Apprentices Needed: Construction Shortages Threaten American Growth
The typical apprenticeship program is very small and very competitive. Nearly half of the roughly 7,000 construction programs registered in the U.S. have only one or two apprentices in training, researchers found. Program coordinators said the problem is not a lack of interest; it’s a lack of capacity. Some said they bring on new apprentices only once every two years and have to turn away most applicants. As a result, while hundreds of new apprenticeship programs have opened in recent years, they have not generated enough of a bump in new apprentices.
That’s the low ceiling, and it makes the leaky pipeline that much harder to explain. Around 40 percent of apprentices drop out before they make it to the end of their program. That’s despite the earn-while-you-learn promise of apprenticeship programs—and the value of a credential, which one study pegged at more than $240,000 over the course of a 36-year career. It’s possible that some of those apprentices are leaving early to accept a full-time job. But researchers found that as many as half of those who leave do so in the first six months of their training.
“This was really surprising for us,” AlFakhri said. “We’re talking about an opportunity that’s paid, that can lead to meaningful employment, and that can offer a pathway to the middle class. If we could close that completion rate gap, that could meaningfully change the supply of construction workers in the near future.”
Just providing more up-front information to apprenticeship candidates might help. The work is hard, the hours are long—and the fact that so many drop out so early in their training suggests they didn’t fully appreciate what they were getting into. Support programs could also help ensure that apprentices have what they need to make it through the pipeline.
Raising the ceiling to increase capacity for more apprentices is going to require more significant work. It’s often not just a question of funding, but of time—and of safety. Apprenticeship mentors are also on the clock with their own work to do. And state laws often sharply limit how many apprentices they can look after at any one time. Amending those laws to allow mentors to oversee two apprentices instead of one would double capacity. But it has to be done with research and evidence that it wouldn’t undermine safety on a busy worksite.
Even with those changes, though, apprenticeships alone will not meet America’s need for construction workers. Currently, registered programs produce around 35,000 new workers a year, researchers found. Unregistered programs might double that. Community colleges and technical schools add tens of thousands more. So does immigration. Add them all up, and the nation still falls around 250,000 workers short of its estimated need.
RAND’s paper began with a question that more people should consider: Will apprenticeships and other career pathways produce enough workers to build America’s future? “The answer,” researchers wrote, “is a resounding ‘no.’” To build that future, they concluded, the U.S. must first find a way to build up its construction workforce.
Doug Irving is a communications analyst at RAND. This article is published courtesy of RAND.
