Dive Brief:

• In Montana, a program partnership involving Miles Community College, Missoula College, local employers and the state’s Labor Department has led to the creation of a competency-based integrated apprenticeship program to simultaneously solve the worker shortage and student attrition rates in the state. 
• For the colleges, the major win is a guaranteed pool of students recruited by industry, whose tuition is paid for, as well as a guaranteed pool of adjunct faculty who are also employed by industry. And for industry, there’s a pool of workers who can be assigned to job sites as they complete modules, rather than waiting for the completion of a two-year program.​ 
• A position jointly funded by and accountable to the community college system and the state department of labor has made collaboration between the colleges and industry more direct and responsive.

Dive Insight:

Leaders at the local two-year colleges had identified two major issues with some of their technical training programs. First, students were leaving college after one semester in the program to get jobs, which presented challenges with keeping a sustainable number of students enrolled to maintain the program. Second, keeping faculty was a challenge because of the significant higher wages offered by the private sector to hire these industry experts. For companies needing to fill workforce needs immediately, two years was too long to wait for students to complete all the required coursework before they went to work.

The solution became an integrated apprenticeship program in which the colleges would develop online training modules for students to complete concurrently as they made their way through on the job training rotations, combining both the classroom and “lab” times into one two-year program. At the end of the two-year program, students have both the requisite work experience and college credential to get hired and advance in the workforce.

Such close collaboration by all stakeholders involved will be critical for the survival of the higher education enterprise — particularly for two-year institutions — and also for the sustainment of the national economy.