What would it take to make “degrees on the job” a mainstream talent pipeline?

Welcome! Last week, we covered developments from the UK which brought into question whether Britain’s young people are seeing the value and ROI in higher education. This week, we go stateside to look at a possible solution that seems to be keeping employers, institutions and students happy: degree-bearing apprenticeships.

“Degrees on the job” is also an experiment for us. Moving forward, the QS Midweek Brief will aim to carry an article from the immediate past edition of the magazine, as well as one from the upcoming edition to give you something new to read every week. Please let us know if you enjoy this.

Continuing our cover story theme of education strategies, we compare China and India’s approaches.

Stay insightful,
Anton John Crace
Editor in Chief, QS Insights Magazine
QS Quacquarelli Symonds

Degrees on the job

By Jamaal Abdul-Alim

In brief

• Blending paid work with academic credit, states like Alabama are transforming traditional vocational training into portable, degree-bearing credentials that benefit students and regional economies alike.
• Programmes in nursing and industry use "last-dollar" scholarships to eliminate student debt. Employers see a 47% return on investment, with 90% of apprentices remaining after five years.
• This model offers a scalable solution to the global skills gap by making learning portable and affordable. By prioritising recognised qualifications, these partnerships ensure graduates gain higher lifetime earnings, proving that higher education and industry can successfully co-invest in a sustainable, professionalised workforce.

When Josh Laney became the inaugural Director of Alabama’s state apprenticeship agency in 2019, he wanted to create learning that was both portable and affordable.

In pursuit of those goals, Laney helped Alabama accomplish a third goal that wasn’t even on his radar – making the state a top provider of degree-bearing apprenticeships.

A new report, Mapping the landscape of degree apprenticeship: Expanding a promising model for mobility, published by New America, identifies Alabama as one of three states in the US that collectively provide more than a quarter of the nation’s 579 apprenticeships tied to degrees.

Alabama has 52 such programmes – largely in nursing, education and industry – making it the second overall provider of degree-bearing apprenticeships. The other two states, Illinois and North Carolina, offer 63 and 40, respectively.

Ivy Love, co-author of the report and a Senior Education and Labor Policy Analyst at New America, a Washington, DC based think tank, says all three states have resources and support available at the state level to “encourage the growth of degree apprenticeship programmes.”

Laney says turning Alabama into a top provider of degree apprenticeships was never part of a strategic plan.

“The degree itself was never the goal,” Laney, who is now Vice President of Apprenticeship and Work-Embedded Learning at the Competency-Based Education Network, or C-BEN – a network of colleges, employers and state agencies that focus on workforce skills development and assessment – tells QS Insights.

“Just making sure that the learning that the apprentice got was as fully portable as it could possibly be – that was the goal.”

By “portable,” Laney explains that he means a credential that is valued and recognised widely in a given field, not just at the company that provided the training.

To help apprentices secure those credentials, Laney turned to Alabama’s community colleges.

“We just always started with the assumption that there's going to be related technical instruction in an apprenticeship,” Laney says. “When we have to go find that instruction provider, if we can find a provider that offers that instruction and it is credit-bearing, then we should go with that.”

In examining the course requirements for various apprenticeships, it became clear that apprentices could earn associate degrees by taking an additional four or five courses. Laney shared that information with employers in an effort to get them see the value of covering the cost of tuition for their apprentices to earn a degree.

He told them it would help them achieve better marketing, because now the employer can tell potential apprentices that the company will pick up the cost of an associate degree. Plus, federal student aid could be used to cover the cost of tuition.

“So now there’s a good possibility neither [the employer] nor the apprentice are going to have to pay for that programme and you're going to wind up with a whole degree,” Laney explains.

And he says it would lead to greater loyalty and retention among employees, thereby reducing the cost of turnover and training new employees.

“They may have to put some money up front to cover the cost of somebody's tuition, but they're now going to fill a vacancy, and they're going to fill it with somebody who has learned to do the job their way, is loyal to them and grateful for the opportunity that they've been provided by this employer,” Laney says.

The approach also appeals to apprentices, who not only get paid on the job, but paid to go to school as well.

North Carolina takes a similar approach – requiring apprenticeship providers to cover the cost of tuition with “last-dollar” scholarships, an additional form of financial aid to fill gaps between a student’s available financial resources and the total cost of tuition. The payoff benefits the apprentice and employer alike, says Chris Harrington, Director of the state apprenticeship agency in North Carolina.

 “The average apprentice earns $10,000 more than a peer doing the same job that didn't do an apprenticeship, post completion,” Harrington says. He adds that the salary advantage persists over the course of a person’s career and thus translates to roughly $400,000 more over the person’s lifetime.

Harrington cites a statistic that shows 90 percent of those who complete an apprenticeship are with the same employer five years later. The ROI for employers is 47 percent or higher, “meaning for every dollar invested, they're getting a $1.47 return,” Harrington says.

Jennifer Gilliland, Director of Health Sciences at Central Alabama Community College, says Alabama’s apprenticeships represent a “great opportunity” for nursing students because they allow them to work in their field and have it count toward their clinical requirements.

“We require them to work at least 24 hours a week as an apprentice, and part of that 24 hours a week counts as their clinicals, so the benefit to them is they're getting paid to go to clinicals."

It has also enabled her institution to solve one of its biggest challenges: lack of clinical instructors and clinical sites.

For every seven apprentices, Gilliland says, it means that’s one less clinical group the college has to plan for. The Alabama board of nursing allows schools to use one instructor for eight students, but Central Alabama Community College keeps the ratio at 7 to 1, Gilliland says.

Central Alabama Community College currently has 50 active apprentices in its nursing programme. Another 80 apprentices have completed their nursing programme – and passed nursing board exams – since August of 2022.

The apprenticeships also give small, rural hospitals a way to compete with larger hospitals that can more easily pay higher hourly rates.

“This has allowed them to gain access to a population of graduates that they train and they hope will stay in their facility,” Gilliland says, citing retention rates that fluctuate between 30 and 70 percent.

Since employers cover the cost of tuition, books and fees with “last dollar scholarships,” students who go through the nursing apprenticeship graduate debt-free.

“That’s the purpose of that – to allow them to come out of a nursing programme and not owe a dime,” Gilliland says.

Not all apprentices take advantage of the last-dollar scholarship, Gilliland says, because they don’t want to commit to the facility where they’re doing their apprenticeship. Facilities may require last-dollar scholarship recipients to stay on with the company for one or two years as a condition of receiving the last-dollar scholarship, she adds.

Shaun Dougherty, Professor of Education and policy at Boston College, says the extent to which the degree apprenticeship movement persists “probably depends on whether employers find that they get the value they expect or need to make it feasible in the longer-term”.

“I suspect that interest will be industry or occupation specific and will also differ in salience by location,” Professor Dougherty says. “In general, places with lower rates of postsecondary attainment, but growth in industries that require some postsecondary education or training stand to benefit the most from this model.”

Jamaal Abdul-Alim is a veteran education journalist who resides in Washington, D.C. His articles have appeared in Washington Monthly, Education Week and Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. An avid chess player, Jamaal was named “Chess Journalist of the Year” in 2013. Known as “Professor J” among his students at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he teaches journalism, Jamaal is the founding editor of Sneaker Theory, a website that grew out of a project he did to complete a “Sneaker Essentials” course in 2024 at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

India and China: Parallel paths in global higher education strategy

By Gauri Kohli

In brief

• India and China are racing to become global education hubs, with India embracing market-led liberalisation while China relies on state-managed models driven by strategic joint ventures.
• India allows independent foreign campuses under new reforms, whereas China maintains tight oversight on curriculum and governance to expand its soft power via the Belt and Road.
• These paths redefine global talent flows; success depends on balancing India’s financial and operational risks against China’s political constraints to build presence outside traditional Western markets.

India and China are reshaping their higher education systems in ways that could alter long-standing global patterns. Both aim to move from being major exporters of students to hubs for global talent, but they are taking different paths.

India is pursuing a liberalised approach by allowing foreign universities to establish independent branch campuses, while China continues with a state-managed model built around joint ventures.

Autonomy versus oversight

For policymakers and universities, one of the clearest differences lies in how the two countries regulate international higher education partnerships.

India’s shift is anchored in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. Since then, the University Grants Commission (UGC) has rolled out reforms to open the system to global engagement. Regulations introduced between 2021 and 2023 enabled foreign universities to establish independent campuses, while the 2025 degree equivalence guidelines have ensured formal recognition of international qualifications.

The opening of Deakin University and the University of Wollongong in Gujarat’s GIFT City marks the first time foreign entities have been allowed to operate without a local partner, effectively creating an offshore educational experience within India. As of today, around 15 foreign universities are in the process of setting up international branch campuses in India.

Eldho Mathews, a higher education policy expert and former official at India’s National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA), notes that this operational autonomy is a sharp departure from the Chinese framework. “India’s recent reforms such as the NEP 2020 and UGC regulations allow independent foreign branch campuses with academic and operational autonomy. But China’s model relies on mandatory joint ventures, with tighter state control over curriculum and governance,” he says.

Futao Huang, Professor at Hiroshima University’s Research Institute for Higher Education in Japan, explains that China’s model was “primarily designed to improve domestic higher education quality through controlled partnerships with foreign institutions, while retaining strong regulatory oversight”.

More recently, China has also sought to expand its own overseas branch campuses alongside selectively expanding foreign provision at home. “India’s recent reforms, by contrast, appear more market-oriented and outward-looking, aiming to attract reputable foreign universities directly and rapidly expand domestic capacity, but with potentially higher institutional and financial risk for both sides,” says Professor Huang.

Gerard A. Postiglione, Emeritus Professor, Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Education, says that India’s recent regulatory reforms are “on the right track and the timing is about right”.

By contrast, China’s economy and its early lead in mass higher education gave it the scale to experiment with and diversify transnational higher education. “For example, China used the opportunity to learn from US and UK universities through its 2003 Law on Sino-foreign cooperation in the running of educational institutions. It learned a great deal from NYU in Shanghai, Duke University in Kunshan, Nottingham in Ningbo, and many other joint campuses and thousands of joint programmes across the country,” says Professor Postiglione.

Strategic initiatives and soft power

International student recruitment has become a central lever through which both countries are advancing broader economic and diplomatic objectives.

“China has made particularly strong efforts to recruit students from Belt and Road countries through scholarships and has introduced new visa categories to retain foreign talent, especially young researchers. These shifts are partially sustainable, but they remain more state-dependent and policy-driven than in traditional Western destinations, where long-standing academic ecosystems and labour markets play a stronger pull factor,” adds Professor Huang.

Elaborating on the extent India and China are repositioning themselves from student-sending countries to talent-retaining or talent-attracting systems and the sustainability of these shifts compared to Western destinations, Professor Postiglione says, “China has launched its China Scholastic Competency Assessment as a combined approach with a clear emphasis on STEM competencies in the recruitment of foreign students including students from India and other countries in the Global South, as well as the traditional foreign pool of Western students).”

On the other hand, “India has some advantage due to English language capabilities, however, China is launching its programmes in both English and Mandarin. Moreover, artificial intelligence’s improving capacity to provide translations across languages limits any language disadvantages,” adds Professor Postiglione.

Gauri Kohli specialises in writing and reporting on higher education news, including analysis on higher education trends, policies and the edtech sector. Her writing focuses on international education, study abroad, student recruitment trends and policies, with focus on India as a market. She has also covered workplace and hiring trends, corporate practices, work-life features, startup trends and developments, real estate for leading publications and media houses in India and abroad for the last 18 years, including Hindustan Times, a leading national daily newspaper in India.