Ryan Craig is a Managing Director at Achieve Partners and was formerly an MD at University Ventures. Ryan’s commentary on where the puck is going in education and workforce regularly appears in the biweekly Gap Letter, Forbes, and Inside Higher Education. He is the author of the book Apprentice Nation: How the "Earn and Learn" Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America (2023). He is also author of A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College (2018), which describes the critical importance of last-mile training and the emergence of bootcamps, income share programs, staffing and apprenticeship models as preferred pathways to good first digital jobs and was named in the Wall Street Journal as one the Books of the Year for 2018. Ryan’s first book was College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education (2015), which profiles the coming shift toward competency-based education and hiring. Ryan is a co-founder of Apprenticeships for America, a national nonprofit dedicated to scaling apprenticeships across the U.S. economy and is a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.
Previously, Ryan led the Education & Training sector at Warburg Pincus. His prior experience in higher education was at Columbia University. Ryan also founded and built Wellspring, a national network of boarding schools and summer camps for overweight and obese children, adolescents, and young adults. He began his career at McKinsey & Co.
Ryan received bachelor's degrees summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University, and his law degree from the Yale Law School.
Recommended Resources:
Gap Letter
Apprenticeships for America
Ryan Craig is a Managing Director at Achieve Partners and was formerly an MD at University Ventures. Ryan’s commentary on where the puck is going in education and workforce regularly appears in the biweekly Gap Letter, Forbes, and Inside Higher Education. He is the author of the book Apprentice Nation: How the "Earn and Learn" Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America (2023). He is also author of A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College (2018), which describes the critical importance of last-mile training and the emergence of bootcamps, income share programs, staffing and apprenticeship models as preferred pathways to good first digital jobs and was named in the Wall Street Journal as one the Books of the Year for 2018. Ryan’s first book was College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education (2015), which profiles the coming shift toward competency-based education and hiring. Ryan is a co-founder of Apprenticeships for America, a national nonprofit dedicated to scaling apprenticeships across the U.S. economy and is a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.
Previously, Ryan led the Education & Training sector at Warburg Pincus. His prior experience in higher education was at Columbia University. Ryan also founded and built Wellspring, a national network of boarding schools and summer camps for overweight and obese children, adolescents, and young adults. He began his career at McKinsey & Co.
Ryan received bachelor's degrees summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University, and his law degree from the Yale Law School.
Recommended Resources:
Gap Letter
Apprenticeships for America
Welcome to Season Eight of Edtech Insiders where we speak to educators, founders, investors, thought leaders and the industry experts who are shaping the global education technology industry. Every week we bring you the week in edtech. important updates from the Edtech field, including news about core technologies and issues we know will influence the sector like artificial intelligence, extended reality, education, politics, and more. We also conduct in depth interviews with a wide variety of Edtech thought leaders and bring you insights and conversations from ed tech conferences all around the world. Remember to subscribe, follow and tell your Edtech friends about the podcast and to check out the Ed Tech insiders substack newsletter. Thanks for being part of the Edtech Insiders community enjoy the show. Right Ryan Craig is a managing director at Achieve partners was formerly a managing director at university ventures. Ryan is one of my favorite education and workforce, journalists and writers as well as a investor. You can find his writing in his bi weekly gap letter newsletter which is amazing in Forbes and in Inside Higher Education. In addition, Ryan has published three books about the future of education. The most recent which we'll talk about today is apprentice nation how the Earn and Learn alternative to higher education will create a stronger and fairer America. He's also the author of a new you faster and cheaper alternatives to college and college disrupted the great unbundling of higher education. Ryan is a co founder of apprenticeships for America, a national nonprofit dedicated to scaling apprenticeships. He's a senior fellow at the progressive policy institute. And he began his career at McKinsey. Ryan Craig, Welcome to EdTech insiders.
Ryan Craig:Alex, good to see you. How are you?
Alexander Sarlin:I am great. I am so excited to be talking to you today about this new book apprentice nation. I've read all of your books, I'm a little bit of a fanboy, as you know. And you've written about, you know, so many different important things in education that I tend to sort of rant about on this podcast about faster and cheaper ways to upskill unbundling the degree. And tell us a little bit about how you got to this amazing concept of apprenticeships as a really core part of the answer.
Ryan Craig:Yeah, let's thanks a lot appreciate anyone who looks at the book, obviously, I think it's really important. And we'll talk about, we'll talk about why. So my last book a new you faster and cheaper alternatives to college was almost five years ago. And that was kind of a guided tour of this new last mile training or upskilling landscape that we were seeing boot camps income share programs. And I touched a little bit on apprenticeship in that book, but it was really one of a number of very promising options. And as time progressed, it became clear to us that even the Best Bootcamp and income share and upskilling and online, you know, short industry recognized certification models, they may have been doing a good job at addressing the skills gap that they weren't addressing, what we're seeing is this emerging experience gap where employers are insisting on real relevant experience for entry level jobs that a decade or two ago they would hire someone right out of college to do. So cybersecurity is a great example of that in cyber, you know, a decade ago, someone with a modest technical background could get a good job as a tier one analyst and a security operation center. Right. These are the front you know, first row defense jobs that you know, are feeling figuring out what to do with these alerts Do you know to have to resolve them, you disregard them? Do you have to elevate them and so forth. Today, almost all that work has been automated. And the entry level jobs and Sox are what used to be tier two analysts, which demand a CISSP certification, which means three to five years work experience. And what digital transformation has done to cyber jobs. I'm afraid AI is about to do too. All right, good. Jobs. I mean, I think back to my first good job as a consultant. And I spent I don't know, what, 30 hours a week, building PowerPoint presentations, and I'm pretty sure that in a year or two, no consulting firm is going to want their, you know, entry level consultants to be spending 30 hours a week building PowerPoint presentations, you're going to be spending an hour or two a week doing that and you'll be spending the remaining time on higher value client or you know, product work research, business development, you name it. And the problem with that is that all of those things are going to require relevant work experience, right? You're not gonna be able to do that without knowing what you're doing. The bargain that we've had for forever in this country and really every every country where you sort of come out of school with a macro credential with the demonstrates you have the ability to learn you have basic cognitive skills, but you have no relevant work skills or work experience is about to disappear because the you know, the grunt work and menial work that you would do as an entry level and your entry level job that was, you know, productive did contribute right at while you learn the ropes and you could, you know, begin to add real value to the business, that's going to be gone. AI is going to do that grunt work and menial work. And so this experience gap is about to turn into a chasm, and boot camps and share programs and online training programs don't address that. And what does address that is apprenticeship because unlike training programs, apprenticeships are jobs, they're real jobs, where someone is tired and someone that's the you're receiving a W two. And the only difference is that built into that job is formal and informal training. And by definition, you don't need skills or experience to be hired for that job. apprentices are hired based on and I tell you this, because we own about 10 companies that hire apprentices. apprentices are hired based on their potential, their ceiling, we look at their interest level diversity, also, our companies wanting their clients diversify their tech, often non diverse tech workforces. And so all of those things, but do you know not skills or experience because we deliver that over the course of the apprenticeship. And so that caused me to take a step back and say, Well, let's take a look at the big picture here. So let's look at where we are relative to other countries and thinking about career launch. And two different models for career launch. One is a tuition based, you know, derisively I might call it a debt based infrastructure for career launch. But then there's an Earn and Learn infrastructure for career launch, where you're not paying tuition, you're not incurring debt, it's your actually, it's a job, where you're being paid, and you're developing the skills you're going to need for your career. And as it turns out, the US is by far the most imbalanced on that in favor of tuition based debt based career launch. And disfavoring. Earn and Learn every other developed country is kind of an order of magnitude higher on Earn and Learn than we are. And that's a real problem. And as the experience gap grows, likely to be a major competitive disadvantage for our workforce and economy. Not to mention, of course, the fact that, you know, much of the social and perhaps even political challenge that we faced is due to the fact that you have, you know, seemingly almost half the country who feels like this, who would tell you that there is this great economy out there, but those jobs don't seem accessible to them. And once they go through this, you know, run run the gauntlet of four or five, six year degree program taking on debt. That's a problem I been running around the country giving talks since the book came out last month. And I've been talking about this. I don't know if you remember this song, Richmond north of Richmond that came out over the summer, it's kind of the song of the summer, it was the first time that an artist appeared on the billboard 100 chart for the first time at number one didn't climb the charts just showed up and showed up and number one, for the first time. And it's a song about by this Virginia singer songwriter Oliver Anthony, who's talking about how he just the only jobs available to him are these you know, crappy dead end frontline worker jobs with no mobility built in, you know, conservatives tried to adopt this as a conservative versus liberal thing or rural versus urban saying You said no, this is this about young people who see this, you know, bright shining economy and can't find a way to break in. And so I think that's, you know, a big part of why we have these social frustration. You could call it the death of the American dream. We need multiple pathways to prosperity and economic opportunity here. And the only one that is a true level playing field is an Earn and Learn pathway where you're not asking, you know, job seekers to take on take on debt, where they're actually paying them where it's a job, and the training is built in to that job. So I think it's incredibly important that we focus on this. Unfortunately, you know, up until now, apprenticeship has kind of been this like, small weird province of workforce development, and it needs to exit out and become something much bigger.
Alexander Sarlin:We're going to unpack so many of the ideas that you are laying down here that was a fantastic overview of the state of affairs and you know, we can we should talk about the politics of it. We should talk about the the US and why they're behind and what's in some of the other countries and what they've done. You have great chapters about this in the book, one of the things I really admire about your approach to education and to workforce development and all of these things is that you're not afraid to sort of really get into the details and the weeds in a way that I think a lot of people are who sort of work at an investment level or high level who don't have to get into the weeds and all the acronyms because they already work in these programs. And I'm going to admit that, you know, when I started reading this book, I knew about apprenticeships as a concept, but I didn't realize how much how many sub details and how sort of thoroughly baked to the sort of all the terminology was around it. And as we get in just just to get everybody on the same page, let's unpack what sort of apprenticeship means in the US right now. This is sort of how you start the book and I found it really helpful. It's sort of on the job training, plus related technical instruction, and that's how you get to this or this Earn and Learn model. Can you just unpack some of the core concepts? What is an apprenticeship today in the US
Ryan Craig:first, okay, so let me just dispel the, you know, often people will say, well, what's the isn't it just like an internship. It's the opposite. An internship is someone's enrolled in a an educational program, typically a degree program, bachelor's, or master's. And over the course of that program, they will do a job, maybe during a term, maybe usually over the summer, and hopefully, it's paid could be unpaid. But that's an internship. So it's a work experience over the course of a degree program. An apprenticeship is different apprenticeship is not education, or degree program. First, it's job. First, someone hires you as an employee, but it's a different kind of job. Because as I said, they don't expect you to have the skills that are experienced, they don't expect you to be productive from day one, you have built in formal training, the term is related technical instruction, RTI. So typically, that means on average, a day a week in the classroom, where you're actually learning what you need to know to do the job. Increasingly, that RTI, I tell you at all of our companies, which are mostly tech companies, the RTI is put up front. So you might have three or four months of RTI at the beginning before you begin doing any work at all, effectively, boot camp up front. In addition, then you have on the job training, which is informal, where your supervisor recognizes you're not just a regular employee, you're learning as you go. And there's much more built in mentoring coaching as part of that apprenticeship program. So you know, apprenticeship, obviously, people are probably most familiar with it in terms of the the trades, the building trades. And that is how most professionals in the building trades get their start. That's true. And so we have about 500,000 apprentices in the country today. 70% of them are in the building trades. There's a reason why when people think about apprentices, they think about plumbers and welders roofers, that's who you you find as results, you know, apprenticeship domain, is really dominated by construction trades and the unions, and the process for becoming a registered apprenticeship program and all the rules associated with apprenticeship. There's a lot in there that is related to safety and construction that might, you know, arguably not applicable to someone who is looking to become a Salesforce mentioned
Alexander Sarlin:the ratio, the ratio of professionals to apprentices and how it's this crazy ratio, because in a safe workplace, you need, you know, five professional pipe fitters for every Pipe Fitter apprentice, but that makes no sense with Salesforce. Yeah,
Ryan Craig:I mean, so that those are the sorts of things that we need to address. Unfortunately, the Department of Labor just came out with proposed new rules around apprenticeship last week, it's pretty clear that nobody in the department had read the book. Well, I know that many have, they'd been probably months or years in development, these rules, you know, not only didn't you know, clarify or simplify things, it actually complicated further by adding additional requirements that will, if adopted, ultimately frustrate apprenticeship creation. So we have a long way to go. Here. I mean, the fundamental problem is that apprenticeship has been lumped in with other workforce development and workforce training programs that are funded by the Workforce Investment Opportunity Act. She's about $3 billion in federal funding a year and that's a program that funds things like Job Corps, and workforce investment boards WIBs, one stops, basically, the places that deal with really the hardest cases, you know, how do you put someone to work who is quite low skilled, and many of those programs are particularly effective in terms of upskilling. And apprenticeship has just sort of been lumped in there. But the problem is that apprenticeship isn't training first. It's a job first, with training coming secondary. And the training is actually not the hardest part to develop. So what's been happening is the Department of Labor, you know, with the money they have, they've been giving the money to workforce boards and community colleges that think of it as training first. And those intermediaries the right word for them, they sort of they're not it. They're not employers, they're not schools. They're not apprentices. They stand between. They're developing the formal RTI curriculum. We're registering the program, and they're kind of sitting on their hands waiting for an employer to come around, seeking to use their curriculum, but there's not a single employer in the country who is saying I would launch an apprenticeship program tomorrow and hire 10 or 20 workers. If only I could find a pre developed RTI curriculum for my apprenticeship program. I'm involved with this new nonprofit called apprenticeships for America is an association of apprenticeship intermediaries, some of which I'm sure your listeners have heard of, like Ravager, multiverse skill, Storm apprenti, year up career wise, and they came up with a list of sort of, here's the thing, if you're an employer, and you're considering developing an apprenticeship program and hiring apprentices, what would you need to do that you're not doing today, and they're about 10, things that they would need to do that they're not doing today, the most challenging of which is hiring and paying a worker who is not going to be productive for an extended period of time. That's anathema to most employers, not they're not interested in it. So it's not about the training. It's about almost everything else. Training is a part of it. And we've been thinking about it wrong, we need to put the job that the horse before the cart here on the horse is the job, not the training. And so this is really a question of how do you change employer behavior? How do you get employers to say yes, to apprenticeships, and yes to hiring apprentices? And that's different from a dialogue around how do you develop the best training curriculum for apprentices? Or how do you make sure apprentices stay safe, so forth, in some cases, they can be in conflict with each other because you're adding complexity and regulation and therefore adding burden to the question of whether employers are willing to hire apprentices. So we've been getting it wrong and thinking about it wrong. It's, you know, perhaps arguably, in the wrong part of the Department of Labor, maybe we need a new department. But I can tell you that every other developed country sort of funds it separately, they're not funding it through the same and regulating it through the same regulatory body that regulates workforce developments, and you know, programs like Job Corps, and we've been funding it insufficiently, obviously, just as a number. As a country, we spend over $500 billion a year on tuition based colleges, we spend less than 1/1000 of that on Earn and Learn programs. So it's where to balance if you were to look at a given apprentice and individual apprentice and compare that apprentice to college student and say, How much public support are they receiving for every dollar of public support the apprentice receives the college student is receiving $50. So that ratio is off every other developed country is kind of an order of magnitude higher than we are or more. And then every other developed country is funding it better, because rather than giving grants to community colleges and workforce boards to develop training, and really don't move the needle on the employer decision, these other countries is providing formula funding that is flowing to intermediaries to do much more of the heavy lifting.
Alexander Sarlin:Let's talk a little bit about those international systems because they're this is a big part of the book. And it was something that also sort of surprised me. You know, a lot of people when they think of apprenticeships and other countries may think of countries like Germany have run apprentices for a long time. And you make this very clear and distinct point that yes, Germany and Switzerland and some of these countries have done apprenticeships forever and have very robust systems for it. But some of the countries who have actually changed towards an apprenticeship model more recently, might be a better paradigm for what the US should do. And you specifically talk about the UK and Australia. You know, tell our listeners a little bit about that distinction of the sort of early adopter and late adopters of apprenticeships and what we can learn from international systems.
Ryan Craig:Yeah, absolutely. So I sort of laugh at it seems like every month or so, there's a junket going over to Germany or Switzerland to look at their apprenticeship programs and you know, enjoy the chocolate and climb the horn or whatever it is they do over there, but I'll tell you what they're seeing on apprenticeship is not particularly useful. Because and this is sort of the dirty the dirty secret of apprenticeship, that I'm not even sure the Department of Labor gets, which is that nowhere where apprenticeships Thrive not in general. When you're Switzerland, not in the US construction trades are they thriving because employers in those countries are theirs? Those sectors are more farsighted or more benevolent, in terms of hiring unproductive workers and training them, no. Employers don't create apprenticeships and don't hire apprentices themselves at scale, for the most part, apprenticeships scale and thrive because there are intermediaries that are doing the work, the heavy lifting of setting up and running these programs for employers. And so in Germany, those intermediaries are very large, powerful Chambers of Commerce who are required to do so by statute. It's actually written into law. And there's they're assisted by unions who are more numerous across the economy than they are they are here, the UK and Australia and Australia recognize that they didn't have that sort of Chamber of Commerce union infrastructure. And so they went in a different direction, which is they just simply provided funding to encourage intermediaries to get into the game of becoming, you know, what I call Apprenticeship Service providers to set up and run these programs. And so today in the UK, you have about 1200 Apprenticeship Service providers that are in the business of going around knocking on employers doors, asking them if they'd like them to set up and run apprenticeship programs for them. That's not a thing. You don't you won't you can't find a lawyer really here who's been considering that in the UK, there's so many that virtually every company is considered it. And a lot of said yes to it, which is why the UK is eight times better than we are on apprenticeships in terms of apprentices per capita. Australia, very similar Canada, France followed the same direction. We haven't got the memo list until now, apparently, so California, thanks in part to the work of apprenticeships for America, a year ago became the first jurisdiction in the US to provide real formula based funding. So every apprentice that's hired can California the intermediary gets paid effectively. And if you were to ask, ahead of the California Division of apprenticeship standards, what they're being paid for, she would tell you, it's for the going around knocking on doors. Because apprenticeships are not bought, there's not a single employer running around sort of looking for other maybe one but looking for help to launch apprenticeship programs. Maybe there'll be one after they hear this podcast. You know, apprenticeships are sold, right, and you have to you have to go to them. And you have to say, Look, I know you're busy, you've got 100 Other things on your plate. You also have, you know, 100 entry level roles that you're having trouble filling, and you would really benefit from an apprenticeship program. And we will do everything for you, we will source and recruit, and maybe even hire the apprentice and put them on our payroll and do the upfront training the RTI and provide coaching and mentoring and deliver to you a turnkey productive resource for you. There are a lot of employers who when approached with that would say, Wow, that's really interesting, I would really love to do that. And that if we can do that at scale, that's how we get to what I call an apprentice nation, where we have as many larger scale apprenticeship programs, as we have colleges and universities where we have as many apprenticeship jobs as we have places in freshman classes across the country. And where, you know, you could imagine a high school senior sitting with her guidance counselor, evaluating the five or six, you know, colleges or universities, she might be interested in an equal number of Earn and Learn options she might be interested in, which would be really good as a country because a lot of what ails traditional higher education, I chalked up to information asymmetry, which means you have under privileged underrepresented first generation students who are enrolling at institutions and programs where the institutions either know or ought to know they're not likely to be successful, their completion rates are below 50%. Their subsequent employment outcomes are not good. Colleges and Universities either know this or shouldn't know it, they certainly have the ability to know it. And yet they continue to enroll these students and take on have the students take on you know, 10s or hundreds of 1000s of dollars of student loan debt in that set. But but the student the students themselves have no earthly idea, right hope springs eternal. And you know, it's a function of the fact that that's the only pathway the only pathway lies through these institutions.
Alexander Sarlin:So I have a quote ready from the book that is exactly about this that really jumped out to me because it's something I feel a lot in my world as well about this asymmetric information probably Which I'd, I'd love just to put in here you can expand upon which is, quote unquote, from you. College is today's version of the 1970. market for used cars. When it comes to selecting a college program, there's asymmetric information, while colleges probably have a pretty good sense of employment outcomes from the degrees they're selling, prospective students have no earthly idea. And if colleges don't know, it's willful ignorance, who could possibly uncover these tricky employment outcomes? Let me think, researchers and where might they be employed, and, quote, they're amazing. This is part of what makes me so frustrated with higher ed, your first two books were really about the, you know, I'd say the failures or the lack of evolution in the higher ed system. Tell us a little bit about this, you know, this world that you envision where, as you say, the student sits with a counselor, and they're looking at five colleges and five apprenticeships, why do we need that world? Yeah,
Ryan Craig:well, you can imagine a world where, you know, you have millions of apprentice jobs available. And it's a real option for someone coming out of K through 12, or perhaps, you know, a lower lower cost Community College option to pursue a Earn and Learn pathway for a couple of years, as opposed to investing in a, you know, a six figure degree program. And what what will that do? Well, it's going to give that student a better sense of what they're interested in, it's going to give them a sense of confidence in their capability to support themselves, that's going to help them develop more maturity, and it's going to help them be better consumers of their future, education, human capital development. And, you know, it's just like, you know, today, all the challenges. Look, there's there's a lot of master's degree debt out there. But you don't hear too much complaining about a student's who wants to have a bachelor's degree, or making an enrollment decision, a master's program, for the most part, they're pretty informed consumers, right. By that point, I want more informed consumers before they're making what could be the first or second most important financial decision of their of their life, that would be really good. And so this orthodoxy, we have high school to college to work. And increasingly, just as demonstrated by low teen and 20, something employment rates, students aren't engaging in paid work until they graduate from college. In many cases, that's unproductive, particularly at a time where we have this experience this this growing experience gap, we need more paid work sooner. So changing that orthodoxy from high school to college to work to one where you could easily go high school to work, and then make a decision as to what your post secondary pathway is. And maybe you don't need a full degree. Maybe at that point, you need a couple of industry recognized certifications. Maybe you want a one year intensive program, it's going to lead to a new kind of credential, the kind of unbundling that I've been talking about for a decade. So that I think would be extraordinarily useful. I'd be remiss in not mentioning the apprenticeships cousin here, which I call career pathways, which is the kind of work that Guild and ethicist and instride and others are doing, where they're serving companies with large populations of frontline workers. And they used to I mean, they would be the first one to admit to you they the original business there was offering online degrees kind of generic online degrees from Southern New Hampshire, that had little to do with the job or career trajectory, and then we're not connected to mobility within the enterprise, right. So they were directed about, you know, directed to keeping those workers in those frontline jobs longer, reducing churn. But today, that's not primarily what guild is doing. What guild is doing today, is really about building individualized skill based career pathways within the enterprise. So you might take a target, cashier at Target, and offer them an 18 month pathway to becoming a junior data analyst in the target organization.
Alexander Sarlin:And that jump from frontline to internal is a huge deal. So
Ryan Craig:it's not really an apprenticeship because apprentices by definition can just continue in the job. In this case, these career pathways, you're applying for a new job in the organization, you're going to what what I call a gateway job in your organization. But what's interesting about what, what they're doing is so it's Earn and Learn, right? You're earning, you're working that frontline job, you're doing the skill based pathway for 18 months, it's connected up to the HR is so the hiring managers for those gateway, Junior data analyst jobs are looking at the you know, 100 cashiers who are making their way through this program. They're seeing the messages, they're encouraging them. And they're aware when they're applying for these jobs, and they're prioritized, so they make sure that they're considered and so forth. So An apprentice nation is also a world where if a, you know, teen or 20, something, hops to work in a frontline job, they also have built in career mobility to those frontline jobs as well. And so, the Oliver Anthony's, who are writing Richmond, north of Richmond, are looking at these options and saying, Wow, look, you know, they're not dead end jobs I could go to work at I could take this, you know, Salesforce administrator, apprenticeship job and, you know, be making six figures in five years, or I could go to work at Target. And I could find myself in a junior data analyst role. In a couple of years, you see, sort of the American Dream built into these entry level jobs. That's that's the goal here, you know, the reality is that, you know, colleges and universities, while I, you know, they, I think they do as good a job as they've ever done it equipping students with the cognitive skills, critical thinking skills, problem solving skills, communication skills that they ultimately will need. They play probably a relatively small role in developing these Earn and Learn pathways, they may be helping to deliver the training for the most part, but they're not the prime mover, or what I would call a general contractor. On any of these apprenticeship programs or career pathway programs. They're going to be driven by intermediaries like guild, like apprenti, like multiverse like Europe, like amateur like skill storm, and we need to recognize that and we need to adopt policy that encourages and incentivizes those organizations. I'm particularly keen on, you know, those of you who know my work, I talk a lot about staffing and staffing, staffing companies, we have staffing giants in this country like allegiance, Adecco manpower, Kelly Randstad, what would happen if all of those companies developed Apprenticeship Service Provider arms, and went to all of their 10s of 1000s of clients and say, Hey, would you like an apprenticeship program? We can build it and run it for you. That could be game changing? And how do you encourage them to do it? Well, we know from every other country that public funding has played a big role in it, that when multiverse in the UK, goes to Barclays and says, Hey, would you like an apprenticeship program? The only cost of Barclays is the cost of that apprentice, the lower wage cost of that Apprentice on their payroll, everything else that multiverse does the recruiting, the training, the mentoring, it's all covered and paid for by the Government. So you know, we're at apprenticeships for America, we are strongly encouraging what we call paper apprentice funding, which could be a game changer,
Alexander Sarlin:I want to zoom out a bit about these intermediaries. Because you have such an literally encyclopedic knowledge of the complexities of this ecosystem, you sort of can you can name these organizations in all that have very different models that are sort of in all different areas of this, that whether it's employers, whether it's different kinds of intermediaries, whether it's these edtech companies that also can serve as intermediaries. Can we play a little like lightning round, where I will name a company or a type of company, and you just give a little bit of a definition, just because I find this very complex stuff to follow. And I will imagine that, you know, having just read the book, you know, very carefully, I still find a complex stuff to follow. I'm sure that there are people who just walking into this thing. Wait, you just named all of these companies skill, Storm and, and multiverse I've heard of and, you know, career wise, can we just do a little break down? Like, super quick one you down? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so you mentioned a number of different types of intermediaries in the book that sort of help bridge the gap between employers and apprentices. Talk to us about the nonprofits? Yeah,
Ryan Craig:again, I think what they have in common is all these intermediaries perform one or more of the functions that employers would need to perform, were they to run their own apprenticeship program. So I think I mentioned at the top, there's something like, you know, 10, things that an employer would need to do, from recruiting, to hiring, to developing the formal training, the informal training, the mentoring, the coaching, registering the program is a registered apprenticeship program, administering it.
Alexander Sarlin:And employers don't want to do this. It's a huge pain and unproductive
Ryan Craig:worker for a period of time. So all those things are hard to do. So in a intermediaries is a organization for profit nonprofit public, that performs one or more of those functions that makes the lift for employers lighter, and perhaps no lift at all, but we turnkey approach. So you know, we did we differentiate between what I call high intervention. It's actually the urban Institute's definition, high intervention intermediaries, where they do most or all of those functions and a low intervention intermediary that might do one or two of them. You know, nonprofits. You have industry associations, like the wireless infrastructure Association, that runs a fairly turnkey intermediary for it. It's members sort of putting up wireless towers and so forth and managing
Alexander Sarlin:the lines. Career was in there, right? Yeah,
Ryan Craig:career wise would be in a, they're in the youth apprenticeship corner here, which we haven't talked about. But apprenticeship by definition is a full time job, which would exclude a high school student who's obviously, you know, can't work 40 hours a week. So youth apprenticeships, sometimes called the Swiss model is where you would have a high school junior, who might work a day a week, their high school schedule would accommodate that they'd have block scheduling, so they'd have a day off a week. And maybe as a senior, they'd work two days a week with the expectation that they graduate and then become a full time apprentice at the company. So my challenge with the i Everyone is in favor of youth apprenticeship, everyone thinks it's a great idea. There are states that are you know, Maryland and Indiana, pursuing Youth Apprenticeship initiatives. Today, the problem is that if you can't convince an employer to hire a 22, or 25, or 29 year old as an apprentice, you're not going to be able to convince them to hire a 16 year old who's working, who's in high school. As an apprentice, that's a higher order problem. In my view, we need to get the basic infrastructure or tracks laid for apprenticeship before we begin to focus most of our time on youth apprenticeship. But I'll tell you, there are foundations out there, out of the Gates Foundation, all they want to talk about on apprenticeship is youth apprenticeship, they don't want to deal with the rest of it. So that's also a sort of cart before the horse problem. There, you have other nonprofits like apprenti, it's kind of like a nonprofit version of multiverse where they're running around and pitching to employers, mostly in the tech space that they'll set up and run the program for you, you're gonna still have to put the apprentice on your payroll, but they pretty much do everything else for you. And that that is sort of the basic, if you were down to it, they're kind of I'd say there are three models, right, you have your low intervention intermediaries that develop the training, like community colleges, you have your high intervention nonprofit, and for profit intermediaries that are what I call Apprenticeship Service providers that are do pretty much everything but ask the employer to put the apprentice on their payroll. And then you have hired trained deploy companies, which are the companies we mostly create, where it's truly, truly turnkey, where our company hires, our intermediary hires the apprentice, upfront to training, and is sort of hand in often costly, it's custom training. And it's sort of custom delivering a trained apprentice to the client. And the intermediary remains the employer of record for up to two years allowing the client to try before they buy. So if they don't like John Smith, you know, they can send John back after two weeks. So it's truly no risk for the employer that those are them, obviously, we're betting on those models.
Alexander Sarlin:So the apprenticeship service providers, which includes nonprofits, like career wise, or Europe, or apprenti, the for profits, which include multiverse, you know, we've talked a multiverse on this podcast a couple of times. And it's a really interesting model. Tell us about the for profit side of that just briefly, and then I want to go into the industry specific ones as well, but tells me for profit Apprenticeship Service Providers?
Ryan Craig:Well, I think the challenge that they face in this country is that as I said, in other countries, the pitch to employers is really compelling, which is your only cost is the cost of The Apprentice wage, everything else is covered. Here, when Apprenticeship Service Providers go to IBM or Verizon, they have to charge a program fee because there's no funding that comes with apprenticeship, that program fee can be 10 to $15,000 a year, which is what, per apprentice, which as you might imagine, is you know, inhibits scale and often means that when they're walking in the door at Verizon, they're walking in the door of corporate and social responsibility or Dei, and it's not sort of a core talent initiative. So we need to get to a place where apprenticeship is sort of cost competitive. And you get that by you know, essentially, investing in it, as every other developed country has, like we invest in post secondary education. So we should invest in apprenticeship, we should allow apprenticeships service providers to, you know, have a much more attractive pitch to employers around apprenticeship and earn and learn. And that's going to require investing in it. So, in terms of the industry specific, as a firm, we focus on sectors where just the talent gap is so substantial, that we can make it work without a subsidy. So we're focused on areas like software development, data analytics, healthcare IT Salesforce workday, cybersecurity, we have as you said, a healthcare staffing company called row health that helps nurses and behavioral therapists get their start their first job in a school, K 12 school and under all of these sectors, what they have in common is that after three, four months of training, the clients are more than happy to pay a rate that allows us to pay the apprentice, you know, 50,050 60,000 a year, and recoup the costs of our investment, our company's investment in the practice sourcing, screening, training, development, because the gap is just so large. So we have companies that, you know, we're clients are quite happy to pay a, you know, $100 an hour bill rate to that resource, which translates into, you know, that's kind of a $200,000 a year position. So obviously, there's a lot then you can do in terms of training when you're making, you know, 100 $200,000 in revenue for an apprentice. So, but that's not true in most in most jobs, right, you're not going to, you're not going to find a employer willing to pay, you know, even maybe even a $50 an hour bill rate to, you know, an intermediary for a new a brand new resource. So we, the point about the subsidy is we need to make this work, even where the employer is only willing to pay kind of a $30 an hour bill rate for a new resource, right? If you're paying them 20, and you're billing them at 30, you're employing them and they're not being billed for, you know, four or five months. At the start. You can't make you can't make that work, right. You're also paying for the cost of the training and so forth, and not everyone makes it through. So that's sort of where you need, you need the subsidy, we should have apprenticeship anywhere you have an employer willing to pay a living wage for an entry level position they're having they're not able to fill or wouldn't otherwise fill. And we could do it as an apprenticeship. That should be apprenticeship. We should be investing in that.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, I'm not sure these will be called intermediaries. But another type of company you name that I think is really interesting to talk about are these work integrated learning platforms. This is another place where ed tech sort of inter sex with this apprenticeship world. So tell us a little bit about like Parker, Dewey, and forage and what do they do in this world?
Ryan Craig:You know, as you think about the experience, gap, apprenticeship is obviously a great, I think that's the best solution for it. Because as I said, you don't need experience or skills to be hired as an apprentice. That's the whole point. Big picture here, take a step back and think about what digital transformation and AI are going to do two entry level jobs. The big picture is we desperately need to figure out how to integrate real work experience into the education pathways that we currently offer young people. So starting from, you know, right in middle school, right? How do you in Finland, you know, seventh graders are taken out in like, you know, put they go visit job sites for days or, or weeks. So, that's very different. So what are the options besides apprenticeship? Well, you can imagine a world where every college student graduates from a you know, Drexel, or Northeastern style, Co Op program, right? Everyone has multiple paid infield internships, right and the college or perhaps some intermediaries organizing those. So you can kind of guarantee that relevant work experience. So that would be good. As someone mentioned to me last month, as I was doing the book talks, you know, it may not be a coincidence that Drexel and northeastern started out as my schools, you may not be in the DNA of your typical university to build a Co Op program like that. And in fact, someone mentioned to me also this kind of depressing that Northeastern, having a written Co Op to sort of the point of, you know, highly selective university, is now going to be de emphasizing that in their marketing going forward, because they're playing a new game, they're now competing with the, you know, sort of IVs of god of the world, right? It's kind of depressing, it really is. So you have the internship, but then you then you have this idea of work, integrated learning companies like ripen, where I'm on the board, Parker, Dewey. And the idea here is these are real work experiences from real employers that somehow are being made available to students. So on Parker Dewey, their students are basically signing up directly for these work experiences. There's a company called Paragon one, we have a small investment and it's doing something similar with what they call externships. Ripen is integrating those work experiences into degree programs and courses. Essentially, it's a marketplace where you have 1000s of employers posting 10s of 1000s of real projects, you know, from banks and hospitals, and you name it, and faculty members can then search for a relevance project and incorporate it into their courses, a capstone project. And so you might have 50 students working on a project for MasterCard and 50 students working on a project for Verizon or whatnot. And they're getting real feedback from the employer and they put that on there. It may only be four weeks or six weeks, but they're putting on on their resume, and it's real work experience. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:they experience gap but still chipping away at that experience gap.
Ryan Craig:That's an ed tech. And I should say, too, in terms of Ed Tech, we're seeing the emergence of these apprenticeship management platforms like build within a co founded by Michelle Rhee, former DC schools, a superintendent, despite the challenges around apprenticeship, it's growing like crazy. And we're going to see a real growth year over the next couple of couple of years, whether or not the Department of Labor helps or not, I think there's going to be a lot of room for ad tech development and involvement here in terms of helping to manage this new Earn and Learn ecosystem.
Alexander Sarlin:One of the things that feels so ironic and sort of extra tricky about this apprenticeship model is that as the sort of value proposition and the the clear ROI of traditional, you call it tuition based training, or your you know, traditional higher ed system has been going down pretty continuously. I think, you know, we're at this moment, we're just a few weeks out from this real cataclysmic issue in Congress with the university presidents and you know, I feel like the the sort of reputation of college as an institution has been just going down for quite a while. And you've written about this for a year. So you're way ahead of this. At the same time, the reputation of apprenticeships, at least in concept has been going up. And you mentioned in the book that you know, there are apprenticeship proposals from both sides of the aisle. Amy Klobuchar, Gavin Newsom in California, you mentioned Tom Cotton and Susan Collins and Jeb Bush, some very staunch Republicans. Tell us a little bit about that. Because when you say, Hey, we're head, if we are heading towards an apprentice nation, if there's going to be more meaningful policy and funding, is it an advantage to have everybody excited about this idea? Or is it that everybody's excited? And they're all throwing different ideas out there? nobody quite knows what they're doing.
Ryan Craig:It's all positive. I mean, if on a policy front, I'd say the only barriers are the bureaucrats and the Department of Labor who don't get it. And that's a solvable problem. Yeah, I was I was giving a talk in DC, for example, talking about the lack of performance based funding, and someone from the Department of Labor was in the audience and say, well, that's not true. We do provide performance based funding. And of course, what she was referring to is the fact that they provided last year performance based grants to states. And I said, Well, what did the states do with the money? She said, Well, I don't know. Right? So that's the level of thinking so no, I think that we are and I say we are primarily talking about apprenticeships for America, which is this trade association of the 200 or so intermediaries in the US a lot of receptivity both sides of the aisle for doing some some really interesting innovative things here. And once we do that, once we sort of begin to get this infrastructure set up, I think the funding will flow and begin to shift, right. And you were, you know, the UK was spending sort of at their peak kind of, you know, 4 billion a year on apprenticeship, which translates in this economy would be like, kind of 30 billion a year. So that's kind of 100x what we're spending today on apprenticeship. We don't have to get to that level in order to make a big difference here. But you know, it's not going to happen by funding it through WIOA. And workforce boards, and community colleges. That way we have the way we have and we need formula based funding, the funding should flow with the apprentice, like it does in higher ed, right, we've built our world leading higher education system, because the funding flows with the student funding should flow with the apprentice, and whoever can get an apprentice hired placed, should get paid for that, because that is a huge benefit to the apprentice to the employer, and to society,
Alexander Sarlin:and recreate this huge market of intermediaries, which is exactly what UK and Australia have been doing, which is really how this starts to happen. I love your point about you know, apprenticeships are not bought they're sold. Right? It's people don't always know that they need them. But when they have them, they have great
Ryan Craig:results, right? I mean, again, those who are in the apprenticeship game, the Department of Labor and Workforce boards and so forth. For them, apprenticeship is old hat and it's the province of welders and plumbers and so forth. And it's not it's not new. But for 95% of the employers out there in the economy, it would be new. And we need to think of it from that. So we need to put on the hat of like, what would it take for your you know, your typical 500 person, you know, tech oriented services business to launch a in an apprenticeship program. And that's sort of the hat that I tried to wear in writing the book. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:it's a very powerful argument. And it's very comprehensive. So one thing you mentioned that I thought was really, really powerful because I've heard these objections come up in the context of apprenticeships or while you sort of named three common, I'm calling them objections, but sort of, you know, ways that people hear all of these arguments about how great apprentices chips are there. You know, you get all this money back for every dollar invested. It saves taxpayers almost $8 all these great things, but then they have these objections and the three name are stigma partially your no apprenticeships have come out of this construction trades and a lot of people still see them as a lesser option than that. Additional for your degree, the worry about career trajectories that you know apprenticeships will get you that first job but maybe not pigeonhole you. And this concept of core cognitive skills that you know, the overall education of a liberal arts degree or you know, of a college generally, including things like problem solving, don't necessarily come with an apprenticeship. These are really interesting. And I think these are three things that almost everybody here who has thought about this, or has talked to anybody about this has heard glimmers of these. Tell us a little bit about these objections and how you think about them having thought about it so deeply. Yeah,
Ryan Craig:well, first of all, stigma, I think that gets solved simply by increasing the supply of apprenticeships outside the construction trades, we know that when we launched an apprenticeship, cohort, an apprentice cohort in cybersecurity or healthcare IT we have hundreds of applicants for every seat. So you offer a paid pathway without requiring skills or experience to a job that where they're going to make six figures within five years, you get the you don't have a problem with stigma. So I'm not concerned about that, in terms of the cognitive skills, and I think that the career trajectory, cognitive skills are related, right? I think it's it's an issue, and two that there's no perfect answer there. One is that apprentices largely end up from the research in either their field or related field. So you're not you don't typically see maybe only like one to five or some number like that ends up switching completely to a different field. But let's focus on those that does switch, right. Let's look at the worst case scenario. And I would say that your worst case apprentice slump, you know, say a young woman who decides to become a data analyst apprentice for two years, and then decide that she doesn't want anything to do with data hates analysis, like what needs to be something totally different. Is she worse off than your worst off college student today? Right? And my answer is definitely not. She's better off, right, because she'd been working for two years making money, developing a better sense about her interests, as opposed to the college student who probably drops out with debt. She has
Alexander Sarlin:skills, which we have not mentioned, but really important concept.
Ryan Craig:Yeah, so there's a lot to be said for that. So I think that even in that, like, I'm not saying apprenticeship is a substitute for post secondary education. I think of it terms of staging, right, if everyone did an apprenticeship for two years before going to college, I think we would be we'd have a more we'd have less asymmetric information, we have more informed consumers, if we said, apprenticeships can only be accessed by those who complete college, which is kind of crazy. But imagine a world where we just built apprenticeship infrastructure for college graduates, it would still be worth investing in that infrastructure, right? Because college graduates are going to have a hell of a time finding good entry level jobs in 10 years, as entry level jobs are just transformed with AI. So it's not a substitute, necessarily, but it's a necessary addition to our ecosystem of education and workforce development. The way
Alexander Sarlin:you frame it, and you've said this a couple of times, it's really powerful is, you know, there's tuition based training where the learner or apprentice, you know, or student pays upfront pays, until they can reach a credential that they can walk away with, and hope that it'll get them into the employment outcome that they paid for, or hire, train, deploy, or earn and learn or, you know, all of these different models where you're actually getting paid while you learn. Just on that level alone, it completely changes the equation. Because as we all know, you know, the graduation rates at many, especially non selective colleges are incredibly low. The tuition and student debt is spiraled so much over the last few years that it's become, as you mentioned, in the book, sort of the premier, higher ed policy of the US government is just trying to control student debt. And so you know, we've gotten to the scenario where tuition based learning is just proven to not work for a significant number of people. So I like the way you're putting it that in saying, you know, let's not compare it to Perfect, let's compare it to what we have. And what we have is we are failing so many people in this country, if
Ryan Craig:we just look at every other developed country that has this much more developed and unlearn pathway than we do. So let's at least get to where they are.
Alexander Sarlin:Exactly. Exactly. One thing that I thought was very interesting. You've mentioned this in passing, I mean, people listening to this conversation will realize that it's not there's not a sort of fork in the road, necessarily between traditional higher ed and apprenticeships. They are two different pathways, but people can weave between them. They can do them one after the other. And one thing that I found really interesting was your concept of Let me quote you to yourself one more time, I'd love to hear you expound upon this enrollment challenged colleges would do well to make a list of in demand, industry recognized tech credentials, and Promise students they'll graduate with at least one, especially if they're kept out of a technical major due to capacity constraints. Then either integrate those credentials into degree programs or modify distributional requirements to mandate additional credentials either way, be sure to stay Are these credentials in the first year, turning degree programs upside down? So this is a way to put them all together. Tell us about it. Yeah,
Ryan Craig:you know, the idea that somehow you need to graduate from a four year institution that need to go to a boot camp to get right skills, is just silly. And colleges, I think most colleges understand that. And they understand the value of micro credentials. The problem is too many of them are trying to invent these credentials themselves. And sort of they build a certificate program and data analysis. And employers have no idea what that is. Yeah, they kind of ignore it. So industry recognized credentials are really important. Let's focus on what employers what's out there, what the industry associations and the technology companies themselves, are offering. And let's make sure that you're graduating with credentials that employers will understand simple, and it particularly at non selective colleges, where completion rates are low, let's make sure that your students even if they don't make it all the way through the multi year degree program, have some credential a value at the end. So, you know, to me, that just makes a ton of sense. Of course, for colleges, no one has ever gone broke betting against the pace of change in higher education. And I think until enrollment falls off the cliff, most schools are just not going to move in that direction. Some will, and hopefully, others will follow.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, and he does feel like some of the you've mentioned Salesforce here, but also workday, snowflake, you know, there's an epic is a big medical platform. You mentioned a lot of companies who were the platform skills are really, really valuable. And those companies are starting to create pathways. We recently talked to figma. And figma offers, you know, training for free all the way down to elementary school and high school level. And it's like, fantastic, because if you graduate high school, knowing how to use figma really well or college, you know, use frequently Well, that's a skill you can take into many, many different jobs. It seems so obvious when you say it that way that you know, industry recognized credentials, often associated with existing tools or platforms are what get people the jobs yet. Colleges just don't think about it that way. I could talk to you for hours. I have like at least five more questions written here that we didn't do it. We
Ryan Craig:love talking with people who are passionate about this forum. It's great. It's
Alexander Sarlin:incredibly important. We'll have to do a part two sometime, but we're going into the holiday season. I'm going to end with the questions I always ask everyone, I'd love to hear your answers. The first is, what is the most exciting trend you see in the Ed Tech landscape right now. And you can expand that a little to be you know, workforce landscape that our listeners should keep an eye on.
Ryan Craig:Like, I'll go back to I think formula based performance based funding for apprenticeship and thinking about earn and learn in the same way that we think about tuition based on where the funding flows with the student, the funding will flow with the apprentice look for more states to follow California's lead. Look for a lot of the $500 billion in CHIPS funding for semiconductor fabrication that's allocated to workforce development to be going to formula based funding for apprenticeships in that space. And I think we're just going to start seeing a virtuous circle here around performance based funding for Earn and Learn. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:the idea of the funding flowing with the student and being based on their performance and use a formula base just want to make sure I understand what formula base means in this context is that that there's money going through intermediaries. Now
Ryan Craig:it just means it's simply that it's clear, right? You don't have to apply for a grant which is where the with funding is coming. It's just the you know that if you hire an apprentice, that there's money on the other end,
Alexander Sarlin:got it so there's a formula in place for the same way that you
Ryan Craig:know, college enrolls a title for eligible college enrolls a student they know that there's you know, a Pell Grant and Stafford loans unless maybe you're an Ivy League school. If we're that's gonna be all taken away. According to the latest rules. That's
Alexander Sarlin:a crazy change. I'm still digesting that one that feels really nuts combined with all the other things happening in the in the space. Okay, fantastic funding flows with the students formula based performance based funding and what is a resource obviously goes without saying that we will put a link to a Prentice nation fascinating, fascinating read, as are all of your books. In the show notes for this episode. What is another resource that you would recommend for somebody who wants to dive deeper into any of the many topics we discussed today? Well, obviously
Ryan Craig:I have a gap like the my newsletter that goes out every week the gap letter, so feel free to subscribe to that the apprenticeships for America also has a newsletter. They put out you can go to the apprenticeships for America website and subscribe to that. I think it's bi weekly. Also, as basically of you know, all the news in and around apprenticeship.
Alexander Sarlin:Fantastic. Yes, I have a longtime reader of the gap letter. And I've recommended that to many people that I have not tried this apprenticeships for America newsletter. So we will put links to all of those resources in the show notes for this episode. Ryan Craig, truly an inspiration I literally an inspiration to my personal career and I think for so many people just open their eyes to different ways of looking at workforce development at education generally at certainly at higher ed. Thanks so much for being here with us and in tech insiders. Wonderful,
Ryan Craig:what a great conversation. Thanks, Alex. Happy holidays.
Alexander Sarlin:Thanks for listening to this episode of edtech insiders. If you like the podcast remember to rate it and share it with others in the tech community. For those who want even more Edtech Insider subscribe to the free Edtech Insiders newsletter on substack.