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Earlier this month Achieve gathered in Mystic, CT, home of Mystic Seaport, Mystic Pizza, and Achieve Managing Director Troy Williams. For the third consecutive summer, Troy organized a few days of New England-themed activities for our team. After last year’s Mystic visit coincided with the hottest day of the year – a day I imprudently began with a long run and, due to a full day of team building in the steamy outdoors, including lunch and dinner outside, continued sweating for 14 hours straight – Troy planned a less onerous program. The schedule included an oyster boat ride with an oyster-boosting oysterman as charismatic as (but less scandal-plagued than) Graham Platner, seafood lunch (with oysters), an unplanned stop for artisanal ice cream, then straight on to a cheese-and-beer pairing where, in a stuffed stupor and with the cheesemonger rattling off dozens of cheeses (including Wensleydale), I was mystically transported to Monty Python's cheese shop.
My Mystic highlight occurred on the eve of oyster-and-cheese gluttony: a lobster roll cookout at Mystic Seaport. The dinner featured a local trio playing what has become Mystic’s theme song: Van Morrison’s Into The Mystic. Into the Mystic appeared on Morrison’s 1970 wildly successful Moondance album. But Morrison wouldn’t have landed on Moondance or Mystic without first resolving a contract problem. Morrison was from Northern Ireland and in the 60s was working in the U.S. without a visa. This allowed a small, New York, mob-backed record label and publisher – the label, the aptly named Bang Records – to threaten him with deportation unless he signed unconscionable contracts. Morrison signed and immediately regretted it. Despite the success of Brown Eyed Girl, no real label or publisher would mess with the mob. So he wasn’t going anywhere unless he could get out of these deals.
Emboldened from marrying his American Brown Eyed Girlfriend Janet Planet and gaining a green card, Morrison hooked a savvy manager on his novel combination of soulful vocals, melodic bass, and jazz flute that became the timeless Astral Weeks album (the one before Moondance). The new manager solved the Bang Records problem by walking into a Ninth Avenue warehouse and handing over $20,000 in cash to two mobsters dressed to the nines. Getting out of the publishing deal required even more chutzpah. Morrison’s manager negotiated a full release in return for a payment plus delivery of 36 new songs. Morrison had a few he was happy to hand over. But the agreement didn’t define what constituted a song. So he trotted off to the studio and, in an hour now known as Van Morrison’s Contractual Obligation Session, recorded 31 minute-long songs mostly consisting of one or two chords and whatever words popped into his head, repeated over and over. Morrison’s new “songs” included:
None of these would rival Into The Mystic, although there’s never been a song like Ring Worm (“I can see by the look on your face / That you’ve got ring worm”), there can be no arguing with the sincerity of The Big Royalty Check (“I’m waiting / For my royalty check to come / And it still hasn’t come yet”) and Want A Danish may be the finest composition about wanting to eat a Danish. But Morrison’s escape act demonstrates how people can be fooled when definitions aren’t clear. And in the world of education and workforce development, there’s no better example of this than the ongoing lovefest with pre-apprenticeships.
Everyone wants more pre-apprenticeships. Pennsylvania touts nearly 150 pre-apprenticeship programs serving 3,200 pre-apprentices. Illinois is dropping another $17M this year, handing out grants to 39 organizations participating in the Illinois Works Pre-Apprenticeship Program. North Carolina just announced a new state-sponsored healthcare pre-apprenticeship program. Florida boasts over 4,500 pre-apprentices in 70 programs, doesn’t distinguish between pre-apprenticeships and apprenticeship programs in grantmaking, and has gone to the trouble of creating a “registered pre-apprenticeship” designation with the state Department of Education. The Trump administration just dropped a cool $98M in grants to pre-apprenticeship programs and each year new bills promoting pre-apprenticeships are introduced in Congress.
Dozens of community colleges have jumped on the pre-apprenticeship bandwagon. Northern Virgina Community College offers a raft of pre-apprenticeship programs. Community College of Philadelphia offers a career readiness in IT pre-apprenticeship. Illinois’ Parkland College is launching a new healthcare pre-apprenticeship program, preparing participants for careers as surgical techs, rad techs, respiratory therapists, occupational therapy assistants, and LPNs. South Texas College is starting pre-apprenticeships in construction, IT, and industrial machinery mechanics.
But what exactly are these lovable programs? As we all know, apprenticeships aren’t training programs. They’re jobs with a twist of instruction and on-the-job training. So apprenticeships are binary: either they are jobs or they aren’t. If you’re not being paid by an employer, you’re not an apprentice. Youth apprenticeships are apprenticeships with an additional degree of difficulty because youth apprentices are minors and the part-time jobs must accommodate high school schedules. But although policymakers and observers who should know better often confuse the two, pre-apprenticeships are completely distinct because they aren’t apprenticeships – because they aren’t jobs. A pre-apprenticeships is a training program that’s supposed to lead to an apprenticeship position.
The CBC just ran a profile of pre-apprentice Kayla Climenhaga who completed a 30-week program for aspiring electricians. While Kayla learned a lot in her classes, “what was missing is instruction in how to navigate the equally complicated world of securing an electrician apprenticeship. She's been sending out resumes since early spring and made calls to electrical contracting companies, but so far hasn't made much progress.” The CBC concluded: “pre-apprenticeship graduates can face significant challenges when it comes to actually getting an employer to commit to taking them on as an apprentice… there's… fierce competition for apprenticeship slots, which are limited.”
The Pennsylvania Capital-Star tells a similar story. After Nakiah Walker finished her pre-apprenticeship in digital marketing, a program run by nonprofit We Love Philly, “she was hopeful and excited about what might come next for her professionally. She felt her resume, experience, and credentials would help her get noticed by employers, and she’s been able to find work since the program ended. But that work isn’t in digital marketing. These days, she’s working at a hospital and considering applying for college in a year or two.”
A recent study from Jobs for the Future (JFF) confirms as much. Released at the end of June, Understanding Youth Movement from Pre-Apprenticeship to Registered Apprenticeship tracked 1,066 young Americans who enrolled in pre-apprenticeship programs. 75% completed the pre-apprenticeships, but only 6% successfully transitioned into registered apprenticeships. As for the other 94%? 23% were unemployed, 23% found unrelated employment, 3% enrolled in college, 45% ended up in parts unknown – likely ratably unemployed and unrelatedly employed.
What conclusions can we draw? JFF somehow concludes that “pre-apprenticeship is often a bridge into multiple positive trajectories” and adds some motherhood-and-apple-pie-happy-training talk: “pre-apprenticeships do far more than channel young people into Registered Apprenticeship (RA)… they build confidence, problem-solving skills, and career clarity, open multiple positive post-program pathways, and strengthen employer talent pipelines.” Of course, the same can be said of most training programs. So the sad truth is that the vast majority of pre-apprenticeships are JATPs: Just Another Training Program.
Why are pre-apprenticeship outcomes so poor? The JFF report provides a few hints. First, there’s little if any employer engagement; at best, employers contribute ideas for curriculum or deliver sessions on workplace expectations. Second, there’s no real work involved; at best, pre-apprentices get simulated work experience in the form of “labs, simulations, roleplays, and project-based units.” But perhaps the worst thing about the JFF pre-apprenticeship report is that it required a $5.3M U.S. Department of Labor grant. So while it’s nice to know what doesn’t work, it would have been much more productive to spend the $5.3M on supporting actual apprenticeship creation.
It is possible to connect pre-apprenticeships to apprenticeships, but – due to the shortage of apprenticeship jobs – only on a small scale that makes them uneconomic. So there are very few such programs and the vast majority of pre-apprenticeships prepare young Americans for apprenticeships that don’t exist yet. Rather than expanding the number of apprenticeship seats, pre-apprenticeship programs are training job seekers to wait in line. And while that may be a transferable skill, it’s not the goal. The bottleneck in apprenticeship isn't candidate interest or readiness or willingness to wait in line, it's employer willingness to hire and pay untrained, unproductive workers. And while we’re in the midst of righting decades of wrongheaded policy on that front, there’s little point in building on-ramps until we’ve built the highways.
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A few years ago I wrote about the dilemma that’s faced U.S. high school graduates for at least two decades. The title: College or Chipotle. In theory, pre-apprenticeships solve the College-or-Chipotle problem. But in practice, they’re JATPs and more like college with the attendant employment risk. Sadly, neither taxpayers nor students who enroll in these programs are winners.
Why has everyone fallen for pre-apprenticeships? Because there’s something mystical about the word apprenticeship. If you have a training program, calling it a pre-apprenticeship is a great way to stand out from the crowd of JATPs. Just ask Community College of Philadelphia and Community College of Baltimore County which list pre-apprenticeships under apprenticeship programs. Philadelphia promotes them as “work-based learning programs” while Baltimore says “earn while you learn.” (Neither is true.) And because apprenticeships are a political winner, pre-apprenticeships are, too. If governors could rebrand every training program in the state as “pre-apprenticeships,” they’d do so in a heartbeat and take a victory lap.
Apprenticeship has become so attractive that merely connecting it to a JATP conjures employment and economic mobility. It's a trick Van Morrison would recognize if he weren’t so crazy these days: call it a song, get out of the publishing deal. But unlike Ring Worm, pre-apprenticeships aren't even good for a laugh. They’re not – as JFF claims – a “bridge into multiple positive trajectories.” They’re mostly a bridge to nowhere. And while that might sound mystical to visitors to Southeastern Connecticut, for young Americans desperately hoping for a good first job, there's nothing mystical about a bridge to nowhere.