in the modern workplace.
“It is the hot ticket in town to have a degree apprenticeship,” he said.
Ivy Love, senior policy analyst at New America, has been studying that hot ticket for nearly a decade. She told BestColleges that she first became aware of the model in 2017 when a unique nursing apprenticeship program that culminated in a bachelor’s degree caught her eye.
This year, she compiled a list of over 500 similar programs scattered across the country that allow students to complete an apprenticeship and earn a college degree simultaneously.
“It was so new (in 2017),” she said, “and in just a relatively short amount of time, it’s much more common.”
Love attributed the recent popularity of degree apprenticeship programs to new industries adopting the practice. While apprenticeships are traditionally associated with skilled trades, industries including teaching and nursing have embraced them in recent years.
Tennessee State University’s (TSU) College of Education is one such program.
Nicole Kendall Arrighi, assistant dean of teacher education at TSU, told BestCollege that the university’s teacher residency program started over 10 years ago. The idea came from the realization that the traditional teacher education pipeline didn’t give students enough hands-on experience in classrooms before graduation.
“One of the things they realized was that the 15 weeks of student teaching was not ideal for candidates to get the full sense of everything that comes with being a teacher,” Arrighi said.
Earn a Degree Debt-Free
Many degree apprenticeship programs advertise themselves as a chance to graduate completely debt-free. But how accurate is that assertion?
“It is not a gimmick,” said Michelé Smith, vice president of workforce solutions at Harper College. “It is a true statement.”
That’s because at Harper College, a student’s sponsoring employer — where they complete the apprenticeship portion of the program — pays the student’s tuition, fees, and other necessary supplies.
Besa Sadiku, manager of workforce initiatives at Harper, told BestColleges that students get paid for 40 hours of work each week as if they were pursuing an apprenticeship full time. In reality, however, students only work 24-32 hours a week and spend the rest of their time in college classrooms.
The result: 73% of degree apprenticeship students graduate from Harper College, she said. That’s a significant increase from the typical graduation rate at two-year institutions, which was 39.4% in 2020, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Other degree apprenticeship programs promise similarly affordable programs.
Reach University, an online-only institution with in-person work requirements, advertises a degree for just $75 a month. Reach partners with school districts to elevate teacher aides and other administrators to be credentialed teachers with a degree in a handful of states in the U.S.
Heath Grimes, director of partnerships at Reach and a former superintendent in Alabama, told BestColleges the institution allows students to continue a job they already hold in many instances. As a teacher’s aide, for example, a student spends a designated period observing classroom instruction and then completes online coursework in the evening.
This approach means students don’t need to upend their lives and stop earning a salary to pursue a degree, he said.
“If we can reduce the amount of investment,” Grimes said, “the return comes much more quickly.”
Why Do Students Need a Degree AND Apprenticeship?
Sheet metal fabrication isn’t the profession you’d typically associate with the need for a degree.
Devon Madon, a former college instructor at Loyola University and current co-owner of Madon Sheet Metal in Illinois, contends that the lines between skilled trades and traditional academia should continue to blur. Employees in all types of industries, she told BestColleges, could benefit from both hands-on work experience and a liberal arts education.
“I have had my entire career very much shaped by academia, so I see the value of it,” she said. “I feel like these two modes of learning are pitted against each other, but shouldn’t be.”
Degree apprenticeship programs create more well-rounded employees, Madon said.
College programs help develop soft skills like effective communication, which is important for sheet metal workers dealing directly with clients. Additionally, she said college courses could better equip workers for management roles in the future.
Moreover, many of the industries embracing degree apprenticeships require a college degree.
Arrighi of TSU said Tennessee requires teachers to hold at least a bachelor’s degree. That requirement may have contributed to the state’s prolonged teacher shortage, but TSU’s residency helps bridge the gap between this requirement and the time plus financial commitments required to earn a degree.
“The state has acknowledged that the teaching shortage is real,” she said, “and a lot of time, the ability to compensate these individuals … it has served as motivation to our candidates.”
TSU’s residency model also helps weed out students who aren’t a good fit for teaching, Arrighi added.
The university requires aspiring teachers to spend the two semesters of their residency/senior year in the classroom. During their first semester, they spend two full days a week in the classroom. The next semester, students co-teach with a mentor five days a week, she explained.
Students are getting hands-on experience in the classroom to decide if teaching is the right career for them. Otherwise, students would just be watching videos and learning second-hand about what it takes to educate K-12 students.
“In the typical education experience,” Arrighi said, “everything is framed as a hypothetical.”
Through TSU’s model, everything is practical.
Darice Trout, senior director of workforce solutions and job placement at Harper College, said the degree apprenticeship model doesn’t just help students and employers, but faculty, too.
Placing students into workplaces while they pursue a degree means college faculty get to hear directly from their students about what it’s like to work in their industry. This keeps faculty abreast of the newest trends and allows them to adjust their curriculum to address modern challenges.
Lastly, a degree helps immunize students against potential downturns in volatile industries, Smith of Harper College said.
“We never want you to just have that one credential,” she said, “because what if that industry goes under?”
Future of the Degree Apprenticeship Model
While degree apprenticeship programs are anecdotally growing in popularity, it’s not a model that’s been studied closely thus far.
What we do know, however, is that the “clear majority” of programs center on awarding students an associate degree, Love said, while they pursue a certificate of completion for their registered apprenticeship. While she said she’s found more degree apprenticeships offered from four-year universities than she expected, the majority of programs originate from two-year community colleges.
Lack of awareness about these programs explains some of the growing pains.
Grimes of Reach University said the institution has been expanding its partnerships with school districts, but it typically requires educating each superintendent about what degree apprenticeships are to begin with. The idea is novel, but he said most administrators want to partner with Reach and test the program once they understand it.
He said the goal is to grow the number of enrolled students across the country from 2,600 to 10,000 over the next three years.
Reach recently struck a partnership with the University of Tennessee (UT) at Chattanooga, Grimes said. Reach University will handle the first two years of education, while UT will handle the final two years.
The goal, he said, is to increase the prevalence of degree apprenticeships overall.
“Our mission is to change how we do teacher education in this country,” Grimes said. “We want to work ourselves out of a job.”
One complication with growing degree apprenticeships, however, is their ever-changing nature.
Trout of Harper College said the availability of degree apprenticeships largely depends on whether there are employers willing to offer the apprenticeship portion of the program. This part of the equation can be dependent on job market trends and individual companies’ capacity to hire.
“When you talk about who’s driving it, we’re looking at the occupation,” she said.
Still, Trout said while the college may sometimes have to remove degree apprenticeship opportunities, it typically adds new opportunities at a faster rate.
Ultimately, the future success of degree apprenticeships will require a mindset shift in the U.S., Koller of JFF said.
While many parts of Europe have long embraced apprenticeships, he said, U.S. companies tend to place a higher value on degrees. While degree apprenticeships bridge that gap, many employers will need to accept the potential benefits that may come with paying for a prospective employee’s salary and degree program at the same time.
Higher education faculty and administrators agree that degree apprenticeship programs create more well-rounded workers, but it may take time for employers to see this value.
Many employers, including state governments, have dropped degree requirements in recent years. However, a 2024 joint report from Harvard University and the Burning Glass Institute found that of the 3.6% of roles that stopped requiring a bachelor’s degree, the share of workers without a bachelor’s hired into these roles increased just 3.5 percentage points.
“For all its fanfare,” the report found, “the increased opportunity promised by skills-based hiring was borne out in not even 1 in 700 hires last year.”
Students also need to see the value.
When it comes to work-based learning, apprenticeships aren’t top of mind for most students. An analysis of online forum conversations from Campus Sonar found that internships dominate students’ conversations regarding workforce training.
“Beyond internships, degree-seeking students rarely discussed other forms of workforce training such as apprenticeships, work-integrated learning experiences, or micro credentials during their college search,” Campus Sonar found.
“It’s unclear if this is because students don’t learn about these options during college and career advising (lack of awareness), or if they’re simply not offered at the types of colleges and universities these students and families were exploring.”
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