 It feels like I should have lots of space up here, and somehow I don't, so everything's about to fall off, so I'll put that there. All right, so, thanks. Good morning, everyone. Good morning and welcome. Welcome to New America on this pretty chilly winter morning, one of our first winter mornings. So we're so happy you all could make it. I know this is an early morning, so we really appreciate you getting out. Thank you for joining us for what I know is going to be a really interesting and important conversation on how to expand our national apprenticeship system by better connecting it to our higher education system. So thank you for coming. Thank you to all of our speakers for taking the time to be with us and for many of them to travel here to be with us. A special thank you to JP Morgan Chase and Company for supporting the work that we will be sharing with you today. So my name is Mary Alice McCarthy, and I direct the Center on Education and Skills here at New America. The center is part of our larger education policy program, and we focus on the intersection between our traditional education systems at both the secondary and the post-secondary level and our workforce development and career and technical education systems. So these points of intersection, this is really where our education system generally meets the labor market, right, and these are the programs, our education and training programs that are very specifically aimed at helping people get into jobs and move up in jobs. And as both the price and the importance of education have grown over the last few decades, particularly higher education, there's been a lot more interest in these educational strategies that are more tightly connected to jobs, whether it's career and technical education, which has experienced a big sort of revival in the last few years and a lot of attention or more recently, apprenticeship, right? And that's what we're here to talk about today. So interest in apprenticeship has been growing over the last few years, particularly among policymakers, but also among employers who are struggling to find the workers they need and among students and job seekers who are struggling with that cost, that increasing cost of post-secondary education. The Obama administration over the last couple of years spent around over $250 million in programs aimed at expanding apprenticeship and particularly aimed at expanding apprenticeship into new parts of our economy and into new populations. The Trump administration issued an executive order this summer calling for the expansion of our apprenticeship system, also with an emphasis on the need to grow it in new industries. They have established a task force to explore strategies for doing just that, and that task force kicked off about two weeks ago, I think. This year, Congress appropriated special funding, about $90 million, to help build the capacity of states and other key stakeholders to spread apprenticeship. And just last week, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce included a special shout-out to apprenticeship in its draft bill on higher education. So apprenticeship really is that rarest of topics in Washington, D.C., one that still enjoys some shred and more than a shred, actually a significant amount of bipartisan support, okay? And that broad support accurately reflects public sentiments toward apprenticeship. In a national survey conducted by New America and Lake Research Associates earlier this year, we found that Americans across the political spectrum and also across the age spectrum, the geography spectrum, the income spectrum, the educational level spectrum, have very favorable views of apprenticeship on par with how they view public universities and community colleges. They also think it's the best way to prepare for a job. A very large majority, 83%, are even in favor of government, more government spending to support apprenticeship, right? So I think it's actually safe to say that apprenticeship is the one topic that it's safe to talk about, it would have been safe to talk about over Thanksgiving, it will be safe to talk about with your extended family over the holidays, you know? Everybody loves apprenticeship, okay? And it's not hard to see why everybody loves apprenticeship. So more than 80% of apprentices move directly into a job when they finish their program, often with the same employer where they've been an apprentice. Their average starting wages are around $60,000 a year or more and they come out of their programs with no student loan debt. Today's graduates leave higher education with an average student loan debt of over $30,000, so consider that difference. But try to find someone who is actually completed an apprenticeship and you're gonna have some trouble. Any apprenticeship completers in the room? Okay, we have one, right, okay? And that's because despite the interest in the enthusiasm and the targeted investments over the last few years, our apprenticeship system in the United States is very, very small and very narrowly concentrated in just a few industries. In 2016, we had just around 500,000 people enrolled in our registered apprenticeship system. About 50,000 new apprentices join the system each year and about 80% of those are in the skilled trades or manufacturing. These are great jobs, but again, we see a lot of concentration in just a few sectors and the overwhelming majority of our apprentices are men. Now compare that to our higher education system where we have about 18 million undergraduates and about 2 million new students enrolling every year just in community colleges. So we get to see a sense of the scale that we're talking about here. So that brings us to this question of why can't we grow apprenticeship in this country? What's holding it back? Everybody loves it. Everybody wants to put money into it, but we can't seem to get it off the ground. And that's what we set out to understand in our research. And while there are many reasons, we believe a big part of the challenge of expanding apprenticeship is that it is so isolated and so separate from our formal education system, particularly our higher education system. In the United States, our higher education and career technical education systems have developed separately from our national apprenticeship system. That is very different than the countries in Europe and Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and now even the UK where these systems are much more connected. And I think as many of you know, our higher education and our career and technical education systems are barely on speaking terms themselves, right? Even though the same institutions often deliver their programs, our apprenticeship system then is even further off the map from that, right? So it has an apprenticeship in the United States, has a separate history, a separate tradition and culture, and most importantly, it is governed by a completely separate system of rules and regulations. So why does that matter? It matters because if apprenticeship is going to really expand in the United States, it has to expand into the growth sectors of our economy and sectors like healthcare and business and finance and information technology and education and engineering and social services. But career preparation in these fields right now takes place almost exclusively through institutions of higher education. And career advancement, in many cases, even career entry requires a college degree. In fact, degree requirements for jobs are increasing. Whether we agree with that or not, that does seem to be the trend. Two recent reports from Burning Glass, a labor analytics firm confirmed this growing credential creep in jobs that used to not require either associate or bachelor's degree. This is true even in manufacturing, one of the strongholds of apprenticeship. So for apprenticeship to grow and be an option for many more people, it needs to be connected to our post-secondary education system. It needs to be connected to our system for awarding educational degrees and certificates, right? And that's not something that our apprenticeship system can do. Our apprenticeship system, as you know, cannot award college degrees. So the quest, so we, so, I'm sorry, now I got myself confused. So for our apprenticeship system to grow, we need for it to be able to connect with institutions that can award those credentials, right? Because those are the credentials that have more currency for advancement in the labor market. So that's what we wanna talk about today. We believe that this is something that we can do. We believe that this is a solvable problem and there are not a lot of those in Washington these days. But these are solvable problems. European countries with strong apprenticeship systems increasingly have more permeability between their vocational systems and their higher education systems. These connection points are not impossible to build. And that's what we've been working on for the last year. Again, thanks to the general supporter, J.P. Morgan Chase and company, we have developed a set of recommendations on how we can better connect these systems so that many more apprentices can be college students and many more college students can be apprentices. And we don't want folks to have to choose one way or the other. So that's what we're gonna share with you shortly. But before we jump into that, I have the distinct honor and pleasure of introducing Diane Our-Jones, who is joining us from the US Department of Labor where she is a senior policy advisor to the secretary. Diane is focused on expanding apprenticeship opportunities and meeting the goals of President Trump's executive order. The executive order is called Expanding Apprenticeships in America. So prior to joining the department, Diane was a senior fellow at the Urban Institute where she was working with industry partners to develop competency-based occupational frameworks. And she put out some great research on apprenticeship and competency-based education that some of you may be familiar with. Before her stint at the Urban Institute, Diane was an assistant secretary for post-secondary education at the US Department of Education. So she has been in both of these worlds. She was there during the Bush administration. And prior to that, she served as a deputy to the associate director for science in the White House of Office, in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. And I think most importantly, Diane began her career, as she pointed out, as a nursing assistant through a high school apprenticeship program. She credits that job and her hospital coworkers for convincing her to complete high school and giving her the confidence to eventually go to college and graduate school. So she holds a bachelor's degree in biology, a master's degree in applied molecular biology and a certificate in massage therapy. So, Diane, can you join us and share a few comments? Thank you. Thanks so much for this opportunity. So I earned my certificate in massage therapy after completing a master's degree in molecular biology. And when I went through some confirmation for my prior role, a senator looked at me and said, really, Diane, massage therapy? And I said, yes, because in my job as a professor, I needed to have a second job in the evening to help pay the bills while my husband was in graduate school. And this was a phenomenal way for me to do that. So I think I'm one of those people that thinks all work is to be valued and all work is valuable. So I really appreciate being invited to kick off this event. This is a really important conversation about how to enlist the help of higher education in our efforts to expand apprenticeship. And as you heard, today's topic marries my two loves, higher education and apprenticeship. Before I start talking about this partnership, though, I first wanna thank people in this room. So there's a flyer that I put on chairs. And if we ran out before we got to your chair, I apologize, we can send you a flyer. So I really wanna thank everybody in this room for your contribution to making National Apprenticeship Week just an unbelievable success. We've come a long way in raising the profile of apprenticeship and generating interest in this earn and learn option. And indeed, it was a topic of conversation at my Thanksgiving table. And I did not have to explain to people what an apprenticeship was. This is now a word that's part of our vernacular and people have embraced it and accepted it. So that's great. So according to the stats that we collected, during American apprenticeship week, there were more than 105,000 attendees at 1,000 events that took place in all 50 states. There were 58.3 million social media impressions and that included 4,000 Twitter and Instagram posts. And perhaps most importantly, there were 114 proclamations by 43 governors, 34 mayors, three senators, and numerous industry and labor organizations. And that's the sign that we have arrived. That's the sign that says apprenticeship is being embraced as a valid and credible pathway to career preparation. Now I'm older than most people in this room, but seeing that growth, seeing those numbers tells me this isn't just a fad. What we have on our hands is a movement. Maybe we can get Arlo Guthrie to write a song about it and those of you younger than me won't understand that joke. But when you have this much of a groundswell, and you have this sort of a grassroots effort, this is a movement, and we need to capture the moment and keep the momentum going. So thank you all for the work that you did to expand American apprenticeship week, to participate in American apprenticeship week, and to raise awareness across the country of this valuable opportunity. But back to the topic of the day. I think all of us in this room are in agreement that higher education can and must play an important role in the expansion of apprenticeship. Not only can colleges and universities provide job aligned, related technical instruction, but these institutions can also help us prepare a cadre of mentors and trainers who may be expert in their field and now need to learn how to convey that expertise to the next generation. So I see a role not just in preparing apprentices, but in preparing trainers and mentors. We've seen numerous examples of colleges joining forces with industry to advance apprenticeship, and this includes the colleges and universities that participated in the American Apprenticeship Initiative. I'm very familiar with many of those institutions. I had the chance to work with them over the last two years, and they've presented a number of different models that are effective. So in some cases, we've seen colleges and universities take the lead to organize groups of small employers, recognizing that a small employer may not be able to sponsor an independent program, but when you bring several employers together, they have that critical mass. Now they can approach a program, they can fill a classroom, they can fill a job experience, and by working together, they can make sure that apprentices experience a greater range of skills and instruments and equipment by working together. And if it were not the college bringing those companies together, they may otherwise have not found each other. In other cases, we've seen colleges and universities serving as a direct contractor almost to large companies. So I think we're all familiar of the Zurich example with Harper College. They worked one-on-one with Zurich to develop a program that met the unique needs of a company that was large enough to populate an entire cohort of students. There are other examples like that, but I think Harper College really did a great job and it serves as a model. In other instances, we've seen that apprenticeships have actually resulted in enough college credit that the person completes an associate's degree while at the same time they complete their apprenticeship. And I think this is a wonderful opportunity. And yet in other instances, we've seen colleges figure out how to award credit for not just the classroom learning, but the on-the-job training. And we hope this is something that more colleges will do and that we can come up with some national, I hate to use the word standards and guidelines because I think that's too formal, but the gist of what I'm trying to say is I hope we can come up with methodologies that are embraced at large to figure out how to give, especially the adult learner, credit for what they already know and learn even if they learned it on the job and not sitting in a classroom. So each of these variations on the theme is important. And as we go to take apprenticeship to scale, I think each one of them will play a role and each one of them will need to be developed. So I think the point is to give everyone more options. And although it is true that right now the Burning Glass Survey showed us that employers almost default to their credential, I think part of our job is not just to feed that and fuel that, I think part of our job is to say to employers, stop, wait a minute. College isn't the only proxy for career preparation and while it becomes one important pathway to career readiness, it's not the only pathway. So we're really trying to work with employers to say when you post a job opening, how about posting that the required credential is either an apprenticeship or a degree? So I think our job is not just to fall into the trap of the status quo, but to challenge the status quo and to show employers and parents and students and guidance counselors that there is another way. And I certainly, at a personal level, I mean my graduate degree was really important to my career and to my future, but there was a book many years ago, everything I needed to learn, I learned in kindergarten or something like that. Well, I've oftentimes said to people, everything I really needed to learn to be successful in life, I learned as a nursing assistant because I learned how to be in service to others. I learned about the power of humility. I learned how to juggle emergencies. I learned that you had to show up on time, you can't be two minutes late for your job as a nursing assistant. I learned that when it snows you have to work a double because the next shift can't get there. I was working in labor and delivery when the plane hit the 14th Street Bridge here in DC and I remember being with patients in that setting wondering where their spouses were because I worked in Columbia, Maryland and many people are here in DC. So that was not just a job that allowed me to pay for college, although it did, I had to take a little bit of a loan, but it wasn't just about a means to an end. It was an end in and of itself and I learned valuable lessons in that role that I would not have learned otherwise. And so I don't think I should, so I don't think of my apprenticeship as just what enabled me to get a college degree. I think of it as being another part of my pathway that was relevant and important and I want more people to have it. And in fact of my own two children, my oldest took a traditional pathway and has a master's degree and my youngest did an apprenticeship. So my youngest is in the marine services industry. After one year of college, he came home and said, I hate this. And it was a little challenging because I was the assistant secretary for post-secondary ed at the time, right? So this is when our children hold up the mirror. So he comes to my office and he says, I hate college, I'm quitting. And so I have my middle class parent moment of, and then he said, mom, do you not remember you did an apprenticeship? My grandfather did an apprenticeship. His father did an apprenticeship. My brother, your brother-in-law, my uncle did an apprenticeship. He said, mom, apprenticeship is in our blood and that's what I want to do. And you know, we learn a lot from our children and it really was the opportunity to hold up the mirror and say, you know what, apprenticeship is important for all of our children. And I will tell you this, it was harder for my son to find an apprenticeship than it was for him to get into a good college. And in fact, he had to create his own apprenticeship. He had to go out and market himself to an employer and say, will you do this with me? So I think these are important opportunities for all individuals. Now, as has been pointed out, classroom learning is a really critical part of apprenticeship. So we need to have the classroom learning, whether it takes place on a college campus or at the job site or in some other environment. But I think one of the things we have to really resist is the temptation to let classroom learning overtake on the job learning, right? What makes apprenticeship different is that the apprentice has a job and it is the on-the-job training piece that is so unique and that fulfills the need that many students and learners have. So I think, you know, it's important to not let classroom learning overtake the on-the-job experience. But I think another thing that universities and colleges need to remember is that in the case of apprenticeship, it is the business that is gonna bear the majority of the cost. And so as universities and colleges compete for partnerships through apprenticeship, amenities are gonna be far less important. And so you're gonna have to learn how to compete on substance, on cost, on efficiencies. And I think learning how to do that in the context of apprenticeship will also serve your efforts to serve the general population of students. And so what I really want colleges and universities to embrace is not just how incredibly important they are to this effort and how much we need them to join forces to succeed, but I want colleges and universities to see this not just as a teaching moment, but as a learning moment. Yet the elephant in the room is that apprenticeship is growing, in part because there is a lack of confidence that the college credential is a good proxy for career readiness. And so I think this is an opportunity to first of all show how incredible this credential is and everything that goes into earning it. But I also think colleges and universities have an incredible opportunity here to learn and to listen. Employers have important things to say and they may come at these issues from a different perspective, maybe not from a research perspective, maybe their experience is more practical. But I hope as universities and businesses come together to advance apprenticeship that we all look at this as an opportunity to learn and grow. Because I think all students, whether they're enrolled in an apprenticeship or not need to have career preparation. And I think that the general population and all of the curriculum can improve and be of better service to students as a result of what institutions are gonna learn by partnering with companies. So we're all in this together. As I often times say, I love my two children equally but differently. And in this case, I mean higher education and apprenticeship. I think they both have incredible opportunities to offer. And I really hope that we can see the two come together, not for one to overtake the other, but to reinforce the idea that we can have parallel pathways to the top and that the person who completes a rigorous apprenticeship as just as likely to be in line for the CEO role, as is the case in Germany and Switzerland, as somebody who completes an undergraduate or graduate degree. So we're all in this together. I'm glad we can count on your partnership. I'm glad that colleges and universities are stepping up to the opportunity. And I just think we have an incredible opportunity ahead of us. So thanks so much and thanks for having this event. So it's quite a charge to follow Mary Allison Diane. I'm Iris Palmer. I'm a senior policy analyst here at New America. My background is in higher ed policy. So this has been quite the learning experience for me. I've done quite a bit around competency-based education. And so this, I sort of see this as fitting into that very nicely. So we're gonna get a little more granular. We released this report, which has a set of recommendations for actually integrating these systems together. So if you have a copy of the report, it's on page 17 and you can follow along with me. So Mary Alice touched on the fact that these systems actually grew very separately. And right now, there's no reliable way to track or identify student apprentices who are enrolled in higher education. So if we're gonna bring these systems together, we need to be able to do that and identify them in different data systems. Because if you can't see how apprentices are progressing through the system, if you can't see what their outcomes are, it's also impossible to target policy towards them to create incentives for colleges to create more apprenticeship programs that are degree granting to find out what the outcomes, the labor market outcomes are for these students. And it's also impossible for colleges themselves to look at what the outcomes are for these students. So we recommend creating a definition of a student apprentice that will make apprentices visible in these data systems. We're actually talking about bringing together the definition of an apprentice in the National Apprenticeship Act and the definition of a regular student in AGA, bringing them together and creating that definition of a student apprentice. This is the first time that those laws have ever met. And we think it would be very useful to not only create that definition, but actually integrate it into the relevant legislation, HEA, WIOA, Perkins, and also state and federal data dictionaries as well. So basically what that's gonna do is give us a way to target financial aid policy, state performance-based funding systems, outcomes-based funding systems, and different ways that we can actually track and find out how these students are performing. But that's actually not enough. We also need to create a definition for a degree apprenticeship. I think we actually had a lot of really good conversation here this morning about how there are strengths to apprenticeships and degrees. There's that on-the-job learning, that applied learning, and that mentorship that happens in the apprenticeship. And then there's this sort of broad-based learning that happens with a degree. We wanna bring those together and integrate them into something called a degree apprenticeship. And this is also a definition that we would bring together, the definition of apprenticeship in the National Apprenticeship Act, and the definition of a program that's from a state agency, and a higher education program. And we think if we integrate both of these in, it's going to create the baseline ability for us to start to target policy and bring these systems closer together. So the last way we would recommend bringing these systems closer together is expanding registration agencies to a state education agency that is identified by the state and is recognized by the Department of Labor. So for those of you that don't know exactly how registration works, it is a very formalized process that creates a minimum bar for what an apprenticeship should look like, things like progressive wage gains, and it's really about going through and making sure that that apprenticeship meets those baseline standards. It's actually very analogous to program approval that a lot of state agencies do for degree programs. And so we think that state agencies, the appropriate state agency in a state where they decide to do this, that the state agency, the state educational agency, could go through and check off and make sure that these programs were meeting those baseline standards, not only for a degree program, but also for an apprenticeship program. We're thinking about one, there would be one education agency with this in a state that was interested in doing it, and it would have to be approved by the Department of Labor. Basically, we think that this would help spread and scale the degree apprenticeship programs in states. So obviously just growing and connecting these systems isn't enough. Creating apprenticeship programs and paying for related technical instruction is expensive and we don't have a good financing system here in the United States. So we think there should be two sets of public financing for apprenticeships, degree apprenticeships and for student apprentices. The first piece is for around program design and creation because it needs to spread and it needs to scale. And the second piece is around paying for that related technical instruction piece. In Europe, which has already been mentioned here, students and employers are not expected to pay for the related technical instruction and yet here we have to piece together different kinds of financial aid, different kinds of WIOA funding to try to cover those costs. And a lot of times the apprentice is actually left paying that bill. Maybe not a lot of times, but sometimes. And so our first piece on this would be to create a annual discretionary grant program at the Department of Labor that's funded through fees for the H-1B visa program. My colleague Brent Parton has done some really good work on outlining what this might look like. And basically, so if companies are going to go and say they can't find an American to do a job, they have to pay fees to do that. And so it makes sense to build this system to fill those needs at the same time. So creating that kind of grant program could really go a long way to spreading and building more of these programs and supporting the consortiums of intermediaries, employers, and educational institutions that are going to be creating these programs. So for that related technical instruction piece, we looked at the federal financial aid programs and we thought that of all the federal financial aid programs that the federal work study program actually made the most sense for supporting related technical instruction because of the mission of the program and the fact that it doesn't have a very strong needs analysis. So basically, our problem is, is that if you have a high quality apprenticeship, hopefully you're making too much money to be eligible for a Pell grant, for instance. So we recommend actually creating a car, carve out the wrong word, but creating an exception in the federal work study program so that that subsidy could go to the student's apprentice's tuition rather than just to a wage subsidy, but only for the people who met that definition of student apprentice. This is a very good example about why we need that definition of student apprentice so we can start to target policy towards that population. So at the state level, there's actually a lot of conversation right now around free college programs. And so we have the community college program for adults in Tennessee, but we also have a bunch of free college programs that are targeted at workforce needs in different states. So we have in Kentucky, we have free college programs. It's really only for five in-demand certificates and degrees. We have some in Arkansas that is actually four associate's degrees. We actually recommend taking this student apprentice definition and this definition of a degree apprenticeship and integrating it into some of those state aid programs. Because actually, if what you're trying to do is create, is to give students and basically students free college for something that's in-demand, one of the best ways to actually do that is to have that program be in-demand, which is exactly what an apprenticeship is. So those are our recommendations. I would love to call up our first panel to discuss this and other things. If you guys can come up here, I'm gonna go ahead and introduce you. Wonderful. So our moderator, oh, are we missing somebody? Yeah, why don't you guys go ahead and move over. Oh, where's Eleni? That's who's missing. Eleni? She is here. We're gonna call you up. It's a good thing I know my panel's backwards and forwards. So first we have our moderator, Jeff Selingo. Jeff has written about college extensively for outlets from the New York Times to the Washington Post, and he's been writing plenty on apprenticeships recently, so he's been seeing a lot of these programs up close. I'm very excited to have him as our moderator. Next we have Sue Smith. Sue is the Vice President for Technology and Applied Sciences Division at the Ivy Tech Community College. She's been working at Ivy Tech for over 25 years and is the point on all the apprenticeship work, and we're very excited to have her perspective here today on the great work Indiana's been doing at Ivy Tech in particular. Next we have Eleni Papadakis. Eleni has served as the Executive Director for Workforce Training and Education Coordinating Board in the State of Washington for 10 years now, it looks like. And during that time, you've had plenty of experience looking at the being on the front lines of the good work Washington State's been doing around apprenticeship. Next we have Angela Hanks. She's the Associate Director of Workforce Development Policy for Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress. You've done a lot of writing and thinking about apprenticeship from the national perspective, and we're very excited to have you here. And last we have Daniel Bacielo. Bustio, I'm sorry, I should have asked you before. Apologize. Who's the Director of the Healthcare Career Advancement Program at SEIU, and you have a ton of experience trying to spread apprenticeship into non-traditional occupations. We're very excited to have this. Please give our wonderful panel a round of applause. Thank you, Iris. It's great to be here and just to continue the theme of what Mary Alice was talking about earlier about everyone loves apprenticeships. Earlier this year, back in February, I did a piece for the New York Times on apprenticeships, which was that month one of the most female stories of the month. And the comments were a lot of people whose children mostly had pursued traditional post-secondary education, were struggling in the job market, and they wished that this was seen as more of an option in the US. And related to that, as part of that story and as part of a book I wrote on higher education last year, I spent a lot of time with the apprenticeship programs outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, and advanced manufacturing mostly. And I'll never forget this story of somebody I met in his mid-20s who had completed an apprenticeship with Siemens, was now working for Siemens, but in high school was highly discouraged, and we'll talk about this in the panel today, was highly discouraged from his high school guidance counselor of pursuing the apprenticeship pathway because he was accepted actually to NC State to major in engineering and was told he was college-going material. And it was only because his parents happened to get a divorce. He moved high school that he found a high school counselor who was supportive of this decision to pursue an apprenticeship. He ended up doing this. He ended up, by the way, getting his degree. And when I met him in his late 20s, he was married with children and his wife had just completed an MBA and was struggling to get a job. Meanwhile, he had already moved into management because of following the apprenticeship model. So I think that, again, I wanna talk a little bit about the cultural aspect of this. How do we move beyond this idea of you either, you know, that this is seen as kind of not college. And I wanna talk a little bit about that today. So we're gonna spend about a half hour in this panel talking amongst ourselves and we'll open it up to questions from the audience. My hope is to kind of gather three key themes from this panel today. First, to talk about what's happening in each of your organizations and states around apprenticeships. Number one, number two, is to talk, how do we kind of change the conversation? Because this is, as I said, really a cultural conversation I think, particularly in the US. I'm struck when we talk about other countries and visit those countries about how apprenticeships are just seen as a different thing in the rest of the world. And then third, I wanna dig a little bit deeper on the new America. Fantastic recommendations around apprenticeships and what are the hurdles to getting these put in place. So those are the three big themes that I wanna talk about today and then we'll open it up for questions from the audience. So first, let's start with Elena. In Washington, can you talk a little bit about what apprenticeship policies there have been put in place to allow you to accomplish what you've accomplished in Washington state? Yeah, sure. So there's a number of them. We do have a state apprenticeship bureau and a joint apprenticeship council that's very active. We have a very rich and robust set of apprenticeships. They are primarily in the construction trades even though we have, I think it's somewhere around 500 apprenticesable trades on the books. The take up is primarily in the construction trades and some of this is because of the policies that were put in place. So for instance, we have an apprenticeship utilization policy for all state and federally funded construction projects. So there's a requirement to bring on a certain number of apprentices and that expanded our take up rate considerably. We have made efforts to make our community and technical college system the locus of related supplemental instruction for our apprenticeships. We give the joint apprenticeship councils the option of using the community and technical colleges or something else because of the things that the virus was talking about with the financing about 15 years ago, I think it is, there was a policy put in place to weigh 50% of the tuition for individuals going into apprenticeship at a community and technical college that actually expanded usage and take up pretty considerably. So there's been a wide range of efforts to do this. The other thing that I think was really helpful is I think we were the first in the nation to do an ROI study of apprenticeship. And we do that in comparison with, now it's like 16 other federally and state funded workforce programs, workforce and education programs and apprenticeship consistently comes out as the greatest return on investment for individuals and taxpayers. That moved the needle considerably certainly with the legislature and our policy makers as well. And I can go on, but I'm gonna stop there. So Sue, and I wanna follow up on that ROI study in particular, so Sue, how about in Indiana? What has enabled, what policies have enabled the expansion there and the work that you've done in Indiana? So we've been at this since the 90s and particularly in the construction trades. And we have a fund that generates funding for those apprenticeship programs. And it is with our penalties and interest from our unemployment insurance. So we have about $4 million that we use, we pay for- $4 million annually? Yeah, and that we use to pay for about 5,000 union trades apprentices and some other non-union building trades apprentices. We pay for all of their instruction, we pay for all of their tuition and all their costs associated with instruction. The interesting thing about that is it's we've grown our number of construction trades apprentices to a whopping 5,000. The majority of our programs, however, are manufacturing related. So we have a lot of manufacturing programs, apprenticeship programs. But not enough students? Oh, we don't have nearly enough students. We have about 2,000 apprentices in the manufacturing trades. So the majority of our programs in Indiana are manufacturing, however, the majority of our apprentices are construction trades. So very similar to what they're finding in Washington as well. I want to get back to that, about how we kind of move beyond the construction trades. But Angela, tell us a little bit about the policy environment in Washington, particularly about aligning this idea that's outlined in this report from New America between higher education and the workforce, right? We still very much see these things as two very different things, workforce and higher education. How can we better align them? And is there an opportunity here with the house coming out with its higher education reauthorization bill last week? Is there opportunity here to align the two? Yeah, you know, I think- Or better align the two, I should say. Yeah, I think that when you think about the higher ad and apprenticeship landscape that Iris outlined, I mean, it's sort of no wonder that it's really difficult to expand these programs. You know, the paper and others talk a lot about the structures that exist in other countries that make apprenticeship programs possible. It simply doesn't exist here. And we've had some good progress in the last couple of years, certainly beginning with the Obama administration. Congress has appropriated funding in the last couple of years. The Trump administration has made some commitments on apprenticeship. Certainly there's some momentum around kind of putting those structures in place. But when you think about Ivy Tech or Indiana is spending four million dollars a year on apprenticeship programs, and at the federal level to support apprenticeship programs in all 50 states were at around 90 to 100 million dollars a year. It's sort of like, of course, we're not expanding these programs, we're not investing in them really at all. And again, I don't wanna discount that progress because it is meaningful, but it certainly is one step and we need to take many more steps. So I think a lot of the policies that New America has outlined in aligning this more with a higher education system that is both well funded and also, you know, the structure is there really makes a lot of sense. I think, so last week the House put out its bill for reauthorizing the Higher Education Act. Congresswoman Virginia Fox is the head of that committee. So this is her vision and there is a new title in that legislation on apprenticeship programs. So unfortunately, the bill eliminated the teacher prep title that was in there to add this, which I don't think we wanna eliminate preparation for teachers in order to get apprenticeship. I think we should be able to have both, but what the title does is it establishes what they're calling an apprenticeship grant program. I think it's really more of a kind of broadly earn and learn grant program that would help support kind of some, help subsidize some of the cost of apprenticeship, whether it's wages or cost of equipment. I think as it stands now, I have a couple of concerns about the way that it's structured. I think not least of which I think probably most importantly is that while we're here talking about apprenticeship, one of the reasons why apprenticeship works in Washington State and works in Indiana is because, and works in these industries where it's well established is because employers know what apprenticeship means. So they know that it means there's a progressive schedule of wage increases, they know that people who have gone through an apprenticeship program have a certain set of skills and they have progressed over time, that they were mentored by a more experienced employee. So they know those things going in when they hire someone who comes to them having completed a registered apprenticeship program or when they start one themselves. So I think one thing that we have to be very careful about and one thing that I'm concerned about in the H.E.A. reauthorization is that it doesn't really make this distinction between registered apprenticeship, which is this defined thing, and earn and learn, which is a broader category of which apprenticeship programs are a subset. So I think it's important to be clear about definition. Otherwise we're gonna create confusion among employers, among workers, and ultimately it's gonna be harder for employers to recognize this credential as something that's valuable to them. So I think, but I also would say this is just the beginning of this conversation. This is sort of the testing the waters on H.E.A. and certainly the Senate will have something to say in the next couple of months. So I think this is just the beginning of a conversation. It is encouraging to see that Congress is thinking about earn and learn as a strategy in the post-secondary space. And of course it's only authorizing language. So we also need money behind some of these things. The money is important too. As well. So Daniel, we heard from both Indiana and Washington State about apprenticeships incredibly popular in the construction trade. Not as popular, not as much of an uptick in many other industries. Healthcare being of course one of them. Healthcare jobs, when you look at kind of what the future is going to be. A huge increase in many healthcare jobs, which require a lot of on the ground training in addition to education. It seems to also, given we're manufacturing, is moving in the U.S., it seems to me that it's kind of a popular pathway to a good career. So why hasn't healthcare kind of taken up apprenticeships as much as other industries, growth industries and what can be done to try to kind of shift that narrative? That's a great question. Actually I can spend, we can spend the day talking about that one particular question, right? So I will say, so just to talk a little bit about why healthcare is a non-traditional industry for registered apprenticeship is extremely important. As you talked about, if we think about BLS projections by 2026, healthcare will actually be the largest major industry in terms of employment of the 11 million projected new jobs, not even replacement new jobs, four million of those in healthcare alone by 2026. So we do have, I'm gonna pick up a little bit on what Angela talked about and add a couple of different pieces and then I'm sure we'll continue the conversation after this, but. So we do have, I like to categorize it as we do have some policy and reimbursement issues. There are many opportunities in healthcare. There are some barriers as well. We do have some issues of perception as well, that's sort of what Angela talked about. So this is a non-traditional, even though if you think about healthcare as an industry, many of the jobs in healthcare, we heard Diane talk about her nursing assistant apprenticeship. Many jobs in healthcare over time have been de facto apprenticeship like models in terms of training, there's a large OJL component. It has not been formalized in the industry. So I think what I like to do is talk about, I'll just talk about three high level things. So number one, we need to disaggregate where job growth is occurring. So we think about as we move forward, it'll still be nursing, home care. Those two occupations will still be in terms of just raw numbers, largest numbers. We do have some significant policy and reimbursement barriers to the adoption of a program like registered apprenticeship in those two particular occupations. I think that frankly, when we work with employers, there are still a lot of perceptions that we're a labor management organization. So as part of our extended network across the country, we have 1,000 employers that participate as part of our extended network across all sectors of healthcare. When we work with employers, by and large, there was still a lot of trepidation related to some of the perceived bureaucracy around the registered apprenticeship system, what are some of the requirements? Are you asking me to change my entire system of workforce education and training? I think by and large, most of the employers that we have worked with do not necessarily want the responsibility of being a registered apprenticeship sponsor either. We take a multi-employer sectoral approach and you're gonna hear from our fabulous partners in Philadelphia in a little while about the work that they're doing in early childhood education where they do a lot in healthcare as well and sort of most of the employers that we work with do not want that responsibility. There is no national one, on the hospital side, on the health system side, there is no national employer in healthcare. Very different. So we think about this as a regional strategy. There is no 50-state hospital that exists in healthcare. So you have to take a regional strategy and I think that's sort of one of the other things in terms of potential barriers that sort of lead to the possibility of some of the impediments that we're talking about. And the last thing I wanna end with is, frankly, if you're remiss about it and mention that, this is a time of tremendous uncertainty. And it has been a time of tremendous uncertainty, both in terms of healthcare workforce, but frankly just policy uncertainty. So I think clearly to say that that has not had an impact over the last while, I think that clearly it has. I think that frankly, what's happening in healthcare we're really being driven by healthcare, employers are being driven by the reimbursement systems that exist in this country. So picking up on the ROI component, which is one piece of work in healthcare. We're also doing work at the ground ROI, but we're also doing additional evaluations in some of the national programs that we have because employers are being driven by, if we're transitioning from a payment system that pays for volume to one that pays for value, clearly what's being reimbursed is what's driving their investments. So we have to demonstrate that this is an investment that should be made from a workforce perspective that is going to be beneficial to their bottom line in terms of quality of care. So I wanna talk a little bit about kind of the wording, the language, the culture around apprenticeships and how do we raise them to a higher level in the conversation in the US? How do we make them as prestigious as getting into Harvard, right? I wrote a piece many months ago saying that we need kind of a Harvard for skilled traits in many ways, right? We need to have it be on a similar platform, especially for parents, students and lawmakers in particular. So Sue and Elaine, let me start with you, both of you in the States first of all. So you both mentioned that incredibly popular among building trades. We heard earlier that apprenticeships are heavily dominated by men, which is interesting because college now is heavily dominated by women. So how can we move beyond the traditional building trades? How can we get more people into apprenticeships in other fields? How can we make them so that both genders feel comfortable in apprenticeships? And most of all, how can we get our education system, K through 12 and higher ed, to appreciate and value apprenticeships more? So let me start with you and then we'll go down. Sure. One of the things we did early on was we added degree outcomes to our apprenticeship programs. So all of our construction trades, apprenticeships and an associate degrees. So they're awarded their journey person card and their associate. So this is not a choice between college or work, right? You're still getting college through this. Right, right. And so then for our industrial trades that we've developed, we did the same thing. The interesting thing was most of our manufacturing companies said, well, what you have as a degree program isn't what I need. I need some of this and a little of this and some more of that. And so we developed a degree outcome that's an interdisciplinary degree so that they could also be awarded a credential because parents and students want to get degrees. They see that as their credential. The challenge for us in Indiana really has been at one point in time, we were really heavily into industrial trades for degrees or for apprentices. And that sort of changed over the 2009 timeframe. And so how do we get back there? Because we know that students complete cohorts like apprenticeships and they complete them at a very high rate and they're very well prepared for the workplace after that. They tend to stay five years, at least five years after they complete their apprenticeship. If anyone works with millennials right now and some of you are in the room, that's phenomenal. That's a phenomenal retention rate for today's workforce. And so I think that getting employers to understand and value the degree and the apprenticeship program the way the degree is delivered is what we really need to do. And that's, we're challenged to do that in Indiana. We've done that in a number of ways and I can detail some of those if you like but we are trying to do that because understand that if parents and students in industry don't value that, we can't recruit those students into those companies. And so we won't be successful. Going back to Washington State, what has your experience been there? You talked about earlier something like 500 apprenticeship types of industries but again limited only to construction. You talked about that huge ROI which I thought would be most convincing to parents and others around changing this narrative. Obviously that hasn't done it. What will change this narrative that apprenticeships not only could lead to further education but also jobs? What Susan said, I think we've got to get the employer community to start talking about apprenticeship differently. We've got to come up with the right ROI or business case for industry. But it seems like construction has, they figured that out, right? They figured it out for a very long time, right? So why don't they talk to other industries? And I think they do, they try or at least in Washington we try to set up forums where they do this. Our largest employer organization, the Association of Washington Business has convened these groups and the association is now advocating for apprenticeship across multiple industry sectors. But in order for business to take on this new model they have to see how apprenticeship ties into their business frameworks. And that's going to take some coaching, it's going to take some time, some demonstrations and we've got to spend more time on that with them. We've got to be partners with them on the business impact side. And that's where, you know, there's no funding stream for our public systems that pays for intermediaries to do this kind of work, right? So that's one. I think the other piece is on the education front and folks talked about the need to intersect or align or coalesce apprenticeship in higher education. But not just to the associate degree level and not just within post-secondary CTE. We need to blur the lines and make them much more permeable and put momentum in there so that there is no terminal end to education and training, right? And this is part of the problem. This is what parents hear and as we go out and talk to parents we hear this a lot. Well, in apprenticeship they stop at this point. Well, they don't have to, correct? But nothing's transferable, right? I mean, we're trying to make it transferable within the community college system but they get the associate's degree in the community college and it's not transferable to the four-year degree program and then it's not transferable to the masters and the graduate level, right? We've got to think about transcripting very differently. And that's a huge task in higher education. And do we have to start this process earlier? I mean, we talked about college, it seems, in some places, from the time somebody comes right out of the womb, right? So do we need to start to think about talking about apprenticeship as a model? Because again, when we look at Switzerland and Germany, it's just so part of the ingrained in the culture there and very much the same way college is ingrained in the culture here. So we are talking about career-connected learning in Washington and building a K through death system of career-connected learning. We have to think about lifelong learning as well as K12 or K20. And there are programs at the preschool level to bring career awareness. And we're also focusing on making more of our education system student-centered, not just about what students learn, but how they learn. Yeah, I mean, I always thought that career readiness and people, when you talk about that in elementary middle school, they think we're trying to already track people into careers and it's more about just exposing them to what's out there. And then, we're talking about the financial right. We obviously have two very good examples from the states here. Colorado now is doing a lot around apprenticeships at the governor's level there. States have always been great experimenters with education. Is this something that really should be more of a state issue or we were talking earlier about H.E.A. and the New America proposals here are very focused on the federal level flowing down to the state level. Who's gonna take the lead, I guess, on this in the next decade? Is it gonna be at the state level? Is it gonna be at the federal level? Or in your mind, does it have to be a partnership between both? I think it has to be a partnership. I mean, certainly there are things that we can do at the federal level in terms of creating the structures that are necessary in terms of getting funding where it's needed. But ultimately, especially when you're thinking about taking a sectoral approach, that's not something that you can necessarily dictate at the federal level. That's really something that's more appropriate at the state or regional level. So I think that there's a real role for a partnership taking on dividing up between the states and the federal government who has the best capacity to do what and really focusing on where the federal government can provide the most helpful impact and where the states can be most helpful as well. And I think in terms of thinking about how to expand over the next 10 years, I will kind of, I don't really have the opportunity to go out and convince people that this is a good idea, but I do think that there is this sort of, we're at this point where we need those structures in place. And I think if you build it, they will come, right? Like if there was a pathway that was transparent and that was simple for people to go through an apprenticeship programs, then people would participate in apprenticeship programs, but that just doesn't exist right now. So I think one, I think the states can make progress in very specific ways in kind of developing their own programs and testing new models, which is incredibly important to inform federal policy, but also the federal government can step up and create the larger structures that help support these programs long term. I wanna be moving to questions in a couple of minutes. So let's dive a little bit deeper into the New America recommendations here, which Iris outlined. A lot of it is creating these new classes of student apprenticeships, degree apprenticeships, changing the financing models a little bit and kind of building this connection between higher education and apprenticeship. So Daniel, I'll start with you and then kind of move down the line. Are there workable solutions in these recommendations? What do you see as some of the more positive things from where you sit, especially around health care? So absolutely, I think that there are and I think I commend New America for taking a step forward and putting them out there as well. One of the things that clearly having been engaged over the last couple of years is the national part, an industry partner with the Department of Labor and doing the work on registered apprenticeship and health care. Clearly, we do have some issues in terms of what is or is not collected, in terms of data and how we identify folks as it's been identified by New America. But I think that classification is extremely important for tracking purposes and it would assist the conversation that we're having here today. I do think one of the things that should be lifted up, clearly, I'm here representing a group of labor management partnerships around the country and their affiliated training infrastructure that supports the work that they do in health care. As I said, about 1,000 employers, over 650,000 workers around the country worked with many other people outside of that over the last couple of years. There's a recognition that they also have deep relationships with the local community college systems in terms of health care workforce education and training. So thinking about opportunities for lifting up that work and integrating that a little bit more, I think, would also be important and moving some of this forward in a more conservative way. Okay, let's move down the line. Angela, are there any particular recommendations in the numeric and given that you're looking at the federal policy level, what are some of the biggest hurdles? So one thing that I really like is that numeric has moved forward with these terms, student apprentice and degree apprenticeship. I think that's important as Iris mentioned because it helps us inform policy when we're collecting data on these programs and who's participating. Mary Alice also alluded to this in her comments earlier. One challenge in apprenticeship programs is that we also have an equity deficit. Women are largely left out of these programs. People of color are often concentrated in the lower paying occupations. So when we're thinking about how to design policy to make sure this is a program that works for everyone, having data that supports those programs is incredibly important and right now we just don't have enough of it. So I think that this is an important step forward both in making apprenticeships more available to women and people of color but also to helping inform how we think about how people move through those pathways over time. And Elaine and... I'm gonna say ditto to that. I think the data piece and so naming it is really important. I'm also particularly struck with the work study financing piece. I think that that's a huge, that will be a sea change for us and we'll really make the difference not just for the students but for the employers. Many of whom are already engaged in federal and state work study programs, right? So it's helping to move that transition. I'm not quite as struck with other organizations being the registering bodies. I think that the joint registration is incredibly important that business, labor and education together need to register and so with a state apprenticeship bureau where we have all three coming together to evaluate apprenticeships before they're registered I think it works and that's what we need more of. Finally, Sue? Yeah and I would agree with that and I think that we can't lose sight of those standards and the labor organizations usually hold those standards and so if that's really what we train to as we provide the related training. The one thing I would also add is the reason that our construction trades and building trades programs took off work and continue to work is that the employers are incentivized. They're incentivized to use those folks. They're incentivized to, our students are incentivized by the free tuition. So I think that that's one thing that we have to really understand and we have to really figure out. So let me ask you about that incentive and then we'll take questions. Because we always hear about the skills gap, right? So to me the biggest incentive should be employers getting skilled labor. Is that not a big enough incentive? It is a biggest incentive but understand particularly in manufacturing we are in a very competitive marketplace right now in manufacturing and so paying an additional sum of money a lot of actually a lot of fee remission and tuition assistance went away during the 2009, 2010 timeframe for employers in manufacturing. And so now we're just starting to see that come back a bit and so I think a lot of manufacturers don't have that budget, particularly small, medium. Okay, let's take some questions from the audience. We have a microphone runner over here. Hi, I think Jeff very appropriately mentioned the cultural problem. And I don't think this can be overemphasized a lot. How do you destigmatize the whole apprenticeship movement which in the public mind kind of relates to the vocational education stigma which still afflicts so much of the society. Now there's a trend towards what I would call academic de-escalation. Lots of people with bachelor's and master's degrees are returning to community colleges and technical schools in order to pick up employment skills in terms of what the market is. And I guess my question is, are there any examples of people with bachelor's and master's degrees as part of this academic de-escalation movement? Going through apprenticeship programs because this to me would be a wonderful legitimization of the economic and job viability of the apprenticeship movement and would help to legitimize apprenticeships. If you have people with bachelor's and master's degrees going through apprenticeship programs. Well, it also brings up a good question. Are apprenticeships only for younger people? No, we actually see a lot of folks coming into not just apprenticeship but post-secondary ACP professional programs as well because they lost traction in the economy and they see the direct connection between this often short-term training or at least earn and learn models with real jobs and economic security that we are seeing. I would say two things. So in the context of the question that you asked I would say in healthcare, not necessarily yet. It is something that clearly we've identified. There is some work that we'll be engaged with in local states here in this area around this very question. It has not happened yet. I'm a very optimistic person but I feel like I'm bringing up a lot of the barriers in healthcare. So I think sort of thinking about the youth component that you asked, is it only for young people? In healthcare it has not necessarily been. It's primarily been for an incumbent workforce in healthcare. If we think about youth, we think about the aspirational model of some of the European models that we talk about, the cated death model, right? Sort of, if we think about healthcare there are some barriers to youth apprenticeship as well as an example. In terms of certain things that they can or cannot do. And I think we really need to do the work of building really robust pathways, infrastructure and support to if we're building our youth apprenticeship in healthcare, because the positions that they'll be starting out at should not be the position that they stop. That should be the beginning of a pathway, of a career. It should not be the endpoint in the destination. I think the equity component that Angela talked about in healthcare, frankly, most of the apprentices that we're working with are women of color, right? So I think Angela mentioned this at one point in time. On a separate date, and I was frankly shocked by it, that 4% I believe of apprentices are women across the country. So in healthcare we sort of flip that, right? I would say of the apprentices that we're working with, 80 to 85% of them are women and primarily women of color. So I think tackling these issues in healthcare is extremely important for getting to where we want to be with the region. Which is another cultural issue, right? The stigma of the male nurse, for example. So yes, question here. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Daniel, because that leads into my question. My question is the practical perspective which I'm hearing today, dual education versus dual enrollment. The US places a lot of emphasis on dual enrollment, but not so on what I would say is dual education. And as an expert, progressive expert from Switzerland that comes in and hearing, this is probably one of the better panels that I've actually heard as to the practicality of apprenticeships and what's been done across the country. So I commend New America for what they're doing in this regard, but are we too late by the time we get to higher education? When we're looking at middle school and high school, this is where we should be starting. We talk about pre-K to death. You're absolutely right. In Switzerland, when I see young people on John Deere trucks at two and three years old, they know where they're going. That's not the same here. So is it too late by the time they post-secondary? Great question. I think we've fallen into this framework of making a false choice about whether or not starting young is good. I think people have generally thought of that as then you start to track people and you start to veer people off of a college course. And I think there's also another component of who gets discouraged from participating in college, that the US tries very hard to avoid. And so we say instead of doing any kind of career readiness, we're just going to say go to college and kind of keep our hands off of it. But then it's created a problem. I mean, only a third of people in this country go to college. So we're creating one pathway for all, this one-size-fits-all model. It is not for everyone. And then you have people coming to your point, people coming into apprenticeship programs at 27, 28. It's like, where have they been for the last decade of their lives? So I think I totally agree. I mean, certainly we talked a little bit about models that start in high school. I think potentially with Career and Tech Ed, there's a lot of talk about starting career exposure and work-based learning, even at the middle school level. I think things like that are incredibly important. But yes, I think we could absolutely start earlier, even in terms of not necessarily, even if you're not starting your apprenticeship program when you're in high school, just getting exposed to the options that exist for you because ultimately, I think there's interest in moving that college entrance up from a third of the population. But ultimately, it's just not what everyone wants as Diane said. So yes. Sorry. Because we kind of create more boxes when we talk about career readiness and apprenticeship for young people. And we're moving away from that need to really blur the lines and have a student-centered approach to learning, not again about what they learn, but how they learn. And if we don't address multiple pathways for learning at the earliest levels, we are never gonna crack the equity puzzle, right? Because we start these career readiness programs in high school, sometimes middle school, at the point where we've lost so many young people, especially disadvantaged people and any disadvantaged really at that point. So we want young people to make good choices about how they intend to progress. We need to give them a vision of a successful economic future that has to start young. Because for so many of these young people, their minds are closed to their own narrative about success. So sorry, that's my soapbox on you. We have a question back here. Thank you so much, Mark Bartlett, National Governors Association. Wonderful panel, thank you all for your remarks. My question kind of builds on Elaine's remarks, making sure that we build systems for kind of the world of tomorrow and not just systems as we have them today. We know that requirements for skills and jobs are changing rapidly with automation and other types of technology. Pearson just came out with a study, the skills that'll be most in demand in 2030, they were predicting things like social perceptiveness, originality, fluency of ideas, things more to do with kind of direct, directly engaging with other human beings. How can apprenticeship be a part of a solution that gets us more towards this system you were describing, Elaine, what's the opportunity to utilize it to redo how we connect people to skills? Yeah, great question, great thoughts. So apprenticeship gives us the benefit of work-based, project-based hands-on learning, which helps develop those habits of mind, the new habits of mind that we're looking for, right, that you were talking about. Apprenticeship and hands-on learning needs to be part of every learning experience for every young person so we can get there. We have a question right here. Yeah, so some of my questions you guys have answered and it's really good because it is about a system. There's the pre-apprenticeship and all the way through and all of a sudden we hit people, go into apprenticeship. But let me take it from an employer side because I work with a number of employers who are looking at starting apprenticeship. And the single, two things come out, there's two biggest issues that come out to them. There's one, why? What's, and I'm gonna look at your study and return on investment because why should I? I'm already doing some training with people. I have internships. I don't have to pay them even if I don't want but if I do very little, now you're putting a set of rules on me, what do I gain by it? We don't do a good job in this country of explaining the value of apprenticeship and how it fits as you talked earlier into the overall system that's out there. The other issue they have is we have to have employees then supervisors or to serve as mentors and to supervise these apprenticeships. They don't know what they're doing, how to do it. There is no training for them. We don't give any support or help to the employer of how to do it. And so they see it as a cost. And that's also why many apprentices leave because they have not been mentored correctly. So I'm curious to hear from the panel is how is that especially in Indiana and Washington, how is that being addressed and what suggestions you have for how we move that forward? Show me your ROI study, but go ahead both of you. I can talk to that. I, in Indiana we have had that request. How do we add those supervisory skills? And so we have done that into our apprenticeship programs particularly in the industrial area because we've had so many requests from industry because as they've had turnover and as they're expecting turnover, we all know people don't leave jobs, they leave supervisors. And so we have to create those supervisors because the students who are the people who are supervisors are the ones who survived the longest. And so that's a good point and we do that. There's also, we give to our manufacturing companies and our other apprenticeship folks training on how to be a mentor. You know journeymen don't just happen organically. I mean sometimes they again are the survivalists but we do give them those skills and how to do that. So we've been very successful with our employers in doing that, but to your point on why should I have an apprenticeship program? Well in Indiana it's very rural so we have clusters of manufacturing companies in different areas across the state and what typically happens is they trade workforce for a quarter an hour. They go from company to company to company because they have similar skillsets and it's that that really is important to employers. If they have a standard that they're all trained to and they have similar skillsets and it doesn't matter if a tool maker goes from company to company, they have the same skillsets that they can pick up at each company. Can I do some more thoughts? Yeah, go ahead. So just very quickly on the first point I think what we've had to do is sort of go through an intensive process of walking employers through Y in healthcare. There are certain occupations, I use hospital code or as an example where there was a transition from one coding system to another where frankly you're not gonna come out of school and be ready to hit the ground running and be productive. So walking through how that is registered apprenticeship is a perfectly tailored solution for that particular difficulty that employers are facing was very important. I think the mentorship component is also extremely important to us so we've had a really robust partnership with an AI grantee apprenticeship around who just recently piloted a mentorship program because frankly thinking about the core components of the registered apprenticeship program, mentorship is an integral component of that and that is something that should be lifted up and I think actually in some cases we're going in the opposite direction and we wanna make sure that the mentorship component is lifted up. I would just add, I think for all of the reasons Daniel just mentioned that's why the labor management intermediary rule is so important because employers may not necessarily know how to do any of those things especially if they're totally unfamiliar with apprenticeship programs. So having a partnership where you can work with other employers, with labor, with education to develop these programs and sort of build on each stakeholders capacities is really important. We're gonna have two more questions, yeah, first. Youth Prof. George Washington University, Alaini, you are the chair of the Board of Credential Engine and Sue, you work for Ivy Tech which is in the process of putting all of its credentials on the credential registry that Credential Engine hosts. Do you see any potential for the credential registry to blur the line I think was the word you were using, Alaini, between academic credentials and to give sort of an equal status and sort of clarify the ROI that's available to more people, do you see any potential there? Absolutely, it's so I hate you to be here and ask the question. Well, can you explain what the credential registry engine is? That would be helpful. So folks who don't know about it, it is an effort to build a registry so that absolutely every credential in the marketplace gets listed in one place in a common language and over time we can start actually tracking the data against those credentials. It will be the new coin of the realm in terms of connecting job seekers with employers and workers with emotional opportunities. Think as we can actually start to track the market value of credentials over time and how they stack and join each other, right, stackable credentials, we will start to be able to tell a very different story about competency skills, knowledge and abilities and how that moves someone up a career ladder or into the new economy. So yes, it's the starting place, the launch is tomorrow, so we're excited. And then the final question, who has the microphone? Right there, final question. This is Kimberly also from the National Governors Association and I had a couple quick questions. One of them was just the role of registered apprenticeship college consortium in the work that you're doing in the States. Curious if that's coming into play and the work that you're doing to expand apprenticeship in colleges. And then the second quick question is diving back into the high school arena. What policy recommendations would you have for expanding access into work-based learning, apprenticeship type of activities for high schoolers to get them prepared to enter into this type of opportunities post-secondary as well? That's a good question. Anybody wanna take that in the States? Just on those funded demonstrations, I would say we're really using them at the state level as learning laboratories because we are doing IT and healthcare and some other advanced manufacturing kinds of things. So we hope to learn to expand these. But for career connected learning or work-based learning generally, again we're doing the learning laboratory thing, we're doing the environmental scans, we're trying to get data behind it in order to move it. But we do have a program called CareerBridge to bring good career information into our K20 system for folks including the role of work-based learning in there. Any other thoughts on this? On the high school level, I mean, I think that we're making some progress in terms of getting more young people into work-based learning. So, WIOA requires, it's mostly for out-of-school youth, but requires that 20% of the youth funds be used for paid work experiences. Congress has sort of been sitting on the Perkins Act reauthorization. Certainly, there's an opportunity there to have some similar language around work-based learning, even paid work experiences, even better. But really, it's gotta be built into Perkins Authorization, WIOA, HVA, ESSA, kind of all of these things that hit students. Please join me in thanking this great panel today. Thank you. Yes, thank you to this amazing panel. They were great. One more round of applause for everyone. And now, if folks from the second panel could come on up, that would be great. Do that all at once. Okay. Good. And thanks to everybody for all the great questions. I think this was just good. It's interesting, a number of, so many of your questions sort of mirrored things that we were talking about in the process of writing this paper and these recommendations. So, that was super helpful. Okay. So, before we move on to the second panel, where we're really gonna hear from some folks who are on the ground building these programs and doing all the complicated work of building these relationships, I wanna just talk about our final two recommendations. Iris went through our top six recommendations, which were about, again, the definitions that connect the systems and then the financing strategies that can build off of those definitions and then also the registration strategies that we think could potentially work to help expand the system. But even with all of, even with those systems connected and even with some money on the ground, we still have to be, institutions still have to be able to develop these programs. And these are not typical degree programs. These look quite different than how you would do a typical degree program. So, I think Diane did such a nice job in her opening remarks, talking about what makes apprenticeship so special. And if we connect apprenticeship with higher education, the last thing we wanna do is lose everything that makes apprenticeship particularly special, which is in particular that on the job learning, that's structured on the job learning and that mentorship that happens. But higher education isn't structured around recognizing learning that takes place outside of, off campus or outside it's four walls. So, our seventh and eighth recommendations, which we're now regretting not having put up on the screen behind you. So, whoops, yeah, that's what happens when you're racing to the finish line. We, and you'll see here, our seventh and eighth recommendations are around how do we design these degrees? And in particular, we think it's gonna take a lot of conversations between the colleges, between industry groups, between professional bodies, and we've got some of those represented here to be able to talk about in particular how to structure that on the job learning so that we know that it's high quality and so that folks have some idea of how it's being assessed. How do we know that learning is actually taking place? So, that's part of our seventh recommendation. And we also know that once you're talking about learning that takes place off the, outside the campus, you know, you have this little issue, sometimes institutions will run into this group of people called accreditors and they have nightmares about them on a regular basis. And, and accreditors can be very skeptical about learning, too, that takes place outside the institution and wants to make sure that that institution is in awarding degrees for some sort of learning that maybe doesn't meet the standards of an associate's degree or bachelor's degree. So, we also think that part of making, of connecting higher education with registered apprenticeship is, again, engaging in some pretty robust dialogues with our accreditor community, getting the accreditor community to understand apprenticeship, and then also getting into a lot more dialogues with industry associations and with professional bodies. So, that's recommendation seven. And then just in a moment, you know, we just thought recommendation eight, wouldn't it be great? We got together and we thought, wouldn't it be great if there was some program within the Higher Education Act that actually was like a discretionary grant program that created money that helped institutions build these kind of special degree programs? And lo and behold, it turns out the House of Representatives also agrees. So, we're very happy to already be aligned on that. We have a lot of work to do on what exactly that discretionary grant program would look like, but we agree that we need some money available for institutions to be able to develop these programs and develop the partnerships that are necessary to make them work. Because I really want to emphasize just one last point because the programs that we're about to profile here are different than a lot of the apprenticeship programs we see out there. Even the ones where the related technical instruction is delivered by a community college. A lot of our registered apprentices take courses at community colleges, but not many of them get credit for the on-the-job learning and a lot of them don't get credit at all. And there's all sorts of efforts. IB Tech has done a great job of sort of, you know, awarding credit for the non-credit and moving it over. But as anybody in higher ed knows, having college credits is not always all that it's cracked up to be. As Elaine talked out, a lot of times those credits don't transfer or they'll only transfer to one place or one very specific type of degree. They're not like money that you can take to the bank, right? So what these folks who are sitting here have managed to do is to design programs that get around those. And so that's what we want to hear from them. So I'm going to introduce our panel right now. We have Kisha Powell, who is a workforce development consultant at Fairview Health Systems in the Twin Cities. And she's here. She develops educational programs and coordinates grants to support the clinical workforce spread across the network's 14 hospitals and 62 clinics in the Minnesota area. And so Kisha's going to share about a really exciting apprenticeship program there. We have Carol Austin, who is the executive director of the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children. For those in the know, that's called DeVeci. I happen to know that. Which is this early childhood education programs in achieving national and state accreditation standards and engages policymakers to help make quality early childhood education to children across the southeastern Pennsylvania area. She previously worked as a consultant for a nonprofit strategy and is the vice president of the Philadelphia Youth Network. And then we have Tamora Jackson, who is the early childhood education apprenticeship coordinator at the District 1199C Training and Upgrading Fund, which aims to provide access to career pathways in healthcare and human services for both incumbent workers and job seekers and to develop a highly skilled healthcare workforce in the Delaware Valley of Pennsylvania through on-the-job training opportunities. And then moderating our panel is Jennie Sparandera, the vice president for Global Philanthropy at JPMorgan Chasing Company. She previously served as the director of the Job Opportunity Investment Network in Philadelphia. We have a theme going here. I swear we didn't buy it. Kisha, are you sure you're not secretly from Philadelphia? Is it on purpose that you're next to me? If you could just give me on it. Okay, that sounds good. Okay, great. And you were also the director of human capital investments in the city of Philadelphia as well, okay. So great, so I'm gonna turn it over to you all. Thanks. Thanks so much, Mary Alice, and thank you for the kind shout-outs to my current gig at JPMorgan Chase. I just wanted to start with Sharon for a brief moment why it is that JPMorgan is so invested in this work. We every year spend more than $200 million around the globe working to build inclusive economic growth. A cornerstone of that work is a focus on workforce development. And particularly, and frankly the themes that have been raised today are just the perfect lead into this, trying to figure out how we create greater transparency in the labor market, how we help job seekers and workers build the skills they need to be successful, while at the same time thinking carefully about what employers need to grow and to thrive. And clearly apprenticeship plays a very important role in this and we think it should be playing an even greater role here domestically. I think a real value frankly of doing this work on a global scale is that we do have the opportunity to see what this work looks like applied across very different markets. And yet you can still recognize those common themes, those common elements that unite all of this kind of work. We obviously know about the value of skills because we are a major global employer ourselves with a workforce of more than 200,000 people around the world. And every day we have clients and partners who tell us the differentiating factor that skills provide to them in terms of their own growth. So we know how important it is to get this right. We're so grateful to New America for the work they are doing on this issue and for the research and recommendations that were shared today. And what I'm really excited about today is that this panel is gonna dive deeply into the how. How do you do this work at a local level? What does it look like for the people both in the room but also tuned into the webcast who are trying to figure out how to apply these recommendations to their work? What kinds of tips and tricks have you all learned along the way? So with that, and now that I've shared a little bit about why it is that I'm here, I think we are gonna start with Philadelphia but do not read too much into that. Only because Carol, I was hoping we could start with you. Daniel in the previous panel, I thought provided a nice overview of healthcare and why it is apprenticeship is being seen or we're hoping to see more apprenticeship in healthcare. For those who might not be familiar with early childhood education and the roles of standards and credentials, can you just level set for us a little bit about the work you do? DeVacy does and how apprenticeship plays a role in that context. Great. Okay, good. Unlike K to 12 education, education for children under kindergarten isn't mandated. So there's no designated significant funding stream and it's not required that children are in formal structures or formal educational settings in that age group. Yet at the same time, we now know that 90% of the architecture of a child's brain is laid down by the age of five. So that was an alarm call, I think for everyone. And so there's been now this attention focused on early childhood education and what are we doing for children in those younger great ages, especially children who may come from disadvantage. Or not advantage households. So in Philadelphia and in the entire state and in most states, now there's a quality rating and improvement system that looks to increase the quality or raise the quality of programs and educational programs for children in those settings. So that when they go into kindergarten, they can go in ready, ready to learn and ready to take advantage instead of behind. And we know now that many a significant number of children go into kindergarten behind and they never catch up. So it's really been really critical to ensure that children go in ready and they're prepared to learn and they have what they need. And that requires highly skilled teachers and educators in order to be able to fulfill on that. And we are in a field, I don't think it's a surprise for people to know that in the early childhood education or early learning space, teachers and educators and childcare workers are not, it's not the highest paid occupation, shall we say. And so there's some challenges that go along with that even as within state quality rating systems, the level of credential and certification has increased. In the state of Pennsylvania, we are saying you need a bachelor's degree to be a lead teacher in a classroom. But these teachers aren't being paid commensurate with teachers who work in the K-12 state. So you can understand that we have a bit of a challenge. And so we've been looking at workforce and how do we develop and retain the workforce. And apprenticeship has been, we've seen that as a key answer to part of this challenge because in one sense we have, it's a proven, tried and true method. Employers, well not these employers, that's part of the work that we had to do, to begin to educate employers. But specifically funders recognize it as such. They know that as part of the apprenticeship model, employees are going to have pay increases. They know that as part of that model, they're gonna have some kind of a, they're gonna be in a structured environment. Okay, and they know apprenticeships are successful. So it's something that we could and we have been able to then be able to promote with our funders to help support the intermediary kind of functions there as well. And it's a way for the employers that we brought on board to be able to have some kind of a structure to train. And it's a way for the people who, the teachers that we're looking to train to be able to come in and know that there's an investment being made in that. And that they're going to have increased wages. We've been able to do things and tomorrow we'll speak some more about that in terms of being able to fund the education through scholarships for the teachers. And we really are, have created a pipeline and that was really key for us to be able to do that. From high school, this apprenticeship program is a CDA to associate's degree in terms of the people who, the starting point is the staff need to have a child development associate credential. And then they move into, you know, the apprenticeship takes them through the associate's pathway. But we also are linking that down the road, not currently with the work that we're doing in the high school, so with the emerging workforce. And we're linking that with the bachelor's degree program as well. So that they can be able to move through into the next level into a bachelor's degree program. So that's a bit of help, that's enough of a contact. No, that's great. And Samora, how would, could you describe a little bit about the role 1199C Training and Upgrading plays in this equation? And I thought one of the really nice things about the report is that it provides a couple of case studies for apprenticeships who are going through the program. Can you walk us through what the experience is for the apprentices, apprentices, particularly around this connection to higher education? Sure, so 1199C Training and Upgrading funded to intermediaries. So we really are bringing the employers where the ECE apprentices are, they're getting their on-the-job learning experience. And also DeVacy, the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children, they're providing the mentoring for the journey person or the coach. And also of course, Community College of Philadelphia who's providing the related course instruction. So we're the intermediary that coordinates all of the programming for that. And as far as the experience of the apprentices, they're very excited, nervous, to be a part of this program. I think many of them never expected to be college students. So I remember once they had passed our bridge courses, which were the developmental courses to really get them college ready and be able to place at CCP, many of them had tears in their eyes because they never thought that this was going to be a part of their life plan. So they're nervous about it, but now they're a little bit more seasoned. Now that we're going, they're finishing up, I think their third semester in the program. And then you had another question related to that as a part of their experience. So do you mean specifically what their coursework? Right, since one of the things, I think one of the exciting contributions of the report is really about this connection to higher education and has been said so many times, and I think it's a whole other day, month, years worth of panels and seminars, but kind of our inability to really think about these things, not as binary choices, but in terms of college and career. In this case, I think you have interesting, now sort of on the ground experience in terms of people who are melding the two and maybe had that experience before unsuccessfully or didn't, so could you just share a little bit more about that sort of connection to CCP and how students are experiencing it? Yeah, so we have two groups, and the experience is similar, but a little bit different. The first group that we have, they're just starting out their college career, and those are the individuals that had to take our developmental courses to actually be able to place at CCP, many if not all of them came in to the program with a nationally recognized credential called the CDA and CCP graciously worked with a community college of Philadelphia to give them nine credits towards the 62 credits that they need for the associate's degree, and then they'll get another nine credits for the on-the-job learning. Another unique, innovative portion of the coursework is that the academic chair at CCP is working with us and the professors to contextualize the learning. So after they took the intro to early childhood education course, this is group one I'm speaking of, they also took a English course that was contextualized, focusing on early childhood education. So they're writing all of their papers and learning all of the mechanics of what it means to write a paper through the lens of early childhood education. So they're engaged, and they're also going to be taking a psychology course and they'll be taking that course through the lens of early childhood education. So whenever we can work with the community college to contextualize the courses so that they're meaningful, we're doing that. In the English course that they're currently finishing up now, they're reading a book about young children learning to play, which they're familiar with. And so all the other components of how the nuts and bolts of writing a paper are also coming to them a little bit more because they're learning if you do that lens. Then we have a second group. They were already matriculated students at CCP. Some of them may or may not have had the national credential that CCP awarded nine credits to, but they were further along in their academic career. And then they'll also be getting the nine credits for the on-the-job learning experience. So group two, they're more veterans. You know, I guess you would say when it comes to college preparedness, but what really attracted those apprentices to the program is that now they can finally see a graduation date. Many times, unfortunately, it may take someone who's working full-time. They may have a family. It may take them six to 10 years to finish a two-year degree because of family commitments and also just a sheer expense of being a college student. So with our program teaches our partner, they're paying 95% of the tuition, the employer pays a portion, and then the apprentice pays a portion. Whenever we have additional grant funding, we'll pay the employer's portion and the apprentice's portion. And they also get reimbursed for their textbooks and their travel. And they get a chance to graduate with a degree debt-free. And Drexel is also partnering with us four-year institution, and they've agreed to take all of the credits from the associate's degree and put it towards the BA certification. And that's very rare and very innovative. Many times when individuals in the field of ECE who have an associate's degree, now mind you, this may have taken them six to 10 years just to get the two-year degree, then they want to move to, if they're interested in moving to a four-year college, it's essentially as if they have to retake all, most if not all of the credits that they earned with the associate's degree. So many of our apprentices who will be our first graduates in group two, they'll be graduating as early as 2018, the spring or summer of 2018. They're very excited to have the opportunity to go to Drexel and again, graduate with the BA degree debt-free, which is very important for the field that is not well-paying. So we don't want right now, even though we're trying to work with workforce development to bring the salary up to the credentials that we're expecting them to have. So that's huge for them to graduate with a degree and not be in debt. No, it's tremendous. And I think you're helping to put meat on the bones of what Eleni was describing, this sort of K through death, which I couldn't agree with more, though the marketing of that, I think there's room for improvement. But I think the concept is right. But you both raised a number of issues that I think we're gonna return to, but I wanna bring Keisha in to share a little bit about really her experiences and thinking about your work as a case, the role that you all have seen apprenticeships playing in your workforce needs, what kind of problems are they helping you solve and how have you gone about implementing? Absolutely. So as mentioned earlier, I work for Fairview Health Services in the Twin Cities area in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We are the largest healthcare system in the state. And as you all can imagine, and I know there were some comments made earlier, healthcare is definitely an area that we not only continue to see growth, but also how do we tap into maybe those underskilled, underserved areas to ensure that we are representing the communities in which we serve? Right now, just to put it in perspective for you all, we roughly are about a 32,000 employer population, if you will. 1,900 of those individuals are also our assisted care living employees. So how do we continue to develop the skills and the talent that we currently not only have within our incumbent workers, but how do we also attract talent as well? Right now, the role that we're kind of focusing in on and do have a registered apprenticeship program with the state is looking at two-year degree nurses to help them obtain their four-year degree. Part of the reason why that role was identified was based on the Institute of Medicine's push to have two-year degree nurses obtain their bachelor's degree by the year 2020. As you can probably imagine, our workforce is very varied from the level of skill set as far as newly graduate RNs that are just getting started in their career and individuals that maybe have been working for 20 years, and how do you encourage those individuals who maybe haven't been in school, as you've mentioned, for quite some time, or maybe don't even have the desire to continue their education because they feel as if though I've been doing this role, how is that really gonna benefit me and how is that really going to be important? As we started to take a look at kind of statistical analysis and just some data around care management, how the patient population is maybe becoming a little bit more complex, we did realize that it's definitely going to be important for our employee population to have those enhanced skill sets in just overall not only on-the-job training but educational training to better not only serve our patients but the communities that we are also drawing those patients from. Right now, we are also fortunate to have received grant funding to help support this initiative. So we recently, when I say recently, it's been a couple of years in the works, received an $850,000 grant to support up to 170 of our employees more focused in on the nursing realm. Right now, we have about 125 RNs that are a part of our program with the continuation of course of looking at how we can continue to market to get other individuals involved in the program and we're working with about 24 different education partners within the state of Minnesota, a few outliers that are more kind of the online training as well. Sounds like a large number, which honestly, when we first got started, we didn't realize the work that would be involved with that huge undertaking but kind of two reasons why we decided to start with such a large group of individuals, obviously wanting individuals to feel as if though we definitely wanted to invest in their education and wanted to be mindful that individuals were maybe at different levels of their education and on the education partner side, we didn't want to necessarily dictate for our employees where they could get this education but what best suits their needs from a work-life balance perspective, understanding that hands-on, maybe online in the classroom structure, everybody has a different learning style so wanting to be mindful of that as well. Thus far, I will say our program was officially registered with the state January of this year, which hard to believe it's almost been a year. The feedback that we've received from our employees has been positive. The education around it as far as really making them aware that this is all a part of your career and your path in development. So it's interesting to hear some of the comments on just that continuous learning because yes, these are individuals that have been working as nurses but they have the opportunity to elevate their skillset, their education, which in turn will prepare them for more, let's say, leadership positions. Maybe some of those individuals that are at the bedside now but maybe have the desire to do something different in the near future, we feel as if though this program is definitely setting them up for success it's been a huge retention factor for us as well just as the feedback and saying, if I didn't have this opportunity and the additional resources and funding to help support me, I likely maybe would have retired early, done something different or maybe not even be enthusiastic about continuing my education. So that's the primary program that we have in place right now. We are in the works of looking at three other kind of occupations within healthcare as well. One that's a hot topic for us is medical assisting. We found not only within the state of Minnesota but just nationwide. That is a role that it's kind of underrepresented as far as just what the role entails and a lot of individuals don't really understand the nature of the role within the clinic setting. Looking also at our surgical technologist, we have found not only within our own institution but just in the local market not a lot of individuals to choose from as far as drawing those individuals into our organization. So we're finding that we're competing with other healthcare systems and there's a shortage of individuals even obtaining those certifications and degrees. And then lastly is the DNP role which is the doctorate of nurse practitioner. And again, that kind of goes back to as I've been practicing as a nurse for quite some time, what are the other options and avenues for me? And really looking at it's not always about providing direct patient care but how myself can I be an educator or clinical coordinator and provide those educational resources within just a disciplinary team. So that's kind of where we are today and I hope that gave an overview of kind of our work and what we've been doing at Fairview. It's very helpful and I appreciate your sharing the motivations for you all as an employer with a sizable workforce in doing this. Because it came up in the previous panel and this question, I think that education and training practitioners you're always trying to grapple with and policymakers as well frankly, which is how are you assessing the value that this work is bringing to the organization and how much of that is a focus? How are you all doing that or thinking about it at least in the early stages? Yeah, so that's definitely a huge focus for us and even at the onset of developing the program we worked with our education partners to really identify what is the coursework and training entailed from the classroom setting, what competencies will the individual learn from that training and how do we apply that competency model to the hands-on skills or on the job training that we currently are doing with our not only employees but as their students most are in programs if you will have kind of a clinical experience component. So how do we take that, utilize the coursework and the competencies that an individual is going to be learning and applying that to their day to day learning within the on the job training model? So I will say we were very fortunate and partly just to kind of back up a bit, we are an academic health system so very in tuned with working with our education partners. We have a tiered process so understanding that specific programs do develop certain outcomes or provide certain types of training so if an individual receives a certain certification or a degree diploma, we know what type of training that individual has received from that training institution. So a lot of that work was more putting some framework around some of the information that we already had at our disposal and ensuring that our leadership really understood that these are some of the things that we're already doing day to day with student groups and our employees that are students, how do we just solidify that and put a little bit more structure around that framework to be able to look at those outcomes? We're just in the process of starting those conversations on how do we measure that success? How do we take the tools and the resources that we have already implemented so we're not creating a new process to create more work for those that are involved but how do we just highlight the work that's previously been done and how we incorporated that into the overall apprenticeship model? Carolyn, Tamora, you both talked a little bit about employers deciding to participate or engage in this. I'm just wondering if you can share a little bit more about the motivations you're seeing at play. I think Kisha does a good job of highlighting that for certain kinds of organizations. It's baked into their DNA, this idea, but in other cases, it might take more convincing or maybe different approaches. Can you both shed some light on what that looks like from your vantage points? Sure. I can start if you want. Well, I can say the fact that the state requires teachers to have an associate's degree or bachelor's degree is in itself one motivation because in a high turnover field because our employers are really struggling to have that happen. So the opportunity to train existing staff and work with existing staff so that they can get that degree is highly motivating and in a way that is structured and in a way that they also know that there's tuition being provided for them, for their employee and there is additional training being provided for the supervisors who are working with them and there's therefore that opportunity for those supervisors to become leaders or take additional leadership roles. Those are all things that are motivators and there's a couple of things you want to add. Anything you want to add to that? Several. Great. But thank you. From various different angles. Well, quite a few of the apprentices who are enrolled in our program have received some promotions while before they have even received their full associate's degree. When positions become available, there are various different regional and national programs that employers are participating in, in Philadelphia and so those positions require certain credentials and so then the employees that they are growing become attractive, more attractive to the employer and employers want to be able to invest in someone who is gonna be there with them. It was kind of a hard sell to some employers to do this program that's never been done before. Some people get really excited about trailblazing a path and some people say, I don't see the path, I'm not sure where to walk, I'm not sure if I wanna take this risk. But I think now that I'm looking at the employers, they're looking at the activities that the apprentices are engaging in. So to give you an example, in addition to having the contextualized courses, having the wage increases, the apprentices get counseling with me. So I meet with group one on a weekly basis and I counsel them on whatever the issue might be and they get to experience that and they're also a great support to each other. So as I'm sitting talking with an apprentice who may be feeling discouraged and feeling like, I don't know if I can go on with this program for another two and a half years, things that I might say to the apprentice to kind of get them to, I guess, realize why they initially wanted to be a part of the project. And yes, it might be a little struggle now, but think of where you will be on the other side. You'll have more wage increases, you'll have a degree, more experience. They'll say to me, oh, that's what my classmates are saying too. So it's a different experience going to school, completing a degree when you have a whole team of support with you. And with group two, I have conference calls with them because they're able to have, they are able to go to courses wherever they're being offered by the community college. So I'll have a conference call with them and then I'll meet with them individually for meetings at the training fund. But I've noticed that all of the different benefits that we're offering to the apprentices, the employers are looking at how it makes the employee that much more engaged at the job site, at the work site. And the apprentices feel like they are a valued, important employee. They feel like they have a direct line to the administration because they're part of this program. They're proud to say they're a part of the ECE apprenticeship program. So I've noticed that the employers are thinking about how they can embed it in their program overall. And this support that I'm giving to the ECE apprentices that are involved in this program, how can I use these same activities to strengthen my entire workforce? Carol, just digging in on this for a moment. Are there conversations that you're part of with other professional groups for early childhood educators around programming like this in other parts of the country? Or just how sort of bleeding edge is the Philadelphia program in your mind in terms of how apprenticeship is being used as a training model in the field? Great, you asked that question. As far as we know, we had looked all throughout the country. This is the first CDA to Associate's Degree Apprenticeship that we know of. And in the country of this kind, I think there are other CDA apprenticeship programs that lead to a child development associate CDA. But this is the first of its kind. And so we're working also with the state to try to elevate this at the state level so that I was sitting there quite envious to hear in some states they have, they already have a structure in place where they can, students can go for free or it's recognized in universities and they're all of these infrastructure pieces in place. So we're working with the state and hope to be able to have some of that available in Pennsylvania. But we've been a part of some of these forums and Cheryl Feldman is here from 1199C who participated in some of these forums. So it certainly has, the visibility has certainly been raised. Absolutely, and I think one of my takeaways from this work broadly but certainly the paper is the role that multiple stakeholders have to play in terms of coming together to work on this. And I think what I'm hearing you all acknowledge but it would be helpful if maybe you got even a little more specific about is the role that champions have played in blazing these trails. And Keshia I'm curious from your perspective what really helped to get this program off the ground at a very tangible level. And for people who might be considering an ability to replicate an approach like this what are some of the ingredients that you think have been key? So I think for our organization first and foremost as we kind of look at future pipelining needs and career pathways and even just what the market looks like as far as where are we attracting talent. We're finding that we are definitely gonna have a shortage and the typical hiring method or model isn't going to be sustainable long term. So how can we be creative and not only look at our incumbent workers and ensure that they feel as if though as an organization we are investing in them, we are being mindful of not only bringing in new talent but how do we continue to enhance our current talent was definitely key. I think also from an internal perspective getting our key internal stakeholders involved was very important and has been beneficial because again it takes a team and a collective approach to drive this initiative. So it wasn't necessarily something that we as HR or talent acquisition can come in to say we need to change our model in practice but really getting that buy in from those individuals that truly are working with this workforce on a day to day basis. And what are some things that you find are important? How can we help support your workforce to ensure that we are providing the outcomes that are necessary. And again within our industry of course our patients and family members are our customers. And then lastly for those employees that maybe were a little reserved and hesitant or maybe the non-traditional student that's not necessarily interested in continuing their education in a traditional model what additional wraparound services can we provide for these individuals to ensure that they feel supported holistically and not just focusing in on that education piece. So we partner a lot with some of our community-based organizations even getting feedback from some of our community members in which we serve to say what are some key things that would be important as we are looking to mirror our workforce to ensure that our communities and the populations that we are serving feel as if though we have the adequate staff and those that are competent to provide the level of service that's going to be needed as things continue to change. So I think for us it was kind of those three key factors really getting the internal stakeholders involved and supportive looking at what additional resources we could bring into the organization to ensure that the employees felt supported and really making sure that the model that we were implementing matched the needs of our employee base because if those needs weren't met we could have all the tools and resources at their disposal but if they're not the right tools and resources the outcomes aren't going to be what we envisioned. How about in Philadelphia? Yeah. It's interesting you asked the question about champions and I think I was really grappling because we could use some more champions. And I think that's the point. We have champions in Philadelphia the organizations that are at the table certainly champion this 1199C, Debacy, Community College other partners, Public Health Management Corporation but the field has long been in need of people champion early learning and education. And as we meet with legislators we hear often, oh great this is a bipartisan issue we really care about this in general around early childhood education and yet the funding has not really been there supported that and certainly we don't have the kind of lobbying money that other big interests have to be able to have that way but what I think part of the gap is that the support and the financial support that goes along with helping these programs to be successful and supporting them they're just critical and they're not there in a way we would want them to be. So we're doing that work. I know we're gonna move to audience questions in just a moment. So I'm gonna ask one more while folks think about questions they might have for the panel but you all have sort of mentioned the learning that you've done along the way. I guess my question would be where do you see and hope maybe these programs will continue to evolve and what's something you sort of didn't necessarily expect when you started down this journey but you've sort of now brought in incorporated into the kind of ongoing evolution of the program and tomorrow maybe we'll start with you and just work our way. I think the evaluation of the program is gonna be really important and so we're in talks with a couple of different organizations about how we're going to evaluate the program and one tool that we're gonna use is called the class. It's a very well known tool that Head Start uses to basically assess the skills of the children in the classroom because our biggest impact is on the ECE apprentices and so the hope is that we think we intend to happen is that the training, the intensive on-the-job training that the ECE apprentices are getting on site at the job and coupled with the related instruction that they're receiving at the community college, both the professional development and the on-the-job learning will result in a teacher who's able to implement best practices in the classroom related to child development. So we're looking forward to seeing what that looks like. As far as what the hardest thing was, I think you're asking about the program that maybe we hadn't anticipated. I don't know if we hadn't anticipated it but it was definitely very difficult was to really get the ECE candidates at the time college ready. So they had to take a number of what we call bridge courses to get them ready. Many of them will have to take developmental math courses. We're developing a plan for making sure that they have a tutor while they're taking the math class so that we're helping, we're being proactive about getting them the help that they need before they start struggling and getting them to be at the high, to at least get a B in the developmental math course so that when they get to the next level, you know they're ready to really be successful in that. So I would say that was probably the hardest thing in addition to getting some employers on board to try out this new program, but really to get those ECE apprentices ready for college. Many of them had to take the bridge courses that I was speaking of and then they had to take some what we call brush up courses at the community college level. Yeah, I think exactly what Tamora said here in terms of the support. And we did anticipate it but I think in addition supports also for the directors and the owners of programs to ensure that because they have real needs that they're educating children and those children need to be safe and there are a lot of concerns there. So when you're pulling supervisors, coaches, mentors out off a classroom you've got to be able to make sure there's someone else in that classroom. So there are a lot of particles to be responsible for with managing and to really support program leaders and directors in being able to manage all of those pieces and all of those pieces that you have to manage also cost money because to put someone into the classroom you didn't have to pay someone to put in the classroom. So there are a lot of particles there that they are to be managed. So I think probably that has been the greatest challenge. But even though it's a challenge it's also been really great to see the way all the support systems working together. So all of the ECE apprentices benefit from the counseling that I provide, benefit from academic advising on the community college level, benefit from being a part of this group. They're developing lifelong friendships and also the each ECE apprentice has a journey person or a coach who's looking at that related instruction, who's looking at the competencies, who's being trained on the competencies so that the fidelity of the on-the-job learning experience really is worth the nine credits that CCP is granting the ECE apprentices. And then the coaches who are providing support to the ECE apprentices are also receiving support from myself and the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children because that agency is providing the mentoring to the coaches. So we really feel like it's a 360 or however you wanna say it supports system that I think will really be beneficial, especially when we're looking at evaluating it. You should real quickly before we open it up. Yeah, I was gonna say I definitely agree with everything that has been stated. Our biggest kind of exciting goal if you will is to really look at how once individuals successfully complete their program and receive that next degree, how does that correlate with the patient care outcomes and even just the critical thinking, the hands-on experience and how has that really elevated that individual in addition to going back to some of those mentors. Our mentors right now are used to that teaching environment but as they are having the opportunity to work with our apprentices, how has that impacted their skills and abilities and allowed them to grow professionally as well. Some of those individuals are truly in leadership positions but a lot of the work is really an informal leadership so it's allowing them to grow and develop without that academic piece behind it. On the flip side as far as talking about challenges, we were very eager and excited to get the program up and running, not realizing the amount of resources that needed to be put in place. So being very transparent, not in a negative by any means but looking at how can we even reevaluate how we're administering the program and who else can be brought into that to make it more of a holistic approach because as you can imagine, engaging and working with 125 individuals with just one program in addition to 24 education partners for one individual with a few others that helped me out from time to time was a little bit more than what was anticipated. So we've learned a lot along the way but it's really been a team approach and kind of a collective effort. So I think moving forward as we solidify what that framework truly looks like, we're able to not only look at those other roles that I maybe mentioned earlier as we get programs developed and underway but how can we partner with some of our other healthcare systems within the Twin Cities area to allow them the same opportunity to kind of use some of that same model and framework. Hi, Cheryl Feldman from the Training Fund and I'm really proud of the presentation today. Thank you. So our agency spans, our organization spans both the healthcare and early childhood education fields and it's so interesting to look at the similarities and differences between healthcare and early childhood. One of the things that healthcare has really done, I think in a positive way at least in many occupations is to create a career path with credentials. And because of that, there's been a recognition of the importance of education and how it connects to the workforce needs. Less so in early childhood where there's been just this silo of education and workforce and most of early childhood education work has focused on the education side, the education of the young child in that setting, not the education of the workforce. And so in developing our apprenticeship program in Philadelphia, you asked about challenges. I think one of the big challenges was to open the eyes of the stakeholders including the employers about the importance of looking at the workforce and how we address the needs of that workforce. Both with wage increases but also with the quality of their education connected to wage increases, connected to credentials, connected to college credits and degrees. And I'm just wondering for all of the panelists how you see the integration of workforce and education and the work you're doing on the ground and what you feel the potential impact of that is. So I can start. I definitely think for healthcare in particular and kind of going back to just the demographics and the communities in which we serve, we're really focusing in on how do we provide opportunities for individuals to continue their education so that they can have sustainable living wages in addition to looking at creative learning models because most of our individuals could potentially be working full time. So how do we allow and create enough flexibility so that there is that opportunity to continue that growth and development so that they can continue to advance on that career pathway in addition to increasing their wages to ensure that they have sustainable living wages? Yeah, I mean, I think what I think what I appreciate about the recommendations from New America is that there's not this either or, right? Education and workplace training, go hand in hand. And I think that is critical. And prior to being a divasi, I came from the secondary education space where we were preparing young people to enter the workforce and being able to give them an option. You know that they were both college ready and work ready at the same time and being able to access that. So I think that is critical. And to your point, I think part of the issue why early childhood education has been so siloed to is because there has not been that opportunity, that space to be able to think of both because it's such an underfunded area. There's just been this focus really on survival. You know, what can we do with what we have? So, and this I think is a strategy where it can be really can be a win-win and people really encouraging and engaging people in seeing it in that way. So easy because there's already systems built in place but then it sounds so hard. I mean, it's easy because we already have requirements in the state of Pennsylvania that say that ECE professionals have to get a certain amount of professional development. So it's conceivable that we return all of those hours that we're saying ECE professionals must have in order to maintain their positions are always turned into college credit. But when you get into having conversations on a higher ed level, then that's when we seem to find a hiccup in my opinion. Yes, my name is Celeste McDonald and I really listened with interest. I work for a company that operates job course centers, one in Philadelphia and one in St. Paul, Minnesota. Really? It's like, I fell like you, I would just bring out every word. And want to say at our Philadelphia job course center, they were just involved in a partnership with CVS and Kensington for pharmacy technicians. And I tell you, Job Corps trains 16 to 24 year olds and we're a pre-apprenticeship program. And so now these pharmacy technician students at the Philadelphia center know that they can go right into the CVS apprenticeship and so want to thank you more than anything because it's just been such a great thing for these 16 to 24 year old students. And I'm not sure if at the Hubert Humphrey Job Corps Center we're one of your partners, but I certainly hope that we can be. So it's more of a comment that 16 to 24 year old age group I think is so critical. And we certainly look for ideas of how to strengthen our pre-apprenticeship curriculum. And so do you have any suggestions of how we can do that so that we can be much more appealing to companies and higher education institutions to partner with us? Do you have any thoughts on that? Great question. And we are in talks with, I think really getting involved with the high school regionally will be helpful. And that's something that we're working on doing with a high school called Parkway West. Especially on my end and helping to get the, who might be ECE candidate, apprenticeship candidate, college ready. They could take many of those developmental courses early on so that they're ready. And then if they have an interest in early childhood education to really start getting them the professional development that they need. But I think that's crucial like he was saying to get them as early as possible. And I definitely agree with that as well. I'm not sure if you're familiar, but even within our organization, a large focus and area that we look at right now is at that high school level and how do we take some of the models that we're currently using for more of the college level or adult population and really looking at developing opportunities for high school students as well. Interesting that you mentioned farm tech because that is an area that we also find is a high need and kind of a interesting dynamic from an employee base and where do we draw our typical candidates from? So I could easily foresee, although I don't know that we partner with the Hubert Humphrey Center right now, but I could see as we're continuing to develop our reach and our expansion that that could be something that we could engage in and further as we look at specific occupations and what that training model entails. Many high schools also have to have volunteer opportunities. So if you had individuals in the high school level who were interested in going into ECE, we could tap into the employers that are in the neighborhood hoods where they're attending high school and see if they could start out volunteering. And then when they were ready, they could, those volunteers, the volunteer opportunities could turn into employment opportunities, which would help get the hours that they might need for the apprenticeship. Hi, Susan Sclifani, former Assistant Secretary for Vocational and Adult Education. So I really enjoyed both panels today. But I have a question for you. Keisha mentioned living wage and family supportive living wage and that simply does not occur in the early childhood program. And so as you're working with the employers, how do you focus on helping them create more public awareness of the need to raise salaries? And yet, where costs are already over $9,000 a year for childcare, how do we then help the people who need childcare afford to enter this? I mean, so this is a bigger societal problem that I think we have to address before these people going through your program are going to really receive the benefits that they ought to receive for the work that they're putting in here. Yeah, I mean, I can say real quick, in Pennsylvania, we have a campaign. One is a pre-K for PA campaign. We also in Philadelphia now have a mayor who has funded pre-K through the soda tax. So there is that goodwill and there are champions there. And the AC, the Delaware Valley Association and we have a state affiliate also in Pittsburgh. You know, we're all coming together and we've created this childcare campaign. So to your point, there is the need to have a lot of visibility. And so we have a number of campaigns happening right now, some of which are funded and some that aren't, to both increase investment and change policy, but also to get the word out to your point. So that people understand the challenges around that because it is a challenge in that parents, there's a limit to what parents can afford to pay. And that's the reality. So there's no way that this is going to happen without public investment in addition to, you know, the investment from families. And it's very important and critical that all of the stakeholders really understand the issues. And especially if we're talking about teachers with higher credentials. And I think interestingly to Cheryl's point, we talked about two industries where benefits accrue to a third party, but within healthcare, there are clearer lines of sight in terms of how you capture that value. So I think it's a great question. All right, you get the honor of our last question. Thank you. I failed to identify myself earlier. I'm Myrtle Alexander from PhD, University of St. Gallant, Switzerland. So in looking at the Swiss system, which I did for the last five years and their apprenticeship system, in particular via their dual education system, they have a framework where their education system highlights the entire pre-K through PhD. I think we're missing something here. So I think when you talk about the communities of practice, if you have, and maybe it's a challenge for New America, if you have that framework in place, that's your starting point because it shows you the trajectory of where everything takes you. So if it's not there, which it's not, it should be. And that's just an observer's comment and a progressive expert's notion that I think we need to really have these in place for all of America, all 50 states, to be able to say, here's how, and also just to piggyback on Virginia Fox, we train animals, we educate people. So thank you for helping us end with sort of the gauntlet being laid down, but please join me in thanking the panel for all of their comments today. I really think we just can't stress enough how incredibly innovative these programs are. Apprenticeships in early education, apprenticeships for bachelor degree nurses are things we weren't even thinking about five years ago. They're really cutting edge and really showing us what's possible. I think another theme that really came out in this conversation was how apprenticeship can also be a really valuable equity strategy, a raise the floor strategy, a job quality strategy that it intersects with also, it brings our education conversation to our labor market conversation in really valuable ways that are hard when we're doing a higher education all by itself. And I wanted to say one last thing. Another theme that I heard come up repeatedly was what about high school students, right? And so I'm happy to say that if you really wanna know more about high school students and apprenticeship, please come back next week on December 14th. We're gonna have another fabulous event and two fabulous panels to talk about precisely that, about high school based apprenticeship programs, what it's gonna take to build them, what kind of policy environments can support them. So I hope you all, thank you so much to everyone. Thank you to our fabulous panelists and they have a great day. Thank you.