Stop Making Students Choose Between College and a Paycheck: The Growth of the Anti-Debt Apprenticeship Degree

National Apprenticeship Week, April 26 to May 2, focuses attention on earn-and-learn pathways to opportunity. It also underscores a larger truth. Higher education has a work problem.

For decades, the script for upward mobility asked students to do something that, for many, was a financial burden. They should push work to the margins, gain a degree, and then get a job.

That model left many with debt, limited work experience, and reasons to wonder how a college degree and economic mobility fit together.

The apprenticeship degree is emerging as an important answer to that problem. It’s not anti-college. It’s not anti-separation. It treats work and postsecondary education as partners, not rivals.

The nonprofit REACH University is an example of this approach. Founded in 2020 and initially focused on helping K–12 employees, such as paraeducators, become licensed teachers while continuing to work full-time, REACH is now expanding beyond education into health care.

Joe Ross, REACH’s president and CEO, has a memorable way of explaining the model. “I like to talk about the ABCs of apprenticeship degrees,” he says. “‘A’ stands for affordability without student debt; ‘B’ stands for based fully in the workplace—it starts with a paid job and ends with a better paid job; and ‘C’ stands for credit for learning at work, leading to an accredited degree.”

That’s not just a slogan. It’s a compact statement of what too much of American higher education still struggles to provide: affordability, relevance, and genuine connection to advancement.

The appeal is easy to see. Apprenticeship degrees are a model in which students earn wages, receive academic credit for on-the-job learning and related instruction, and complete an accredited degree over time.

In that sense, the model does more than reduce tuition pressure. It changes the sequence. Instead of asking students to front-load costs and hope that labor-market payoff comes later, it lets them build earning power and practical skills while making academic progress, all at the same time.

That’s especially important in fields where the country faces persistent labor shortages and where the traditional path into a profession is often expensive and poorly aligned with the realities of working adults.

This month, REACH announced the creation of an Apprenticeship College of Health in Washington state, partnering with the Healthcare Training Fund, a nonprofit partnership between hospitals, healthcare systems, and the state’s largest healthcare union. It will have a behavioral-health pathway that prepares learners for careers as substance use disorder professionals. REACH hopes to add bachelor’s and master’s pathways in healthcare fields.

The move matters not only because it addresses labor shortages in another high-need field, but because it tests whether the apprenticeship-degree model can travel.

That broader issue is the real story here. Apprenticeship degrees are not simply a clever financing tweak. They represent a different idea of college itself. Rather than treating the workplace as a distraction from learning, they treat it as a central site of learning. Rather than assuming that valuable knowledge only flows from classroom to job, they recognize that the job can be a source of disciplined, mentored, credit-bearing education. As REACH puts it, the university is aimed at working adults ready to earn a debt-free degree and at employers seeking to recruit and train local talent pipelines.

REACH is not alone. Other institutions are experimenting with the same general approach in partnership with REACH’s National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree.

For example, the nonprofit Western Governors University (WGU) signaled its own interest in the apprenticeship-degree space through the acquisition of Craft Education, a platform designed to track, assess, and report on on-the-job learning in apprenticeship-degree programs.

WGU says the acquisition is meant to accelerate the expansion of apprenticeship and other embedded-job programs across education, health care, technology, and business. That matters because one obstacle to scaling this model is not philosophical resistance so much as operational difficulty with issues like documenting workplace learning, aligning it with academic credit standards, and making the system legible to accreditors, employers, and students.

The policy environment is changing, too.

The federal Workforce Pell program, which takes effect July 1, 2026, opens a limited but important federal funding stream for short-term job-focused training. Governors will play a major role in setting standards, certifying value, and building the data systems needed to track completion, placement, and earnings. In other words, the federal government has opened a door, but states and local education and training institutions still have to build the hallway.

The apprenticeship degree model challenges one of the most damaging assumptions in American higher education policy. Students must first step away from productive work in order to become educated enough for productive work.

For many students, especially working adults and those in high-need service fields, that assumption has become less defensible by the year. REACH’s growth from 67 candidates in 2020 to more than 3,400 learners across eight states, with Washington becoming the ninth, suggests there is real demand for another option.

If policymakers and higher-education leaders want to expand this effort, they should start with five practical steps.

First, states should make apprenticeship degrees an explicit part of their workforce and higher-education strategies, not a boutique side project. These programs sit at the intersection of talent development, postsecondary attainment, and labor-market need. They should be treated that way.

Second, public leaders should support blended funding. PPI argues that apprenticeship degrees work best when employer wages, public grant aid, tax dollars, and philanthropic or private support are combined rather than forced into a single funding silo.

Third, accreditors and state regulators should make it easier to award high-quality academic credit for structured workplace learning, while keeping clear standards. The point is not to water down a degree. It is to recognize rigorous learning wherever it actually occurs.

Fourth, employers in shortage sectors should stop treating talent pipelines as someone else’s job. Apprenticeship degrees are most powerful when employers help shape roles, mentoring, progression, and tuition support.

Fifth, states should use Workforce Pell as a catalyst, not a crutch. It can help fund the instructional component, but it will not by itself create durable pathways without stronger data systems, better advising, and clear connections from entry roles to better-paid jobs.

The old college compact told students to borrow now, study now, and trust that work would come later. That is one reason National Apprenticeship Week should prompt colleges and policymakers to think bigger about apprenticeship degrees and the role they can play in expanding opportunity.

The apprenticeship degree offers a different promise. It advances work now, learn now, advance now. In a country that says it values both opportunity and dignity, that sounds less like a gimmick than a long-overdue correction.