Rural Opportunity, Through Apprenticeship

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The program has ballooned since its founding four years ago, with 350 active apprentices across 202 school districts in the state—57 percent of them in rural areas. Jon Turner, associate professor of special education, leadership and professional studies at Missouri State and a founder of the program, said the positive impact of even one special ed teacher on some of these rural communities is hard to measure.

“That one para is one para to us, but they’re serving a whole lot of kids in that rural community, and for generations,” said Turner, who spent upward of two decades working in rural schools himself. “They will be there for 10, 15, 20 years in that field,” he added, due to their community roots.

And the need is great. Exeter, for example, currently has only two special education teachers across all grades, Howard said; one is her own mother. While the district enrolls only about 300 students, she described a wide range of needs, with multiple grades in the same classes by necessity, creating “a lot more to juggle.” About three in four students qualify for free or reduced lunch.

“It’s very hard trying to make sure we’re meeting every need we can,” Howard said.

Apprenticeship experts and advocates say they’ve seen firsthand how the model has created outsize impacts on rural and otherwise underserved learners as well as the communities in which the apprentices are working and training. These programs can provide career paths in critical, often understaffed local sectors, such as education and health care, and encourage retention in these fields. They help combat rural brain drain by allowing apprentices to stay put, taking coursework and advancing their careers close to home. The model is particularly well designed for older learners with families who can’t afford not to work full-time and may have limited or no experience in college. And these pathways can boost upward mobility in regions that tend to have limited economic opportunities and higher unemployment and poverty rates.

“It’s just a really compelling strategy for a lot of rural and exurban areas to explore, and there’s definitely been a lot of interest in growth,” said Sarah Oldmixon, a consultant on education and workforce development and the former managing director of the think tank New America’s Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship.

She believes rural apprenticeships are also poised to expand.

Online learning has taken off, she pointed out, making it easier for rural learners to complete apprenticeship coursework, even in areas without a college in easy commuting range. And rural communities have extra incentive to create these programs because “they’re particularly eager to grow their own talent.”

“This is a little bit of a golden age for apprenticeships to be emerging as a real workforce development and economic mobility tool for rural communities,” Oldmixon said.

What Makes Rural Apprenticeships Different

Yet some of the same factors that make rural communities prime for apprenticeships also challenge apprenticeship growth.

Rural apprenticeships remain “underdeveloped,” said Shaniqua Corley-Moore, director of tech workforce at the Center on Rural Innovation, a nonprofit dedicated to connecting rural communities to the tech economy. Staff at smaller, rural colleges and local industries often lack the bandwidth to navigate complex federal guidelines and pursue federal dollars intended to sustain these programs, such as Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act funds, she said. Her organization sometimes steps in to try “to cut through the red tape” on their behalf.

Rural apprenticeship programs also need to get creative based on what jobs are actually on offer in their regions, said Kathleen Moxon, co-founder of Rural Youth Catalyst, an organization focused on economic uplift for rural young people. For example, she recalled a construction workforce training program in Las Vegas, N.M., that found no active construction in the area, so participants had to drive over an hour to Santa Fe for their work hours.

Rural programs, in particular, have had to expand well beyond construction and other more classic apprenticeship fields to support industries “fitting for their community, whether it was fighting wildfires or [stream] restoration work—jobs that really were happening close to home,” Moxon said. Her organization and Jobs for the Future created a map of rural apprenticeship program examples spanning a wide range of fields, from agriculture technology to water management to oyster farming specific to rural parts of Maine.

Apprenticeship sponsors also often need to invest in smaller cohorts to serve rural areas well, Moxon said, because a rural community might desperately need a small number of new workers in a variety of fields, versus hundreds of employees in one occupation.

That can be a hard sell for higher education, even as it’s increasingly leaning into apprenticeships. If a college requires a cohort of 20 apprentices to run a program for a certain industry, for example, that one cohort may have “saturated that market for maybe three or five years,” Moxon said. So colleges and universities might need to more regularly switch up what kinds of apprenticeships they’re sponsoring to better meet local workforce demand.

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Even putting numbers to rural apprenticeships—how large and widespread they are, what fields they’re in and who participates—presents its own challenge. Substantive data on rural apprenticeships is hard to come by, in part because of dueling definitions of “rural.” The federal government has upward of 14 different definitions of rurality across agencies, said Vanessa Bennett, director at the Center for Apprenticeship and Work-Based Learning at the organization Jobs for the Future.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for instance, defines rural as counties outside of metro areas with fewer than 50,000 people, whereas the Census Bureau’s definition includes anything outside of an urban area. Some towns consider themselves rural, even though they’re adjacent to cities and urban resources, while others define themselves as rural based on cultural identity, the agriculture industry or how sparsely populated or remote their towns are from economic hubs. (Inside Higher Ed has defined rural broadly in this story to include both urban-adjacent and more remote communities.)

It’s just a really compelling strategy for a lot of rural and exurban areas to explore, and there’s definitely been a lot of interest in growth. ”

—Sarah Oldmixon, founder of Oldmixon Consulting

The most comprehensive federal data source on apprenticeships, the Department of Labor’s Registered Apprenticeship Partners Information Database System, or RAPIDS, doesn’t disaggregate data by rural and urban programs at all.

That leaves those studying apprenticeship to decipher what “rural” means—and sometimes, the results can feel off to rural experts and community members, said Kim Phinney, co-founder of Rural Youth Catalyst. “Our brains get fractured” by the ways urban-focused, urban-trained researchers sometimes try to “drill it down to the furthest-rung-out census tract and declare what is rural and not rural,” she said.

But what data does exist offers a glimpse into whom these rural programs serve.

An analysis of U.S. Department of Labor data by Jobs For the Future, in collaboration with Rural Youth Catalyst, broke RAPIDS data down using the USDA’s rural commuting area codes to study apprenticeship programs with ZIP codes in these areas. It found that apprentices in rural programs tend to be slightly older than their urban counterparts—with a mean age of 31 versus 29 when they start their programs—and they come from a range of educational backgrounds. Some 69 percent graduated high school while 19 percent attended some college, perhaps earning some kind of credential but not a degree. Rural apprentices also complete their programs at a slightly higher rate than their urban peers, almost 52 percent compared to 43 percent. Nationally, the apprenticeship completion rate averages 46.5 percent.

The goal is to learn more about “where are the fault lines with apprenticeship design? How can it be really terrific when it works well?” Phinney said. “And what are the gaps? What does this really look like and mean for rural communities?”

Second Chances in the Rust Belt

Central New York is full of factories, but not all of them are humming with activity anymore. Some loom along the roadside, dilapidated, with broken windows and crumbling facades. One sports a sign that reads, “For Lease,” the letters all but obscured by dust.

The Erie Canal morphed Utica and Rome into booming industry towns in the 1800s, a source of jobs for rural surrounding areas in the Mohawk Valley. But the region eventually came to the same fate as much of the Rust Belt: bustling manufacturing plants shuttered, and the population dwindled.

Now the region seems in the midst of a resurgence. Utica and nearby areas in Oneida County have become a hub for resettled refugees, shoring up the local population, with 42 languages spoken in the city’s public schools. The semiconductor industry has taken root in the region and existing factories are growing, with jobs to fill.

Manufacturing companies like Indium Corporation are using apprenticeships to help fuel that growth and retain workers. The company, headquartered in the region with sites in Utica and Rome, makes solder materials, semiconductor fluxes and specialized metals and alloys used in day-to-day products from stoplights to pacemakers to cellphones. It’s also one of over two dozen companies with apprenticeship programs sponsored by the Manufacturers Association of Central New York (MACNY), in partnership with local colleges.

MACNY became a group sponsor for registered apprenticeships a decade ago at the request of nine companies in the region eager to start apprenticeships but daunted by the process, said Amy Stage, the trade association’s director of apprenticeship and workforce development. Apprenticeship programs in five trades grew into 17 trades, and MACNY has now graduated at least 470 apprentices at more than 100 different companies across the state. The association also oversees a statewide alliance with three other group sponsors and five companies that act as intermediaries, which have collectively served more than 1,300 apprentices for over 230 businesses. In line with federal standards for registered apprenticeships, apprentices typically complete 2,000 hours of on-the-job training and 144 hours of classroom instruction per year—in Indium Corporation’s case, at nearby Mohawk Valley Community College (MVCC).

Often “we’re working with apprentices who are kind of nervous to either go back to school, or go to school in the first place, because they didn’t think that was for them,” Stage said. “Once they realize that what they’re learning in the classroom can actually be applied to what they’re doing on the job every day, it’s a lightbulb moment, and they’re like, ‘Oh, I understand this. This is not as scary as I thought it was going to be.’”

That was true for William “J.D.” Clark, who joined the industrial manufacturing technician apprenticeship program last summer after several years at Indium Corporation. He’s a manufacturing technician II, making sure equipment runs smoothly, but he’s eager to gain engineering skills and advance further within the company. Clark, 34, grew up in Bouckville, a rural hamlet of Madison County, N.Y., known for its annual antique show and farms. He didn’t know what he wanted to do out of high school, so he went straight into the workforce, first as a security guard and later as a driver with a commercial license.

But he found himself “burned out” and searching for “more of a career,” he said. He always liked figuring out “mechanically how things work,” so he decided to give an operator job at Indium Corporation a shot. He quickly took to the work, and his now-mentor encouraged him to become an apprentice, despite his trepidation about the college component.

“I was nervous because I hadn’t been to school in however long, since 2010,” he said. “I think you always make it out to be harder in your head than it is really going to be.”

Now Clark describes his coursework at MVCC as a challenge but also his favorite part of the program.

“I feel more like, ‘Yeah, this is what I like. This is what I want to do.’ So I’m way more sure of myself,” he said.

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Cara Jones, an organizational development specialist at Indium Corporation, said the company is using apprenticeship in five different trades as a retention strategy, which seems to be working. She estimates that at least 85 percent of apprentices complete the program and stay on at the company. Apprentices earn their journeymen cards, plus a wage bump and college credit via their related instruction courses, which they can use to continue toward degrees and other credentials after the program.

Jones attributes the program’s success partly to the flexibility and support provided by the company, MACNY and MVCC. Indium Corporation offers students flexible work schedules to accommodate classes and counts course hours as paid work hours whenever possible. Apprentices are encouraged to take advantage of all the college’s resources, including its tutoring center. And because of the rural region’s growing immigrant population, the company offers English-as-a-second-language classes, taught by college instructors, on site at their factories for all employees, including apprentices.

MACNY also developed two pre-apprenticeship programs, in partnership with MVCC, designed to create pipelines to apprenticeships like Indium Corporation’s: one coed option, Advance 2 Apprenticeship, and a women’s program called Real Life Rosies, aimed at diversifying the male-dominated manufacturing field. The programs are free to students, supported by funding from the New York State Department of Labor, and offer financial subsidies for transportation and childcare, plus stipends when pre-apprentices hit certain milestones. They receive $250 for completing the program, $250 for earning a credential, such as an industry-recognized manufacturing or Occupational Safety and Health Administration safety certification, and $750 for starting a job or registered apprenticeship upon program completion. Pre-apprentices learn power (sometimes still called “soft”) skills, such as job interviewing and résumé writing, and technical skills to prepare them for advanced manufacturing jobs.

Katrina Genier, 40, said that when a former caseworker handed her a flier for the Real Life Rosies program, she was interested in the stipend money, not manufacturing. She’d just finished rehab for substance use disorder and moved into her own apartment, hoping for a new era of stability and a chance to re-establish contact with her kids. Yet she quickly found manufacturing to be a fit. “I’m actually very hands-on. I love working with my hands,” she said.

Her Real Life Rosies cohort cheered her on as she completed her GED that same year and she got an operator job at Indium Corporation. This spring, she found herself knee-deep in her first college coursework as a registered apprentice, learning electronics when she wasn’t baking metals in the flux department at the company’s Utica facility.

“Sometimes, you doubt yourself for so long and you think you can’t do something, and then you find out you can,” she said. “I don’t want to stay stagnant.” She’s proud of the example she’s setting for her eight kids, with whom she’s since reconnected.

She tells them they, too, can “work it,” she said.

Sometimes, you doubt yourself for so long and you think you can’t do something, and then you find out you can. I don’t want to stay stagnant.”

—Katrina Genier, apprentice

Heather Beebe, an instructor at MVCC who teaches power skills for the pre-apprenticeship programs, said stories like Genier’s aren’t uncommon in her classroom, where she’s taught formerly incarcerated people, stay-at-home moms, refugees and rural learners.

“Rural communities are dying,” she said, as industries that sustained them hit hard times, which can lead to higher unemployment rates and drug usage in these regions. Especially for out-of-work farmers, manufacturing apprenticeships aren’t just potential jobs, but “opportunities for them to see themselves again as productive and give them some pride.”

Apprenticeships can also play a role in overcoming higher ed “stigma” in rural areas, said Will Bartell, a 22-year-old apprentice at Indium Corporation’s Utica site. Growing up, he said, his parents had “white collar” jobs, so he always expected to attend college himself. Friends made fun of those aspirations, “but if you’re in an apprenticeship, that’s typically perceived as more of a tradesy, blue-collar kind of deal—and people tend to have more respect for that.”

Personally, Bartell has found Indium Corporation’s apprenticeship program to be an unexpected route to a degree. When his college plans got derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic, he took a job at the company, planning to revisit college down the line. But through the apprenticeship and Indium Corporation’s tuition-reimbursement program, he’s now on track to earn an associate degree in mechanical engineering technology from MVCC a year from now, with plans to transfer to the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute for his bachelor’s in the same field for a fraction of the cost.

Balancing his on-the-job training and his degree program hasn’t been easy—the color-coded schedule he pulls up on his phone goes from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. most days—but nonetheless, he’s become a fierce proponent of the apprenticeship model.

“This puts me in a different position than your conventional college student,” Bartell said, sporting a blue Indium Corporation 2025 Apprenticeship Program sweater, “because I will have the theoretical knowledge, but by the time I graduate, I’ll also have five years of applying it.”

Rooting Opportunity in the Ozarks

Pathways for Paraprofessionals apprentices shared similar experiences about the benefits of learning on the job. And for many, the key selling point was that they didn’t have to leave their hometowns.

Driving through southwest Missouri to Cassville, just miles from the borders of Arkansas and Oklahoma, vast green pastures stretch into the distance. Groups of cows laze behind fences, roads dotted with signs for other nearby small towns and the occasional poultry plant. Springfield is just about an hour’s drive to the northeast, but for apprentices in the Cassville R-IV School District, the city can feel a world away.

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Traveling back and forth to Missouri State wouldn’t have been an option for teacher apprentice Kayla Hall, 39, who has two of her own children still at home, plus three foster kids with special needs. Juggling her work hours as a paraprofessional plus her classes and her family is already a struggle, necessitating long nights and early mornings. But the flexibility the apprenticeship afforded her made a degree feel more manageable, she said.

Beyond the flexibility of online courses, Hall said she appreciates that her teacher colleague, Tracy Anders—herself a recent graduate of Pathways for Paraprofessionals—gives her time to do her homework during breaks and cheers her on. Both women grew up in Cassville and graduated from the same school district where they now work. And both were drawn to the apprenticeship as busy moms rooted in and raising families in the area.

“Without the program, I don’t know that I would have got it completed,” Anders, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Teacher” in rainbow letters, said of her bachelor’s degree. She started college in 2015, earning her associate degree in elementary education from nearby Crowder College, but the apprenticeship pushed her over the finish line to earn her bachelor’s degree a decade later.

As part of the design of the program, Missouri State has its own faculty teach the bulk of classes, but K–12 district instructors and administrators can teach coursework in certain subjects, up to 24 credit hours for undergraduate apprentices and nine credit hours for graduate-level apprentices. The university affirms that the courses meet content standards for state certification and teach necessary skills, and—through a process called Prior Learning Assessment (PLA)—awards apprentices college credit. If smaller districts don’t have staff with the expertise to teach them, a larger nearby district can serve as a hub for these courses. Missouri State administrators say the goal is twofold: to create flexibility for apprentices and to show respect to K–12 staff as the experts on their own districts. For Anders, some PLA hours happened at her son’s high school football practice with her district’s special education director, whose son plays on the same team. Sometimes that was the best—or only—way to squeeze the coursework into her hectic schedule.

Anders now tells Hall to “stick with it—it is worth it.” And the message has spread. Two more paraprofessionals in the Cassville district are starting the program this summer.

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Farther east, in Seymour, a town of fewer than 2,000, Kelsey Hickey, 38, stands in front of rows of desks, encouraging her middle school students to pipe up with plot points from the book they’re reading, Loser by Jerry Spinelli. They jump in to share, erupting in giggles as they describe some of the book’s funnier parts.

Hickey didn’t know she’d wind up in front of a classroom. When she graduated high school from the same district where she now teaches, she enrolled in Ozark Technical College, but she felt aimless and unsure of what to study. “Just to go for nothing, it just didn’t make sense,” she recalled. She left after two semesters, afraid to “rack up debt.”

She started as a paraprofessional at Seymour Middle School after a decade working long hours in an ophthalmologist’s office, hoping it would put her on a similar schedule to her kids’. When she first heard about the apprenticeship program, she had no intention of pursuing higher education.

“I kind of weighed it back and forth. I was like, can I do it? Because I just wasn’t a great student. Growing up, it just wasn’t my thing … I didn’t know that I could do college,” she said. She teared up remembering how she felt: “I was like, ‘Man, I’m old.’”

But encouraged by a teacher she worked with, Hickey applied and quickly got assigned an adviser. Missouri State encourages applicants to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and apply for federal TEACH grants and FastTrack, a state workforce incentive program. The combination often brings down the cost of the program, which totals about $4,000 per semester without aid. In Hickey’s case, the aid completely covered her costs.

She graduated this spring with plans to immediately continue on to a master’s degree program in special education at Missouri State. She said the apprenticeship left her with a “sense of pride”—and no debt—so she wanted to build on her academic momentum.

The paraprofessional in her classroom has since applied to be a teacher apprentice.

Turner, the associate professor at Missouri State, attributes the program’s success, in part, to thoughtful planning and community input. Before starting the program, he and his colleague Reesha Adamson, associate dean of the College of Education, took a road trip to rural school districts across the state, soliciting feedback on their idea.

They asked themselves and others, “How can we make [our apprenticeship] affordable for individuals, but also make it something that’s attainable?” Adamson said. “How do we make sure that we can really support the needs and the culture of your local school district, but also make sure that we’re turning out really high-quality candidates?” The result is “we really designed a program that is tailored towards working adults, individuals that maybe have had significant gaps in their education.”

The Rural Design Imperative

Experts on rural apprenticeship, higher ed leaders and faculty leading and partnering on these programs agree: Design matters if apprenticeships are going to have an impact on rural communities. They also acknowledge that standing up these programs, and doing it right, hasn’t been without its challenges and mistakes along the way.

Joyce Milling, an apprenticeship program development adviser at Craft Education, a nonprofit that helps employers and colleges track data for apprenticeship programs, said first and foremost, it’s important to create programs informed by feedback from employers and data on a rural community’s specific workforce gaps.

For example, she highlighted an organization called myFutureNC that makes detailed profiles of North Carolina counties, including their emerging industries, workforce shortages, most popular career and technical education programs in high schools, and other details. She said those pieces of information are crucial for establishing rural apprenticeships, where the goal is “to really align how we’re preparing students, how we’re designing apprenticeship programs to meet those workforce needs.”

Milling also emphasized that apprenticeships can’t just “layer on the education on top of the work experience,” leaving apprentices overworked. Program design elements that offer flexibility, such as asynchronous online courses or credit for prior learning, giving students college credit for work experience before and during the apprenticeship, which can stave off burnout, helping rural apprenticeship programs do what they’re designed to do: recruit and retain workers, she said.

Sustainable programs also require strong, clear communication between higher ed institutions and employers, emphasized Corley-Moore of the Center on Rural Innovation, which isn’t always easy to pull off.

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“It’s not going to work if they are not communicating and talking with one another,” she said.

Pathways for Paraprofessionals leaders spoke candidly about a learning curve while designing the program and acknowledged they’ve sometimes missed the mark and had to retool to better meet apprentices’ needs.

Case in point: They realized that some rural learners were taking exams in community centers and local diners because of limited access to broadband, but the crowded environments alarmed virtual test proctors, Adamson said. Now leaders encourage districts to offer apprentices time at school after hours so they can use the internet and urge faculty to show flexibility. They also learned that districts didn’t have the capacity to teach certain PLA courses, so they reconfigured which parts of the curriculum were taught on the job versus by professors. Finding mentors for apprentices, an important component of any apprenticeship program, has also been an ongoing struggle because the most experienced special education teachers are often new to the job themselves in rural districts with severe teacher shortages.

Pathways for Paraprofessionals has also developed some best practices. Program leaders quickly pivoted from offering one pathway for associate degree holders to multiple different tracks, including for learners with some or no college or career switchers, when they realized the diversity of demand for the apprenticeship. Administrators and advisers for the program meet weekly to talk about individual apprentices and their needs, as well.

“This has all been kind of an evolution,” Adamson said. “How can we continuously change and be responsive to the needs of all of these individuals who are interested in this?”

Higher Ed, Thinking Differently

The challenges of standing up apprenticeships, and rural apprenticeships in particular, can be daunting for higher ed institutions. One report by Apprenticeships for America found that as of 2023, 541 community or technical colleges were identified as registered apprenticeship sponsors. However, just 208 of those colleges had active apprentices. And the overall number of apprentices who were enrolled represented a “small fraction” of all civilian apprentices.

That’s still only a tiny share of the thousands of colleges and universities across the country, and it’s unclear how many of those programs are serving rural areas. But that gap means higher ed has vast potential to play a larger role in starting and growing rural apprenticeships as sponsors and training providers and intermediaries, experts say.

Milling, of Craft Education, said consortium models—in which community colleges serve as group sponsors for multiple employers—work especially well in rural communities, where small businesses are often agile and willing to innovate but lack staff capacity to start apprenticeships on their own. She saw that model in action when she worked as a youth apprenticeship coordinator for ApprenticeshipNC, North Carolina’s state apprenticeship agency, which is embedded in its 58-campus community college system.

Those colleges function as “regional hubs,” Milling said. “And one of the keys with working with rural populations and apprenticeship is really listening to the community and having boots on the ground in the community. That’s why you see that alignment between the community college system and rural apprenticeships and the success of rural apprenticeships.”

One of the keys with working with rural populations and apprenticeship is really listening to the community and having boots on the ground in the community. That’s why you see that alignment between the community college system and rural apprenticeships and the success of rural apprenticeships.”

—Joyce Milling, apprenticeship program development adviser at Craft Education

MVCC, the higher ed partner for Indium Corporation’s apprenticeship with MACNY, is a prime example of higher ed stepping in as a regional apprenticeship lead.

The college works with more than 35 employers in the Mohawk Valley region to train almost 100 registered apprentices per semester across fields from manufacturing to health care to junior accounting, depending on the needs of local companies, said Franca Armstrong, MVCC’s executive director of apprenticeship programs. Sometimes apprentices take classes online or on campus. Other times, the college brings classes directly to the workplace, depending on demand.

If there’s a cohort to serve, “We will offer it at 5 a.m. if they want,” Armstrong said. She’s done it before—for a baby food company that needed classes on site between its evening and morning shifts.

The campus is also a fiscal lead for the State University of New York system’s apprenticeship initiative, which doles out $3 million in state funds to community colleges investing in registered apprenticeships statewide every year. Colleges apply for scholarships for their apprentices: $6,000 for those in two-year programs and $8,000 for programs three years or longer. Some apprentices do a shorter trade followed by a longer one for a total of $14,000 to cover their costs. Since the SUNY initiative started almost a decade ago, it’s served over 3,000 apprentices and 5,000 pre-apprentices.

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Armstrong stressed that apprenticeships benefit not just rural employers and underserved learners but also higher ed institutions that provide the training, as “it’s a pipeline of students that you ordinarily may not see.” She believes the accommodations MVCC puts in place for apprentices, such as evening and online classes, ultimately serve all students.

“It has allowed us to think differently,” Armstrong said, “and it has forced us to think differently, and those two things really come together and serve the community as a whole.”

Turner also emphasized that at a time of declining public trust in education, apprenticeships enjoy bipartisan support. They’re “not a political flashpoint” when the country is so polarized, making it a ripe moment for colleges and universities to invest in this work, he said.

He acknowledged that’s easier said than done, given rural apprenticeships require colleges and universities—typically slow-moving institutions—to embrace different learning structures and sometimes invest significant resources in small apprentice cohorts, which “doesn’t make financial sense” from colleges’ perspectives, at least not right away.

“But we’re a public university,” he said. “You just have to make the case … This is what public universities do.”