To earn the rank of journeyman in a medieval guild, you had to demonstrate your craft through a piece of work that was recognized by experts as achieving the basic knowledge of your craft. Competence earned the credential. Five centuries later, the degree that we built to certify expertise has papered over the system’s reliance on just paying, showing up, and spending enough time in a seat to graduate. And our employers who are pulling from this talent pool have reacted. A Cengage survey this year found 77 percent of graduates say entry-level postings demand too much experience, and 75 percent say genuine entry-level openings have grown scarce. CNBC Make It captured the paradox in a statement from a recent grad about how companies now treat “entry-level” as roughly three years on the job. Students, educators, employers, and government stakeholders have all taken note of a need for gaining and demonstrating real-world experience. How it gets implemented is where market opportunities and institutional differentiation come into play.
History provides us with a model as well as guardrails. In late Middle Ages Europe, the guild system created the pathway to technical careers. Apprenticeships lasted seven years in England, moving to journeyman, and eventually master with the creation of a seminal work, an actual masterpiece. For over 500 years the system worked, until in the latter days, calcification and hereditary trappings started to erode the value. People could not get into a guild and could not succeed when they did as nepotism ruled over skill. The guild’s political clout and wealth along with the favoritism is likely why they were targeted and disappeared from France during the Revolution. The first industrial revolution eroded the system further and it fell out of use or was formally banned.
The need for experiential learning did not disappear and at the turn of the 20th century, the concept came to the fore again with the second industrial revolution. In 1906, the University of Cincinnati, under Herman Schneider, implemented cooperative education starting in their engineering department. This carried over to Northeastern in 1909, also starting in the engineering department, but expanding to the rest of the university over the next twenty years. They stand as an exemplar of the model because it has been a structural component of their curriculum ever since, even as fads and fashion dictated that it was passé.
Inside Higher Ed reports that apprenticeship is trending again, and many experts believe this time it will stick. As Holly Smith, who studies apprenticeship degrees, argues they don’t undermine traditional higher ed but “modernize and lift” it, by embedding credit for work, employer partnership, and curriculum alignment inside the degree instead of bolting them off the side. New America counts roughly 350 institutions now offering nearly 600 degree-apprenticeship programs across 91 occupations — nursing, teaching, and cybersecurity, not just the trades. And the demand is real: CNBC, citing the State of Skilled Trades report, projects 1.7 million skilled-trade jobs opening annually through 2035, with no clear sense of who will fill them.
There are real pressures on realizing the benefits of experiential learning. Just under half of those who start a trade pathway through postsecondary education or a registered apprenticeship complete it, and of those who finish, only 29 to 34 percent are still in the field five years later (State of Skilled Trades report). Employers are spending more than ever — $102.8 billion on training in a single year, with AI-specific programs jumping from 25 to 58 percent of companies in twelve months, per Workera — yet 56 percent of workers say they have no time at work to actually build the skills. And the last set of institutions that sold fast, work-ready outcomes, the coding bootcamps, are closing: software-development postings sat 27.5 percent below their pre-pandemic baseline this summer, and programs built entirely on a six-month job promise lost the outcome they were selling. Announcing earn-and-learn is not the same as delivering and maintaining it. There is work to be done.
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, former IBM executive John Porter laid out a vision for how the future of higher education and technical education can coexist in a rapidly changing workplace. Porter describes teaching “the welder and the bachelor students” in one system: a certificate in HVAC that leads to a job, then a return for an associate degree with the credits carrying forward, then a bachelor’s in business management years later when they’re starting their own business with each prior credential and their work experience counting toward the next. This model is echoed by Michelle Weise, author of “Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs That Don’t Even Exist Yet,” in her conception of the Cloverleaf University. Her observation that traditional education is built to front load education and then work is antiquated and like Porter, should instead consist of a series of on ramps to education and off ramps back to the workforce and vice versa. To make this system work requires a system that connects experience and credit. Learning and Employer Records (LERs) make a worker’s skills legible across employers and providers, and competency-based education grants credit for what someone can demonstrably do rather than for time served, which hearkens back to the guild system’s masterpiece. Texas has gone furthest, passing a law directing at least one institution in each university system to offer competency-based degrees in high-demand fields. Tellingly, The Chronicle notes that some have implemented it incompletely, because CBE forces changes to processes and systems many institutions are not built to make. Bridging the distance between policy and execution is the work.
Not every institution will or wants to stand up a degree-apprenticeship program, but nearly all can make work-integrated learning real rather than optional. And the evidence points strongly at the advantages, even in the most basic form, internships. Forbes, drawing on Gallup-Purdue data, reports that a college internship doubles a graduate’s odds of having a good job waiting at graduation and doubles the odds of being engaged at work over a lifetime. And this was a better predictor of those outcomes than where someone went to school or what they studied. This benefit is reinforced by a credit bearing course developed by Podium Education called Career Discovery and now offered at ten universities. As reported in Inside Higher Education, the course provides first year students with “opportunities to explore different industries and potential career paths through hands-on projects with employers.” This exploration provided self-reported gains in career confidence and intent to persist in college.
The market has determined there is value in experiential learning. Deans and provosts must decide whether to treat this demand as a bolt on feature or as an opportunity to redesign their curriculum and program architecture. As with guilds, the importance of creating a system that allows hands-on experience alongside the measurement of mastery is the goal. Our modern system has the potential to provide the flexibility and value of being stackable, competency-based, and portable. If it’s built into the framework of the institution it becomes a positive differentiator for prospective students as well as employers leaving behind the degree programs that only measure attendance.
