A private two-year college leans into its vocational roots to prepare students for high-paying, high-demand careers. Also, new research on how U.S. workers layer apprenticeships and degrees, and essays on how Workforce Pell gets ROI only half right, and on why people need to be at the center of the skills-based economy. (Subscribe here.)

Built for the Trades

Dunwoody College of Technology is unusually well situated to deliver on surging employer demand for workers in the skilled trades.

With an original benefactor who co-founded General Mills, the private, nonprofit college located in Minneapolis has focused solely on hands-on technical education for more than a century. Vocational training concepts were developed at Dunwoody, which for 30 years was led by the architect of federal legislation to create a career and technical education system.

“Dunwoody’s close ties to industry are baked into our founding,” says Scott Stallman, president of the college. “When an employer comes to us with a change happening in industry, we listen and we adapt.”

Employer advisory committees are serious business at the college. Some meet each month. And Dunwoody doesn’t launch a program without first consulting with a steering committee of industry pros, who help the college tailor education and training to needed skills.

The college’s certificates and degrees get strong marks in the ROI ranking from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. Average annual tuition and fees are a relatively steep $28K. But median earnings for formerly aid-eligible students are $70K, according to federal data, which is $20K more than the average for the two-year sector and nearly double what high school graduates earn in Minnesota.

Dunwoody has resisted offering programs that would attract students but that typically fail to pay off in the job market. The college also hasn’t chased comprehensive university status. Even so, student demand is strong. Enrollment tops 1,500 students, with the biggest recent gains in electrical construction and maintenance, cybersecurity, and automated systems and robotics.

“High pay and high demand are the two biggest factors we look at when evaluating both our current programs and future offerings,” says Stallman, who previously worked at Lone Star College and other community colleges.

It helps to be located in the Twin Cities, which has a strong hiring market with skilled trades jobs that pay above-average wages. And local demand is seriously outpacing the supply of trained workers. “We have an abundance of need,” Stallman says, pointing in particular to electricians and HVAC technicians.

Dunwoody starts exposing students to careers before they even arrive on campus. High school juniors and seniors who are accepted into the college’s signature scholarship program participate in a three-week summer experience where they visit companies and job sites.

“For many of these students, this is the first time they will get to see what an HVAC technician does, what an architect’s day-to-day is like, and what an electronics technician works on,” says Stallman.

The college also this week has begun a novel push directly into Minnesota high schools. The new program features credit-bearing online coursework and mixed-reality labs, which blend hands-on, applied instruction with virtual reality simulations. Its costs are covered by donations from businesses, foundations, industry organizations, and individual contributors.

Reaching students at a younger age is critical, Stallman says. It can help change the stigma around skilled trades careers, including the “not for my kid” view that’s common among parents. Stallman also says the recent flurry of investments by corporations in training for the skilled trades sends an important signal to families and students.

The Kicker: “When massive companies put real money behind training the next generation of tradespeople, it changes the conversation,” he says. “It’s no longer just colleges like Dunwoody saying these are good careers. It’s industry itself saying it with a checkbook.”

Opinion

For Many Americans, It’s Apprenticeship and Degree

In today’s zeitgeist, apprenticeship is often positioned as an alternative to the “costly” bachelor’s degree, but new research published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia paints a far more nuanced picture of how learners actually behave. And it serves as a reminder that most people don’t live inside the “college vs. the trades” echo chamber. 

Apprenticeship in the U.S. is both an alternative credentialing system and one that’s intertwined with traditional higher education. Community colleges have long been a go-to for delivering the related technical instruction required for registered apprenticeships, and there’s a growing movement to go further with apprenticeship degrees in fields like teaching and healthcare. Some apprentices also do a stint in college, or even earn a credential, before apprenticing.

What’s been less clear is what people do after they apprentice. The new paper finds that many go on to earn a degree. The researchers drew on job postings data from 2010 to 2024 and worker profiles from the firm Lightcast that allowed them to track about 280K apprentices over time in a way that federal data doesn’t. They looked at workers who participated in both federally recognized apprenticeships and ones that sit outside that system.

Among the apprentices they studied, about two thirds started with no postsecondary credential, and more than half had no college experience at all. But for many, the apprenticeship wouldn’t be their final education.

  • Among apprentices with no prior college, about 40% went on to earn a bachelor’s or higher, while 8% earned an associate degree. 
  • In new-collar fields like the arts, sciences, and business, the proportion earning at least a bachelor’s rose to 55%—while in the skilled trades 27% still earned at least a bachelor’s and 9% an associate.

The authors did caution about the limits of their data: They were only able to track the education and career paths of people who had professional profiles online, and those people aren’t necessarily representative of all apprentices. Former apprentices in the skilled trades who went on to earn a bachelor’s, for example, may be more likely to maintain public profiles than those who did not.

Even so, the data makes it clear that mixing apprenticeship and traditional higher education isn’t a rare experience.

“Many students cross back and forth from what we have traditionally called education versus workforce training,” says Rajeev Darolia, an economist at the University of Kentucky and the paper’s lead author. “It should make us seriously consider how to design coordinated systems that encourage efficient and productive investment by students, workers, and employers.”

Coordinated but still flexible is the key, says Iris Palmer, director of the community colleges initiative at New America, who was not involved in the study. 

Apprenticeship degrees are a promising way to make the path to degrees smoother for apprentices. But Palmer says those programs tend to be highly structured and don’t allow for the kinds of starting, stopping, and layering of education many working learners experience. Closer alignment between the registered apprenticeship and higher education systems would make it easier for colleges to evaluate and award credit for apprenticeship experiences, she says.

A complicating factor, however, showed up in another part of the new research. Only about 26% of the apprenticeships posted online were part of the registered apprenticeship system. The rest called themselves apprenticeships but appeared to have no official designation.

Workers who participate in those so-called little-a apprenticeships may be getting valuable training, but it’s even less visible to the standard systems. Darolia says that’s a challenge for setting policy and measuring outcomes.

“We may have blind spots when trying to systematically understand the market,” he says. —By Elyse Ashburn

Opinion

Open Tabs

Preparing for AI
A new paper from Anthropic models three scenarios for how AI might affect U.S. jobs, economic growth, and unemployment by 2030. Under a middle “substantial” scenario, cognitive employment would decline by 4% while GDP rises by 8%. Anton Korinek, an economist and a coauthor of the paper, writes that uncertainty about AI’s impacts are a reason to prepare, calling for testing on retraining, income support, and new ways of sharing economic gains.

Automatable Occupations
Investments in AI by firms in the NYC region are generally modest, usage tends to be concentrated among a small share of workers, and layoffs have remained uncommon, find surveys by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Texas firms are increasingly incorporating AI into their business processes, according to the Dallas Fed. And that new analysis of online job postings found that AI has reduced demand in automatable occupations across the state.

Rehiring Workers
By 2029, 30% of employees laid off due to replacement by AI will need to be rehired, often at a significantly higher cost, predicts Gartner, a business and technology research firm. Using AI to make workforce cuts can deliver short-term financial benefits, but it depletes talent pipelines and erodes institutional knowledge. With labor force growth flat or declining worldwide, competition for the talent organizations need will be high.

Agile Labor Systems
The Future of Work Labs from the American Institutes of Research will invest in designing and testing scalable solutions to make labor response systems more agile so talent can move to opportunity, Samia Amin, AIR’s managing director of workforce innovation, writes on LinkedIn. AIR is seeking ideas about how AI is being used or explored to help people build skills, navigate careers, find jobs, and access the support they need to succeed.

WIOA Waivers
The U.S. Department of Labor has approved Mississippi’s plan to give the state flexibility with investments under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. The WorkFlex waiver will help Mississippi reduce administrative barriers, modernize program delivery, and enhance alignment between workforce training and economic development, according to the state’s Department of Employment Security. The DOL previously approved Ohio’s waiver plan.

Federal Grants
A move by the U.S. Department of Education to change the rules for terminating federal grants would undermine the ability of community colleges to serve students, Amanda Fuchs Miller, president of Seventh Street Strategies, writes for the Association of Community College Trustees. The proposal, which relates to a broader Trump administration push, would allow multiyear grants to be terminated “for convenience” during the middle of a budget period.

Short-Term Credentials
To best leverage benefits from new federal Workforce Pell Grants, colleges, civic leaders, and state officials must communicate and agree on both big-picture goals and data-driven details, journalist Rebecca Koenig writes in a series of briefings for Open Campus. The six-part email series is designed to provide practical intelligence designed for local leaders on what the new program means for their regional economies—and what questions they should be asking.

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