Joe E. Ross, President, CEO and co-founder of Reach University and the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree, discusses Reach University's "apprenticeship degree" model that turns jobs into degrees rather than the traditional approach of obtaining a job post-graduation. The conversation explores Reach's approach to addressing the "hiding in plain sight" talent crisis by serving the 40-50 million Americans in the workforce without degrees who wish they had them. Ross outlines Reach's three ABCs framework: Affordability, Based in the workplace from day one to graduation, and Credit for learning at work. He shares compelling outcomes from Reach's growth from 67 candidates to over 3,000 across eight states, with 70% graduation rates for Pell-eligible students compared to the typical 40-50%. Ross also discusses the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree's work with 50 institutions across a dozen states, and offers practical steps for listeners interested in getting involved with apprenticeship degrees.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces Podcast. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning.

Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice. Through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education, industry and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort. Please check out our Work Forces podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in.

Julian Alssid: Welcome back today. We're diving deep into a topic that's central to our work, the evolution of higher education to better serve the modern workforce.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Yes, we are Julian. We've talked a lot about the need for new models, especially those that bridge the gap between learning and earning. So many of our conversations have pointed to the power of apprenticeships and skills based pathways, including our past podcast discussions with Bob Lehrman and John Colborn on the evolution of apprenticeships and the opportunities they afford learners and employers alike.

Julian Alssid: That's right. Kaitlan and as we discussed with Bob and John, the apprenticeship movement has been gaining momentum in recent years. Just in August 2025 the Trump administration issued a talent strategy report that calls for the expansion of Federal Registered Apprenticeships, including promoting stronger connections to universities and colleges. Our guest today is at the forefront of this movement, pioneering a groundbreaking model that's reshaping what a degree can look like, the apprenticeship degree. In fact, the apprenticeship degree was called out in the Feds report as a key part of the new apprenticeship initiative. And so today, we'll be discussing this and more with Joe E Ross, President, CEO and co founder of Reach University and the National Center for the apprenticeship degree.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Before building Reach, Joe served as president of the statewide association for county school boards in California, and served for 10 years as a locally elected school board member. He previously served as general counsel to a venture studio in several technology startups, and as a deputy district attorney, he acted as sole counsel in numerous hearings and jury trials. Earlier in his career, he served eight years on active duty in the US Navy. The son of a US Postal Service labor custodian, Joe went on to earn degrees from Yale and Stanford Law School. And Joe, we're excited to welcome you to the podcast with us today. Thanks so much for joining us here.

Joe E. Ross: Kaitlin, Julian, it's such a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Julian Alssid: Yes, indeed, it is a pleasure to have you, and if you will, you know, we've said a little bit about your background, but we'd love to hear you tell us a little bit more, and the story of what led you to co found Reach.

Joe E. Ross: Yeah, sure. So first off, I must offer the disclaimer, I never imagined that I would be a college president growing up. That's not the thing that was on my bucket list, among many things, but I do think I, very early on, acquired a conviction that education is the way you build your own future, I think of it as the pen that you need to have in your hand to write your own future. As you mentioned, my biological father worked for the post office as a labor custodian (that means janitor), and my mom died kind of young, and he was injured in an accident. And I was raised starting at age four by my aunt and uncle, and I think in moving into that new household, in my little head, I must have noticed that these adults had careers and they had degrees and they had power over their lives. And I think in my little head, I thought, I want all three of those things, and I got it into my head that education was my way to those things. That's the only thing I can point to as an explanation for why I was such a nerd in school and so motivated in school, and also why later, after trying all sorts of other things with that pen to my hand, I was a Navy officer, I was a prosecutor, I was an ed tech entrepreneur, I always tacked back to education as where my passion was, and so about 15 years ago, I started running an after school program that sought to turn after school staff into teachers, and that was essentially a job embedded, apprenticeship based program, the first of its kind. And I saw this, this potential of combining work with higher ed. And so fast forward to the fall of 2020, Reach University launched as it's in its current form as an accredited nonprofit institution with a very simple mission, which is to turn jobs into degrees, as you said in the intro, as opposed the other way around. And that model is called the apprenticeship degree. Now.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So you know. Reach University has a unique B2B2C model, right where you partner directly with employers, but you have this dual customer approach of working with employers but also serving the needs of your learners. Can we dive in a little bit there? I mean, this is a complex model to build. How have you gone about it?

Joe E. Ross: Yeah, so it's, it's interesting, it's complex, but it also creates some simplicity as well. If you're running an apprenticeship degree, by definition, you are running a model that's based in the workplace from day one to the day of graduation. In fact, I'll back up. I probably should share for everybody what we mean by apprenticeship degree, and then that will lead lead to the answer. So an apprenticeship degree is defined by elements associated with apprenticeship going back centuries. This is not something that the Department of Labor defined 50 years ago or 10 years ago or this summer. It's something that goes back to a tradition that is very long standing, and apprenticeships had three defining elements that I think of as the ABCs that apply to an apprenticeship degree, a stands for Affordability for the learner, and in this day and age, that means without student debt, apprentices have been asked for their sweat, not for their debt, right? So at Reach University, we made this commitment the beginning, that no one would be would pay out of pocket. No learner would pay out of pocket more than $75 a month for full time enrollment in a full time work embedded degree program that's a for affordability. B stands for Based in the workplace from day one to the day of graduation or the day of completion. An apprenticeship degree starts with a paid job. It ends, or is designed to end, with a better paid job. And C stands for Credit for work, Credit for learning at work. Kind of has a double meaning. Learning at work means literally learning at work, but it also means learning put to work, theory, meaning practice. C also stands for Credential of value. This is not a compromise. It is still a Bachelor of Arts or a Master of Arts or an Associate of Arts. AA does not stand for Apprenticeship Arts Degree. It stands for Associate of Arts degree. So with that definition in mind, let me go back to B based in the workplace. The reason we think of this as a B2B2C model, as opposed to a, B2C model is because you can't run an apprenticeship or an apprenticeship degree without close engagement with employers and for the university. What that means, among many things, is that instead of coming to the university looking for graduates, the employer comes to the university at the front end, bringing the students, you work with employers, and then the employers engage their incumbent workforce, or they actually recruit new employees into jobs that come with degrees. And so what you end up seeing is a lot of partnership work with employers, which is kind of shoe leather and handshaking and presence on the ground, as opposed to buying Google AdWords and competing in the internet for advertising for consumers. And as a result of that, a B2B2C model is much more affordable to execute, and that savings gets passed on to the apprentices, to the learners, in the form of much lower tuition, much more affordability.

Julian Alssid: So Joe, your model, in a sense, is helping to solve labor shortages. And want to hear you talk about, like, who these who these learners are, and what kinds of jobs you're preparing them for. This notion that there's like, this talent, and you know the term like hiding in hiding in plain sight, yeah, is really what you're about, yeah.

Joe E. Ross: Well, we started five years ago with our teachers college, and we were focused on the teacher shortage. And by any estimate, there's many as 30 to 50,000 structural vacancies, to as much as 300,000 structural vacancies in teaching. And what we discovered is that in the very same buildings where principals were looking for teachers where there were classrooms without permanent staff, in those same buildings, there were a lot of human beings doing other jobs that didn't require degrees. They were working as classroom aides, as library aides, they were in the lunchroom, they were in the office, driving the bus. They were janitors, like my father and each of these individuals share, typically, the same story. At some point, they had to choose that job instead of a degree to take care of their family. For example, we did some research, because this was anecdotal, and this was something we were seeing on the ground, but we did some research. You know, if you look the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there's about 1.3 to 1.5 million classroom aids in this country, if there's only 50,000 teacher shortages, you only need a fraction of those aids, a fraction of those aides to get upskilled, earn a degree, to just end a teacher shortage. That type of ratio plays out in other high demand industries. If you look at nursing, there's a nursing shortage, but there's also a tremendous number of people working in hospitals as patient care assistants, or certified nursing assistants and many other roles who, if we actually treated those people as the talent we need and give them the opportunity to rise up, we would end these labor shortages and we create this upward mobility that we want this country to stand for. We bring it to life in places, particularly rural places that are education deserts. So that's basically the story here we have, on one hand, estimates suggest about 10 million high demand labor shortages in high demand industries, and on the other hand, there's 40 to 50 million people working in the workforce who do not have a degree, but surveys indicate they wish they did have a degree. And if we can actually move higher ed to think about that population, those 50 million people already in the workforce or about to enter the workforce, as the market for higher ed, as opposed to the 3 million graduating from high school every year, or maybe in addition to the 3 million who are graduating from high school every year, it's such a win, win. Higher ed has a new mission, 50 million people who were left out get brought back in, and we address labor shortages in high demand fields, particularly in rural, remote places where often the only answer is to do a grow your own effort, as opposed to recruiting effort.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Can you tell us a little bit, Joe about how this model works like a practical level. So you said, right? You know, people learners should be, you know, receiving credit for the work that they're doing on the job. But what does it look like to implement this?

Joe E. Ross: I think the apprenticeship degree is always met with this kind of, oh, this sounds too good to be true. Somebody can have a paid job. Half the learning in their degree program comes from that paid job. The other half comes from seminars held at night or on the weekends or asynchronous instruction. There's no student debt. There's a better paid job waiting at the end of it. Employers are feeling labor shortages, individuals are getting upward economic mobility, and people are kind of like, well, that's genius. Too good to be true. How do you do you do it? Just like you just asked, here are some things that need to go into the design approach. First, employers to higher education providers need to work really closely together to make sure that the degree design meets the needs of the employer. In many ways, the employer is the customer here. They should be actually, in many cases, paying for the program instead of the learner, right? So you have to work with the employers to design now and teaching that's fairly straightforward, because every state knows what teachers need to know, and it's pretty common across state borders what teachers need to know. Similarly, in other professions like a nursing or radiological technician or other allied health fields, the standards of what you need to know in those professions as well now, but you still need to work with employers to make sure that the program design works. And then from there, the employers are also your key partners. I said earlier in recruiting their incumbent workforce, or their new hires into these pathways with the promise that their jobs are not just job type jobs, but jobs that turn into degrees and then give you upward mobility after completion of a certain set period of time. In terms of the actual design of the model, part of what's required here is to rethink some practices that are often taken as rules or laws or regulations, but are just habits In higher education. And I'll give you one example. There's something called the Carnegie Unit that is about the ratio of seat time to homework time, essentially. And this is seen as a barrier to work embedded degree programs, because, oh my gosh, we had to have this much seat time, and then people have to, have to do this, this much homework, and then they have to work 40 hours a week. How do you fit it all in? And so one of the things that we did from the beginning said, Look, you can reimagine the Carnegie Unit as being a function of seat time and work time as opposed to seat time and homework time, right? So if you can combine seat time with assignments on the job, or sense making around what you're doing on the job instead of mindless, irrelevant problem sets or whatever the case may be busy work. But actually make work work, the work instead of busy work, the work. You can actually create an environment where for a learner, and this is the objective for a worker, one plus one in this case, equals one. It should feel like their job and their higher education pathway are the same thing. That's the key element of efficiency here that needs to go into the design. And then from there, there's things in a higher education credential that people think, Well, how could you do that in the workplace? For example, you need to know English or critical thinking or history or writing, or all these things that are referred to as general education? Well, it turns out you can carefully design the liberal arts component of almost any professional or occupational degree to be relevant to that occupation. We're designing a program right now in behavioral health, for example. And to get an associate or bachelor's degree, you need something that looks like writing and reading and literature for to be a degree, but you can choose something that's relevant. So we have a semester we're designing where there's two tracks of learning. One is psychology, one, two and three, which is with one faculty member, and then there's practice on the job. And the other track is literature, but it's going to be the literature of mental illness, right? And it's going to feel really integrated with the psychology track, and it's going to be relevant to the job. So that's the kind of curricular design work that I think the apprenticeship degree needs to entail. Because at the end of the day, these are working adults, and we know what working adults need, and we sometimes are really good at giving them what they need at the graduate level, but now we have to give them what they need at the undergraduate level to make sure the associate degree in the bachelor's degree truly is working better.

Julian Alssid: It's all about that context, really, and just baking it in all around. So then, given this integration and approach like, what are the metrics that you're using to track and what's your impact today?

Joe E. Ross: Yeah, we started with 67 candidates in our pilot cohort in the Louisiana and Arkansas Deltas. That was five years ago. We'll have well over 3,000 candidates across almost 500 school districts in eight states as of this fall. So the program is growing. That's one metric that's important. And in some places, school districts and parishes are reporting the sentiment that their teacher shortage seems to be going away, which is great news, and in part, that's because of programs like, like Reach University, and that's exciting to see when, when do you get to, like, actually solve a major social problem as a nonprofit leader in your life, it's always something on the horizon. We're actually seeing shortages go away, which is amazing. Notably, the population we're serving are overwhelmingly Pell eligible. And so Pell eligibility, I think, is a good proxy for economic need. And any given semester, roughly 70 to 75% of our enrollment is Pell eligible, 37 to 39 year old folks with families and full time jobs, and so they're eligible for Pell. And the typical graduation rate at the undergraduate level for someone who is Pell eligible is a shocking 40 to 50%. In our program. It's on track to be 70% for all our almost all of our cohorts. And I think actually, we have a tailwind in this case, because the number one reason that people who are Pell eligible drop out is economics. They need a job, but in an apprenticeship degree, they already have a job. So you've removed one of the major barriers to completion of a college degree when you pair the degree with a paid job from beginning to end. And so it's not surprising that we're seeing much better completion rates. We also look at retention, you know, the you know, retention is kind of along the way. The most challenging year for a Pell eligible first generation student is the first year of college. And so you really, you can't lose 30 or 40% in year one and have anything close to a 70% graduation rate, obviously, four years later, five years later, and and so we tracked that first year persistence really carefully, and we constantly, actually redesigned our first year to make sure that our first year candidates would had a better retention. We had some cohorts we didn't really like the numbers, like it was down to 70% for one cohort or 65% for another. And we redesigned our first year to integrate the general education courses and make them more working embedded. And so this first cohort is 91 to 92% retention. That's very, very good for a Pell eligible first year persistence. And then at the end of the program, we absolutely need to look at who, not only how many are completing, but how many of those who complete are actually getting the job that is waiting for them. Very often, if not in the same building, it's in the same employer network or the same community. But how many are actually getting that job, and then in a few years, in how many of them are seeing income gains? And if there's a measure of efficacy in the job, whether it's teaching or allied health, how are they doing as compared to peers who came through traditional pathways? And it's still early days for us, because we just graduated our first set of career graduated our first set of cohorts, but early data look very, very good in terms of both obtaining the job, getting the pay raise, and being rated by their employers as better than, at least equal or better than, in terms of performance folks who came through the traditional pathways.

Kaitlin LeMoine: These are some exciting initial outcomes. I know you said it's early days, but it must be exciting to be seeing these, you know, these types of success metrics, and I'm sure hearing success stories as well, right? Those, those anecdotes and qualitative feedback on on the program. So congratulations on that. I think you started to touch upon it a little bit with the redesign of your first year. I'm curious to know, like, what are some of the challenges you've experienced in these first five years of operation, and maybe give us an example or two on how you've addressed them, because it's certainly, as you said, maybe there's elements of this that simplify higher ed, but it's a really interesting model, and I feel like still relatively new overall in the higher ed landscape.

Joe E. Ross: When we first launched this undergraduate apprenticeship degree, we literally planned the semester right in time, right so we couldn't have any transfer students. We brought people in with no prior credit, and we kind of designed that first semester for them as they took it, and then the second semester was designed just in time, and we went through the whole program designing one term ahead of the first cohort. And then when we had upper division cohorts, we started accepting and transfers. Well, we learned a lesson the first year, because the first year, we actually tried to provide four or five work embedded courses at once to our first year students, which meant they had four or five different faculty at once. I don't know what we were thinking, but it's what we did. And of course, the feedback was, this is great, but this is really hard, right? That was the feedback generally from candidates and assignments were on the same time, and people were trying to remember the name of their faculty and their faculty and their peers and all that. And, at the end of that first year, we said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, there is a best practice here that it's already out there online higher education does one course at a time. This is a best practice for working adults. We already know that. And I went to the faculty and I said, look, we've got to do one course at a time. We can't do this five courses at once. And there was a little bit of concern because our faculty who, by the way, are job embedded too. So these were folks who are working in schools as principals, assistant superintendents, as master teachers. And they understood what I was saying, but they also were like, you know, I don't think we can get to know the candidates in five weeks if it's a five week course, or in 10 weeks, if it's 10 week course. And so what we decided to do, as we built the second year is designed a single subject, not a course, but a single subject semester. How do we integrate all the courses as one subject area, where one faculty member essentially would teach three or four, three courses back to back, but they were essentially the same type of course. So world history, us, history and social studies for teachers, integrated as one experience, but three courses on the transcript as an example. And so we did that for the second year and the third year and the fourth year, and retention and persistence and satisfaction and outcomes on licensure tests just moved up and to the right and then we finally, as I said earlier, got back to the first year, and we finally redesigned the first year. We're seeing great retention the first year as well. So I think we maybe should have known this before we started, but we essentially delivered to higher ed an AB test of what it looks like to have four or five courses at once, an apprenticeship degree, as opposed to one subject at a time. And the results are kind of overwhelming. Someone should write the paper on this and get tenure somewhere. But that's, that's, that's one of the big lessons we had at the gate.

Julian Alssid: Well, speaking of challenges, Joe, we know that you know your National Center for Apprenticeship Degrees is a thing that you've launched, and that it's working with traditional colleges and universities to adopt an apprenticeship model. Interested to hear about what you're doing there. And you know, we know that, you know you're getting to design this. You know, Reach University from scratch. What's it like? And what are the you know, what are the challenges you're facing with the traditional colleges and universities? And how are NCAD overcoming these challenges?

Joe E. Ross: So we launched NCAD about two years ago. NCAD stands for National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree. And in part, we launched it because we had a teacher's college. And everywhere I went, people would say, this is a great idea. Can you do this in my advanced manufacturing facility over here? That actually happened. I was visiting a school district in West Memphis, and the assistant superintendent said, you have to meet my husband. He runs this factory across the river in Memphis. I was like, okay, so I visit this factory, and they give me a hard hat, which was fun. And they're manufacturing switches for railroad tracks with all this very, very next level equipment. And they take me through the factory to the back, and there's a state of the art classroom where this employer was actually taking people out of high school and putting them through advanced math and engineering classes so they could run the equipment. And he says to me, I should be able to confer an associate degree for all the training I'm doing on the job, and it would make it easier for me to recruit people into this workplace, if I could do that. That story times 100 made it really clear that this idea of an apprenticeship degree was not just for teaching or even allied health, but that this is something that could be part of a larger workforce and human capital strategy across industries, across geographies, and we're a startup nonprofit, the idea that we could address all that demand seemed a little nutty, but we did believe that what we were doing could be something that, together with other innovators, could create a tipping point, and that the larger mission of changing higher education - bringing it into the workplace was something that we could pursue. And so we launched the Center for the Apprenticeship Degree. And your question, I think, touches on the built in challenge there, because essentially, what we're asking higher education to do is to disrupt itself, right? Like classic disruption is about a simpler product that's more relevant to a larger consumer base that's not consuming. So targets non-consumption, and it's supposed to be something much, much less expensive, right? All of those things are really, really hard for big established players to do. Now there's some big established players that have figured out how to do it. You all came from Southern New Hampshire University. Did disruptive things there, ASU does disruptive things Western Governors, but there's 4000 higher ed institutions in this country, and not all of them are going to just drop everything and create a affordable face in the workplace, degree that rewards credit for work. But what we did realize is that there are some who are doing and that this is a field that's emerging, and one of the things you have to attend to in system change is avoiding fragmentation of an emerging, fragile field. So the first thing out of three that NCAT is doing is attending to making sure we're bringing together the emerging field of higher ed institutions and innovative, forward thinking employers who are launching apprenticeship degrees to address talent needs or to get an edge on their competition, whatever their purpose is. And that has been really successful. We've worked with 50 different institutions across over a dozen states where this is beginning to emerge. The second thing we took on with the Center for the Apprenticeship Degrees is, because we're out there in the field, we're we've become aware of who is really doing amazing things in the field. And so when a system or a state or a college wants to launch a program like this, we're able to provide capacity building support. And we've been doing that in Massachusetts and Colorado and a few other states as well. And then finally, there's a need to kind of build an emerging knowledge base about this field. And so NCAD, the National Center the Apprenticeship Degree, is focused on that as well. The challenge here is, I go back to the ABCs I mentioned before. All three of them are really hard. Affordability is hard because since the 1970s most of higher ed has had the assumption of unlimited student debt without underwriting at least at the graduate level, and that's created kind of a lack of discipline around designing high quality things at an affordable price. So that's that's a big challenge. Being based in the workplace means partnering with employers and changing your recruitment, changing your design strategies. It's not that that's hard to do. It's just not in the muscle memory of a lot of places yet. And then C credit for learning at work means giving up some of the sort of ownership and the direct control over where learning happens, and letting the assessment of skills and capacities and knowledge happen in the workplace that's challenging as well. There's a book that came out a while back called Whatever It Is I'm Against It, by a former college president, and it points to how it's how hard it is, generally in higher ed to work through committees. Committees don't generally drive innovation, but that's it's actually more complex than that, a degree is something that has the fingerprints of dozens of departments. It's not just the school of education that gives you a teaching degree or the school of nursing that gives you a nursing degree. They need to provide general education, which means they have to negotiate with history and anthropology and sociology and all these places that are providing these other courses and making them work. Embedded is possible, but it's a big change. And so at NCAD, the best thing we can do is not tell people what to do, but to surface examples of other places that are similarly situated, that have actually done this. And in Alabama, the phrase that I first heard, I first heard, I first heard in Alabama from the director of apprenticeship in Alabama. The key here is R&D, which stands for rip off and duplicate, meaning like, if we can actually at NCAD, enable folks who are trying to innovate to know what others are doing and steal from them. That's the theory of change here. Because innovators and entrepreneurs, whether they're in academics or technology, do not want to be told what to do, but they're very happy to steal from steal from others. It's kind of the congenital approach of an entrepreneur. So at NCAD, we're trying to make it easy for people to steal from each other, steal from us, and steal from each other, so that this model, which is such a great model, can grow and expand and be more available.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So I would say, building off that point, Joe, you know, we always ask, What practical steps could you provide to our audience around becoming forces in developing apprenticeship degrees? I mean, we could take it from the perspective of, you know, a new employer partner or, like you're saying, a traditional, a more traditional college or university that's interested in pursuing this out of an approach.

Joe E. Ross: I think wherever you sit, whether you're an employer or an educator or a policymaker, I think the first step is to stop being part of a system that forces to choose, people to choose between a job and a degree. So ask, what can we do to convert jobs into degrees that then enable people to have the opportunity to be skilled up and to rise up in their workplace. So for employers, one of the one of the big opportunities here, I think, is to move from thinking of education as a benefit, which many employers already already do, to thinking about jobs that are designed to confer qualifications, certificates, and degrees by design. Because if your jobs are not dead end, but instead developmental, you attract a different kind of talent. And there's so many young people right now, including my own children, who are out of college, who judge the quality of a job by what they think they will learn and what people will see that they have learned in that job. So think about jobs as places where your workplace becomes kind of a college campus. I think that's the call to action for employers, for higher ed leaders. I think that getting around this idea that you can deliver quality but also be radically affordable. It's hard for some to imagine, but it's eminently doable, and part of the way you do that is letting your employers drive your enrollment strategy, which saves a ton of money. And number two, really looking for effective ways leveraging technology and and best practices to award credit for work. Everyone knows that doing is a way of learning. Learning by doing is the expression, right? But that doesn't have to water down the academic enterprise. You could do so much sense making with what people are doing on the job. That makes it still true higher education. And then finally, I'd say policymakers, we're strong advocates of policymakers at the federal, state, local level, looking for ways to bring forth predictable funding that has incentives for affordability and outcomes built in unlimited debt does not incent affordability and full time enrollment dollars don't necessarily incent outcomes. So I think the challenge here for policymakers is, how do you set up mechanisms that cause the market to answer the call? If I knew that if somebody completed X amount of credit and learning in x, in y, amount of time, I would be paid Z, amount of dollars upon proven completion. I take that deal every day because I know my program achieves those outcomes, and it's a better use of public dollars, as opposed to sort of stuffing the channels, which is what we've done over the last 50 years. Basically just make it easier for people to go in debt, make it easier for people to go, encourage everybody to go. That's gotten us into this, right? So I think policymakers have a real opportunity here, with the changes that we're seeing at the federal and state level to incentivize apprenticeship degrees, to deliver the kind of outcomes that I'm talking about. And I think actually we're going to see some movement here on this front I actually think there's a lot of conversation. It is a bipartisan issue. Everybody seems to love the idea of apprenticeship, and everybody loves the idea of an apprenticeship that leads to a degree. So I think there's a lot of hope to be had here on this front.

Julian Alssid: Yeah, no, it's so true. It is definitely. And I kind of was implying that in my little first comments, that this is, you know, there's been this growing movement, and it's totally bipartisan. And I think a lot of the challenge has been that, you know, it's perceived as really hard to do and come and bureaucratic and cumbersome and and what's been so wonderful talking to you is how you know, clear eyed you are about this, how you break it down, you know. And obviously there's a lot of complexity, and I'm sure there's way more, many more challenges as of course, there always are. But that, you know, here you have this entrepreneurial pursuit that's getting things done. You have some strategies for the the legacy institutions and and, you know, at a time when there's really heightened interest and it's all over the place. Everyone's got issues. Employers can't find the talent they need. People don't want to go into debt forever and get nothing in return. And so I guess the perfect start winding down. Would love to hear from you about how our listeners can learn more and continue to follow your work.

Joe E. Ross: Well, great. I love the opportunity to invite people to visit our website and invite people to visit our social media channels. Reach.edu is where you can find Reach University. Join us there if you are interested in the National Center for the apprenticeship degree at ncad.org, N-C-A-D dot org, we have a podcast. It's called Apprenticeship 2.0. It comes out every two weeks, so tune in, and we'll actually tell people to tune into your podcast as well, because this is a great conversation for people to tune into, and the other ones have been as well. We're on LinkedIn. We post a lot of LinkedIn if you're truly interested in getting involved in this movement, if you email [email protected] someone, someone will get back to you and connect you to a way to get involved in launching and expanding the apprenticeship degree movement the United States.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you for sharing all of those various avenues for people to get involved and learn more. And appreciate you joining us on show today.

Joe E. Ross: It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me and I look forward to to the continued conversation.

Kaitlin LeMoine: We hope you enjoyed today's conversation, and appreciate you tuning in to Work Forces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support and a special thanks to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces dot info, forward slash podcast. You can also find Work Forces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like and share it with your colleagues and friends. And if you're interested in learning more about workforces consulting, please visit workforces dot info forward slash consulting for more details about our multi service practice.