Learning by doing, and getting paid for it

July 17, 2024 8:52 AM

This week, the Biden-Harris administration announced the largest federal investment in Registered Apprenticeships in the history of the United States, with new policies "to ensure all workers – including women, people of color, veterans, and those that have been historically left behind – have equitable access to good-paying jobs".

The Biden-Harris Administration is making sure all Americans can access the hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs created by the President’s Investing in America agenda—whether they went to college or not. They've launched nine Investing in America Workforce Hubs across the country that are bringing together unions, local governments, employers, training providers, schools, community colleges, and other stakeholders to train and connect workers to jobs in high-demand sectors. First Lady Jill Biden launched five Workforce Hubs last year—Columbus, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Augusta, and Phoenix—to expand pre-apprenticeships and Registered Apprenticeships, train thousands of workers for good-paying union jobs, and expand community college programs. Building on that success, President Biden announced four new Workforce Hubs this year—upstate New York, Michigan, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia.


What is a Registered Apprenticeship Program?: "individuals can obtain paid work experience, receive progressive wage increases, classroom instruction, and a portable, nationally-recognized credential."



Biden announces investments in workforce development, apprenticeships , Construction Dive, Carolyn Crist, July 16, 2024

The Biden-Harris administration is expanding the Registered Apprenticeship program in certain U.S. industries and investing in workforce development to provide job access to women, people of color, veterans and other historically marginalized workers ...

As part of the July announcement, Philadelphia launched new efforts to build workforce development pipelines to attract workers. For instance, the Geographic and Economic Hiring Preference program aims to hire 50% of apprentices and 20% of journeypersons on certain public works projects from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods across the city, ensuring 200 new apprenticeships in underserved communities. ...

Additional funding will support the Registered Apprenticeship program, including public-private partnerships across in-demand fields, such as clean energy, advanced manufacturing, IT and cybersecurity, and K-12 education.

Although apprenticeships remain outside the mainstream in the U.S., they’ve received more attention in recent years, particularly as part of Biden administration expansions. The apprenticeship programs are intended to serve as another avenue to fill talent gaps and build pipelines, particularly in industries that don’t receive high interest from younger workers.

RI Delegation Announces Over $3.7 Million Investment in Registered Apprenticeship Programs, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse press release, July 15, 2024

“This is another win for young people looking to earn while they learn, for employers who are looking to hire skilled, well-trained workers, and for growing the state’s workforce." - Senator Reed

Indiana receives more than $1.2M in federal grant to expand Registered Apprenticeships, Indiana Public Media, Kirsten Adair, July 16, 2024

Indiana’s Office of Work-Based Learning and Apprenticeship said 94 percent of apprentices who complete a program retain employment and earn an average salary of $70,000 a year.

Department of Labor press release, July 11, 2024

The investments are part of the Biden-Harris administration’s Investing in America agenda, which is rebuilding the middle class and increasing opportunities for underrepresented populations to enter in-demand occupations and careers that offer family-supporting wages.

Biden announces workforce hub in Michigan, The Michigan Independent, Oliver Willis, April 26, 2024

The Washington Post reported in 2020 that under Trump, federal investment in water infrastructure fell to a 30-year low and spending on roads and bridges as a share of the economy had remained stagnant. Trump had promised during his 2016 presidential campaign that he would pass and implement significant investments in infrastructure.

Republicans in Congress have opposed the majority of the legislation forming Biden’s economic agenda; two key pieces of legislation — the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act — were passed with only Democratic votes and a tie-breaking vote in the Senate by Vice President Kamala Harris.

First Lady Jill Biden visits Columbus touting new Ohio workforce hub initiative, Ohio Capital Journal, Nick Evans, July 13, 2023

In addition to the engineering and semiconductor commitments, local and federal officials were quick to praise CSCC’s work to boost health care training. The school is partnering with OhioHealth to double the number of students it trains in fields like nursing and medical imaging.
...
Before hiring technicians, Intel will need another 7,000 workers to actually build the fabs, and that’s where local unions come in. Electricians and ironworkers have committed to expanding their apprenticeship programs. Plumbers and pipefitters, sheet metal workers, and roofers are all expanding training facilities.

Workforce Hubs: 5 cities creating pathways to good-paying local jobs in high-demand industries, WorkingNation.com, Ramona Schindelheim, March 8, 2024

... the aim is to bring about change for the future workforce by creating generational wealth and targeting groups that have historically been left behind.

“The priority populations that the Pittsburgh Hub has selected are individuals who are young adults who have faced a systemic barrier to employment,” explains Puskar.

“Maybe they were in the foster care system or are aging out of the foster care system. It’s Individuals who have a criminal background or a re-entrance back into the workforce. It’s people who live in high- and extreme-need neighborhoods as defined by our local Department of Human Services. It’s folks who are immigrants and refugees.”

Puskar says the keys to the success are support services such as childcare and transportation to make sure that these training opportunities are accessible and lead to family-sustaining wages.

posted by kristi (19 comments total)

YES. Also saw this great list of Biden-Harris accomplishments on Politico of all
places!: Biden accomplishments you might have missed
posted by ichomp at 9:01 AM on July 17 [11 favorites]

Thanks for this. I’m doing a pet project to imagine a new Constitution just to compare my ideals for America to the reality and our direction, and this really maps nicely to my education section. I have a college degree but I am more and more doubtful that we need a zillion college degrees out there because I think we should slowly pivot away from capitalism and unnecessary innovation and growth. The sorts of hands-on jobs that non-college-educated people do tend to be super practical in keeping things running, and to getting less dependent on a ridiculously complex international supply chain. Heartening !
posted by caviar2d2 at 9:06 AM on July 17 [5 favorites]

This is really great. Now I hope they expand it beyond the east coast - I work at a community college and more federal investment in workforce programs could do wonders for us and our students.
posted by mygothlaundry at 9:26 AM on July 17 [7 favorites]

I like the bit when they wake up and do things before an election. It’s been a time coming this time. Wish they could ge a bit more like that all the time.
posted by Artw at 9:36 AM on July 17 [6 favorites]

you can read my criticisms of the biden admin all over the site

...but....

.....the thing is, they've been doing a LOT of good things both legislatively and by executive action. but it's been unsexy, serious governing work that doesn't make headlines.

it's a structural failing with democracies, and this democracy in particular, that this hard work gets you very little reward, whereas big splashy hotbutton issues get you a lot.
posted by lalochezia at 10:23 AM on July 17 [26 favorites]

Artw, my impression is that the Biden administration has been non-stop doing things to make life better for all kinds of Americans from the day he took office.

It took me 45 minutes to put this post together, so I probably don't have time to do the research, but I would bet you 5 bucks I could find a couple dozen major positive actions in every month he's been in office. Maybe every week.

I mean, just starting back in the first week of the administration:

White House press releases from January 2021, currently at January 15-20, 2021, more Jan 20 2021 (those are pager URLs so they'll grow increasingly out of sync as the Biden administration does more and more things for the country); these include:

Fact Sheet: President-elect Biden’s Day One Executive Actions Deliver Relief for Families Across America Amid Converging Crises , Jan 20, 2021

Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government , Jan 20, 2021

Paris Climate Agreement, Jan 20, 2021

President Biden Announces American Rescue Plan , Jan 20, 2021

A National Day of Unity , Jan 20, 2021

He's a busy guy, and always has been. But you'd never know it from the press.
posted by kristi at 11:04 AM on July 17 [20 favorites]

(On failure to preview - ichomp beat me to it. Thanks, ichomp!)
posted by kristi at 11:07 AM on July 17 [2 favorites]

Wages can’t collect “generational wealth” on this Monopoly board we call an economy.

HEEHRA promises funding to states for home energy projects but the first pot of funds for California is like $10 per capita.
posted by torokunai at 11:24 AM on July 17

There's been a lot of defeatism and negativity on posts about Biden and/or Democratic accomplishments in the last few days, and while I understand a general mood given the unrelentingly bad news in the polls and how ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ the media seems to be about the US's slide into fascism, I do not understand shitting all over the Biden administration and Democrats in general for what they've done or not done in the last 3.5 years.

This has been the most progressive administration on the domestic front since probably LBJ, and the most effective internationally in a very long time as well--I could easily be missing something, but I don't think we have US military in a shooting conflict anywhere right now, which is probably the first time that's happened since...maybe a lull after we pulled out of Vietnam?

Yeah, I wish programs like what's in the FPP were even more broad, but Biden doesn't control the House of Representatives or the stupid splinter faction in the Senate, so let's give some credit here and try to stay positive.

Rolling over and giving up will make things a hell of a lot worse.
posted by Ickster at 12:07 PM on July 17 [17 favorites]

I'm glad to see union labor and worker diversity playing a key role in the initiative, which will be a helpful counterbalance to some so-called labor leaders who would cozy up to the authoritarian, white right.
posted by audi alteram partem at 1:28 PM on July 17 [4 favorites]

This is great. But I haven't seen it anywhere on the front pages of any of the newspapers I read (online), which means I haven't read about it anywhere but here. Has it been covered on TV?
posted by trig at 1:30 PM on July 17 [1 favorite]

This has been the most progressive administration on the domestic front since probably LBJ, and the most effective internationally in a very long time as well--I could easily be missing something, but I don't think we have US military in a shooting conflict anywhere right now, which is probably the first time that's happened since...maybe a lull after we pulled out of Vietnam?

100%.

From time to time, I try to post about the Biden admin's environmental, climate, and renewable energy policy initiatives, which are subjects I cover in my professional capacity at a legal news publication. They are barely mention in the mainstream press, unfortunately. And most of the Biden-haters and Biden-doomers seem to know nothing about them.

The NYT is now all in on trying to destroy Biden. It's depressing to see them try to end the career of the best president of the last 50 years. They put a lot more energy into that than into going after Trump.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:58 PM on July 17 [7 favorites]

"whether they went to college or not."

I am more and more doubtful that we need a zillion college degrees out there because I think we should slowly pivot away from capitalism and unnecessary innovation and growth.

I've been tracking this for a while, the various movements to outflank higher education. Sometimes people cast it as "breaking the paper ceiling," where "paper" = "post-secondary degree." I think this is great for America.

But not for American higher ed. Our <>4,000 colleges and universities are largely dependent on enrollment to keep going (state subsidies have dropped and only a handful can use endowments for this purpose). Higher ed is in practice basically privatized. To generalize, decreasing student enrollment is bad news for a given institution's financial stability. The decline in total enrollment since 2012 is one reason you've been seeing stories of cuts, mergers, and closures.

So is it a good thing for government to offer alternatives to higher ed, encouraging folks to skip college?
posted by doctornemo at 3:08 PM on July 17 [2 favorites]

I think US higher education made a deal with the devil in the 80's-00's to reposition itself as job training for white collar jobs, which it is not actually designed for and isn't particularly good at. This was successful in the short term for selling students and families on the idea that a college degree would be a ticket to middle class career and lifestyle, bringing in more tuition money and government budget allocation, but was never sustainable as the fraction of the population with higher degrees increased, and in the end has actually been pretty bad for both academia and students. There are plenty of careers where a university education makes sense as a requirement, but an awful lot where it doesn't, and it's just used as a hollow credential by employers as a way to narrow the field of job applicants based on class and a cheap filter for basic literacy skills that a high school diploma no longer guarantees.

Universities are overinflated and the bubble has been collapsing slowly for the last 20 years or so. Unfortunately the fields hit first and hardest by this collapse, humanities and liberal arts, are the ones closest to the true core competency of academia and what the university's structures are designed around, while fields like business and IT, which would probably be better served by on-the-job training while trainees get paid to learn their trade, are allocated an increasing fraction of the dwindling resources due to their "real world applicability".

In the long run, I think expanding apprenticeship programs is good for young people / students, employers, and academia. In the short run, there will be a continued trend towards contraction in the higher education market, which maybe will accellerate, and the business-minded people who currently control much of higher education will see this as a disaster, but with any luck as they stop seeing academia as a viable means to generate profit, they'll get out of it entirely and leave the universities to the academics again.

However, there is still an unmet need for access to lifelong access to liberal arts education for the whole population. This includes explanding public libraries, museum access, community colleges, university extension programs, educational media of the sort that PBS and NPR still produce but updated for the modern media landscape, and local life-long civics training. If we manage to make it through this fascist turn in our society, this will be critical to restoring our democracy, and leaner, more focused universities are going to be an essential part of providing the leadership for some of these efforts.
posted by biogeo at 4:40 PM on July 17 [9 favorites]

Just making a “portable, nationally-recognized credential" is a massive undertaking. For example, the building codes vary widely between Chicago, other munis in Cook County or the state university.
posted by zenon at 5:23 PM on July 17 [2 favorites]

Biden is going to remembered as the most consequential, small ‘e’ effective president since Carter.

And unfortunately for us, he’s getting Cartered right out of the office, too.
posted by notyou at 6:04 PM on July 17 [4 favorites]

Universities are overinflated and the bubble has been collapsing slowly for the last 20 years or so.

I dated it to 2012, when we passed peak enrollment, but yes, that seems to be the case. At least, that's what I'm writing about in my next book.
posted by doctornemo at 7:47 PM on July 17 [1 favorite]

That seems like a pretty good landmark to choose, if picking a specific moment. To me at least, this looks like an inflection in a much longer curve, tracing at least to my college years in the early 2000s. At this time, my large, public, land-grant university suffered serious cuts thanks to cutbacks by the Republican state legislature; this was a pattern that played out in other states across the country as well around that time. This drove my alma mater, and many similar schools, to go all in on raising tuition, seeking more operating funds from research grant indirect costs, and courting private and corporate sponsors/"partners". In some ways this feels to me like it was the beginning of the end: trying everything to keep the bubble going after the bottom had already fallen out. (Terrible metaphor mixture but I'm sure you know what I mean.) But this perspective is mostly driven by my anecdotal experience at that and a few other universities over the past 20ish years. If you've been researching for a book, I'm sure your viewpoint is more comprehensively informed than mine.
posted by biogeo at 8:19 PM on July 17 [1 favorite]

"I like the bit when they wake up and do things before an election. It’s been a time coming this time. Wish they could ge a bit more like that all the time."

What? The Biden administration has been doing things the whole time. Not big flashy things for his ego/legacy, but fixing a bunch of unanticipated problems with previous administrations' programs.

The Biden administration fixed the ACA family glitch that made healthcare unaffordable for your spouse if your employer offered health insurance.

The Biden administration made FHA-backed mortgage lenders use people's actual student loan payment amounts for calculating their debt burden. Before that, banks would assume that everyone was on the standard repayment plan even if you were on an income-based repayment plan. So people with high student loan balances couldn't get mortgages even if they could afford the mortgage payment.

The Biden administration unfucked the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. The first cohort eligible for forgiveness hit during the Trump administration and Betsy DeVos made it nearly impossible for anyone to actually get the loan forgiveness that they were promised. The Biden administration fixed it so that it worked as Congress intended when they passed the legislation.

etc.

If policy were a house, then the Biden administration has been catching up decades of deferred maintenance instead of building a flashy new wing. We really needed someone to do that because there were a lot of little things that were broken in stupid ways that economists have been bitching about for years. So many things are working as originally intended now thanks to the Biden administration.

As a libertarian, I'm never going to be super thrilled with any Presidency, but Biden is certainly the least-bad President since Bill Clinton. I am surprisingly satisfied with what he's done in his first term and would rather stick with him than try someone new. Four more years of little fixes here and there and no big new shit to disrupt my life sounds great to me.

Basically, I like a President that I don't need to think about much.
posted by Jacqueline at 10:25 PM on July 17 [1 favorite]