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One of the great skits from the Canadian comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall is a two-minute rant against Switzerland. “Sick of the Swiss” features Scott Thompson as a businessman named Ed and Mark McKinney as his equally dapper associate. Both face the camera as Ed explains why he’s sick of the Swiss (but not really) while his Swiss-hating sidekick amplifies his objections in a sing-song manner.
Ed: I'm sick of their good reputation. I'm sick of their cheese. I'm sick of their chocolate. And I'm especially sick of their plucky heroine Heidi.
Associate: He’s sick of the Swiss.
Ed: I mean every other nation in the world has taken their turn being maligned and slandered, but not the Swiss… I've had it up to here with your skiing heroes. I've had it up to here with your mountains. I've had it up to here with your secret bank accounts. From now on Switzerland, your name is mud.
Associate: If you roast them all in a fondue pot, sure bet that they'll complain a lot.
Ed: Zurich heads. Cuckoo cuckoos. Landlocked losers. Neutral ninnies. Boring bankers. Chalet pimps.
Associate: Oh yeah. His name is Ed. He’d like to see the Swiss dead. He’s sick of the Swiss!
This is pretty much how I felt when I read this headline: Indiana Looks to Swiss Experts to Create Thousands of Student Apprenticeships. Released last month, Indiana’s plan even has a Swiss-sounding name: CEMETS iLab. Hundreds of Hoosiers from the state legislature, the Indiana Department of Education, the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, and Ivy Tech (Indiana’s community college system) have traveled to Switzerland to taste the chocolate, see the mountains, and develop a plan to scale youth apprenticeships. And while they undoubtedly learned a lot about block scheduling, awarding credit for work experience, and transporting students to and from work, the most important lesson – and perhaps the biggest reason to be sick of Swiss apprenticeship success – is that the system is not funded by grants.
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America’s system of workforce development runs on grant funding. Governments provide grants to train people for in-demand jobs. Like Florida’s recent announcement of a $7.2M grant to St. Petersburg College to establish a semiconductor, artificial intelligence and machine learning training program. Or Maryland’s $7.3M in grants for training in emerging healthcare, tech, skilled trade, and hospitality jobs. Or the U.S. Department of Labor’s $49M to 35 recipients in 18 states to “prepare workers for good-quality, secure jobs in high-demand industries in their communities.” Or another $65M from the Department of Labor to “help community colleges scale affordable, high-quality workforce training that meets employers’ and workers’ skill development needs in critical industry sectors, such as advanced manufacturing, clean energy, semiconductors and biotechnology.”
Grant after grant after grant has produced a word salad of workforce training. According to one county administrator of workforce programs, funding “comes from over a dozen grants, some of which require applications every year.” But one obvious casualty of the workforce grant blob is apprenticeships. Because apprenticeships aren’t just training, they’re jobs with obvious and immediate employment outcomes. As such, they couldn’t be better positioned for performance-based or formula funding directed to companies and organizations that hire apprentices.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) continues to think that grants are the best way to scale apprenticeships. In July, DOL released the biggest-ever tsunami of apprenticeship grants: $244M to 52 recipients. Here’s how the money was doled out:
What can we say about these grants? 45% of the funding is going to nonprofits and educational institutions unlikely to launch apprenticeship programs themselves or hire apprentices. (According to a new report from Apprenticeships for America, of the 541 registered apprenticeship programs sponsored by community colleges, a minority employ even one apprentice.) 36% passed the buck by sending money to states and workforce boards, which then need to answer the question of how to actually stimulate apprenticeship program development and apprentice hiring. (Or maybe they don’t; maybe the money just supports existing programs and overhead.) Only 19% goes to intermediaries, industry associations, and employers likely to start new apprenticeship programs or hire apprentices.
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Governments often do a poor job of picking winners. During a recent provincial election in New Brunswick, Canada, the Liberal Party campaigned on establishing three industry “superclusters” where New Brunswick would have a global competitive advantage. One supercluster would be cybersecurity. As for the others, the Party suggested maple syrup or blueberries, prompting Canadian education gadfly Alex Usher to use profanity and exclaim “LIBERALS PROPOSE BLUEBERRY SUPERCLUSTER THIS IS NOT A JOKE WELL NO OBV IT IS A COMPLETE JOKE BUT I CAN'T EVEN…” To which I responded: “Blueberry Supercluster sounds like a delicious snack sold at Whole Foods.”
Last I checked, there’s no Blueberry Supercluster in Whole Foods or New Brunswick; the Liberals lost that election (and the next one for good measure). But far too many bad ideas receive taxpayer support in the form of government grants. One reason is that grants tend to go to organizations with little experience or track record building programs or delivering services, but which are excellent at writing government grants. Successful organizations allocate more resources to the grant writing process, allowing them to navigate complex applications. In the case of this summer’s DOL apprenticeship grants, applicants had to churn through 85 pages of instructions. Grant recipients also employ experienced grant writers, sometimes using grant-writing software, producing proposals that align directly with grant requirements (and matching specific language – next time you apply for a government grant, consider doing so under the name “Grant Recipient”).
Another problem is that grants tend to go to prior winners or similar organizations. Many of the new DOL grants are repeats; no one gets fired or in trouble for selecting an organization for a second or third grant. As a result, government grantmaking gets locked into a paradigm, making it difficult if not impossible for an innovative or even different proposal or organization to break through. NIH grants for cancer research are the best-known example, with moonshot projects that could move the needle on cancer prevention and treatment left unfunded in favor of repeat grants to established researchers seeking to take tiny steps.
A big reason for repeat grants is that there’s little accountability for outcomes. Grant recipients are required to report on progress, but only towards goals specified in the proposal. For 80% of the new DOL grants, that’s unlikely to be apprentices hired or apprenticeship programs launched. More likely, recipients will report on development of training curricula, outreach, and awareness-building. In addition, outcome reporting is the lesser component of the quarterly reporting package, dwarfed by financial and compliance reporting i.e., ensuring grant funds aren’t being misused and that recipients are complying with applicable laws and regulations.
Finally, on the off-chance a grant decision is well-made (hey, a broken clock is right twice a day!), the mechanics of disbursing grant funding can be cumbersome. In 2022, California allocated $500M to building new career pathways for high school students. But nearly two-and-a-half years later, following applications from hundreds of school districts and county offices of education, the Golden State Pathways Program still hasn’t provided any funding. After releasing a complex application and revising it several times, the California Department of Education finally announced awards in May 2024. Unfortunately, many awards were higher than the funding requested, while others fell far short, prompting appeals and an extensive review, delaying rollout to the 2025-26 school year.
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Have the Swiss abandoned grants because everything’s already perfect in Switzerland, hence no need for grants? Unlikely, but perhaps their precise clocks and bank accounts have oriented them to recognize that – at least as far as apprenticeships are concerned – government should not be in the grantmaking business.
Government grants make sense when we have no idea what works i.e., throw spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. Or when massive capital investment is required and we need to concentrate public resources, as with advanced semiconductor fabrication (CHIPS Act). In our context, grants may make sense for workforce training programs. As train-and-pray programs often have no clear employment outcomes (and are rarely tracked), it’s possible grants are the best we can do for run-of-the-mill workforce development – grant-and-pray for train-and-pray – or at least do no harm.
But where outcomes are easily defined and measured, government should stop trying to pick winners and simply fund outcomes – i.e., apprentices hired – then conduct checks to ensure outcomes are as reported in terms of quantity and quality. Among many other benefits, making this change will encourage community colleges to become much more proactive in actually selling apprenticeship programs to employers.
We need to stop spending on well-wrought apprenticeship grant proposals and start putting taxpayer dollars to work putting apprentices to work. This is what California had in mind in 2022 with the launch of Apprenticeship Innovation Funding, providing $3,500 to employers for every apprentice hired – a program which has resulted in a 33% increase in registered apprentices over the past two years. And this is why the federal “minibus” package of spending bills signed into law on March 23 included this language in the accompanying Labor and Health and Human Services report: “The agreement directs the Department to assess the feasibility of supporting a pay-for-success initiative to increase and expand registered apprenticeship programs through the Apprenticeship Program and to share its findings with the Committees within 180 days of enactment of this Act.” Well, last week marked 180 days. So we’re waiting for the Department of Labor to share its thoughts.
Let’s hope those thoughts are more Swiss-like than apprenticeship death-by-a-thousand-grants. Because if I see one more apprenticeship Grant-a-palooza for workforce boards, and colleges, I’m going to leverage my Canadian contacts to get Ed and his associate to perform a new two-minute rant, albeit one that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue: “Sick of the U.S. Department of Labor.”