“With One Emergency, We Lose Apprentices”: Dr. Thomas Kriger on Apprenticeship Retention Grants

Thanks to increasing investments in workforce training, trade certification and career-focused education, apprenticeships are an increasingly important part of the higher education landscape.

For students, completing an apprenticeship can be a ticket to a stable career without student loan debt: 93% of apprentices who complete their programs are retained as employees, with an average starting salary is $86,000. For employers, investing in apprenticeships means providing direct support to their future workforce and ensuring new employees have the skills they need to succeed on Day One.

However, too many aspiring apprentices face financial barriers to completing their programs. The Department of Labor reported that in 2024, just 47% of apprentices completed their programs—on par with the five-year graduation rate at community colleges.

For employers in the construction field, the apprenticeship pipeline is vital. The building trades are the single largest source of apprenticeships in the United States, with North America’s Building Trades Unions, AFL-CIO (NABTU) reporting roughly 300,000 total registered apprentices including 88,000 new registrations in 2025.

NABTU, which represents more than 3 million skilled craft professionals in the United States and Canada, is constantly working to expand registered apprenticeships  in the building trades, and serving as a thought leader in ways to boost apprenticeship completion rates across industries.

To learn more, Scholarship America Chief Growth Officer Abigail Seldin spoke to Dr. Thomas Kriger, Director of Research at NABTU. Dr. Kriger, who has had a long career at the intersection of labor and education, spoke with Scholarship America’s Chief Growth Officer Abigail Seldin about the barriers keeping apprentices from completing their programs, and how we can invest in improving the system.

Abigail Seldin: Tell us about your work with North America’s Building Trades Union, and how you work together to prepare individuals for careers in the skilled trades.

Thomas Kriger: The Building Trades annually invest nearly $3 billion in training and education, from collective bargaining, in a system with 1,700 training centers, 90,000 contractor partners, and 20,000 certified instructors from coast to coast. At NABTU, we support the expansion of registered apprenticeship (RA) in new industries, and we believe that our 125-year-plus history with apprenticeship and long-term employer engagement means that we have important ideas to contribute to this discussion.

Let me start with two factors that I think are the primary drivers of our long-term success in the registered apprenticeship space, both enabled by collective bargaining.

The first is the fact that, under United States labor law, our training centers are jointly administered by representatives of our affiliated unions and construction contractors, as they have been for many years. This means that our partner employers—the companies who actually bid for work in our industry—are at the table from the very beginning of our apprenticeship discussions. Our partner contractors drive the RA curriculum, and they have an equal say in how many apprentices are enrolled each year and the skills these apprentices learn in the classroom and on the job.

Other industries are searching for ways to ensure long-term employer participation in RA, but in the Building Trades we have benefitted from their engagement for many years.

The second factor is the training fund that collective bargaining enables, which is jointly administered by labor and management. Many years ago, our members and contractor partners decided that these training programs should be delivered to participants at no cost, which today means no student debt or out-of-pocket costs for their training, which really sets us apart from other industries.

In the Building Trades, we take the notion of “earn while you learn” in RA very seriously.

AS: We’ve seen that only around half of participants complete their apprenticeship within five years—roughly on par with community college completion. What barriers are keeping them from finishing their training?

TK: That’s a very good question. Despite our numbers and historical success, we still have big contemporary challenges.

Some of these are structural, societal challenges, such as childcare. In the Building Trades, childcare is a massive issue because most daycare facilities don’t have hours to match our work schedules. Construction starts early, sometimes at 5:00 or 6:00 am, and it often runs late. If you are pouring concrete, you can’t leave to pick up your kids, and most daycare centers are not open late to accommodate our variable work schedules. That’s one challenge.

Others are more particular to our industry. In construction, our goal is always to work ourselves out of a job: we build things and then move on, in other words. That means that we are constantly working in new locations, which requires reliable and affordable transportation. Many young people today don’t have driver’s licenses, which complicates this situation further.

Our education system is also geared to prepare young people for college, rather than blue-collar occupations. You can see this most directly in the way math is taught. Most high schools in the US train students for the SATs and to get into college, but this leaves out the hundreds of thousands of students who seek employment in agriculture, manufacturing, or construction, and who need applied math that they can use in their jobs. This is another big barrier for us today.

AS: When apprentices drop out due to financial emergencies and lose their place in their cohort, how does that set them back personally? How does it impact the overall shortage of skilled craft professionals in the United States and Canada?

TK: First and foremost, it means that we have fewer apprentices, but there are also some more subtle effects. The biggest one is in long-term planning. When our affiliates plan a class of apprentices, they are looking forward four or five years to meet the demand for skilled workers down the road. It takes years to fully train workers in construction occupations.

With one emergency, we lose apprentices. And if we lose 20% of these apprentices in the first year, it throws these long-term calculations out of whack. It’s almost impossible to add to a class of second period 2026 apprentices, because the new people will have missed the first year of what is ultimately cumulative training.

It’s also a resource issue. When registered apprentices leave our programs, this means the contractors and labor reps in our jointly run RA programs are out at least $10,000 in annual per apprentice training costs. This is a big hit on our programs, and it’s why programs like apprentice retention grants have such promise in our industry.

AS: How did NABTU develop the idea of apprenticeship retention grants to help keep apprentices on track?

TK: In 2022, as part of our work under a U.S. Department of Labor contract to promote RA in the construction industry, NABTU decided to use some of these funds to address RA retention rates. In the Building Trades, RA retention is a serious challenge. Nearly half of all construction apprentices in the US leave their apprenticeships before they finish.

To test how we could help, we decided to implement a pilot project in New York. There was strong demand for skilled workers, including apprentices, on a number of large projects—primarily Micron’s $100 billion semiconductor manufacturing plant construction project just north of Syracuse. NABTU staff worked with the New York State Building Trades Council and held focus groups virtually with training directors and business managers from local construction unions.

These focus group discussions resulted in a proposal where NABTU would provide funding for RA retention grants in New York. NABTU designed a program patterned on the Oregon Construction Workforce Development Program, a successful collaboration between the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI) and Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) that provides financial assistance to apprentices facing unexpected expenses for fuel, personal protective equipment, medical emergencies, or childcare.

AS: What did you learn from the pilot program?

TK: Our main takeaway was that these apprentice retention grants seem to work as intended. In September of 2024, we made follow-up phone calls to the 2023 retention grant recipients in New York to assess if they were still enrolled in their RA programs. Out of twenty-four apprentices, who received a total of $50,000 in grants, 20 (or 83.3%) were still enrolled in RA one year later.

In December 2025, New York State Building Trades Council staff again surveyed Retention Grant program participants for their status after the 2022-23, 2023-24, and 2024-25 Retention Grant awards. At the time they were surveyed, 183 were still active apprentices, 61 had achieved active journey-worker status (meaning they had successfully completed their RA) and just 27 had exited their apprenticeship programs. There was no data for nine participants. Thus, out of 271 total recipients who had received the Retention Grants, 244 were still enrolled in their apprenticeship, for a retention rate of 90%.

This initial success has led us to seek additional funding to continue this program in New York State and to expand the apprentice retention grant program to other states.

AS: In addition to financial help, what are some other ways to make apprenticeship training more accessible to students, particularly those who are working full-time, parenting or caregiving?

TK: One way some of our affiliates are approaching this challenge is through block training for apprentices. Rather than have apprentices drive to their classroom training two or three days a week, some affiliates train apprentices in week-long blocks. The apprentices don’t lose their jobs, they are slotted back in when they return to the jobsite. But in rural areas, or in areas where training centers are scattered, this means apprentices can avoid long car rides, week after week, after work.

Another option is what we call Apprenticeship Readiness Programs or ARPs. These boot-camp style programs are designed to teach participants what they need to succeed in RA, and to provide them with certain skills, such as blueprint reading or construction math, that will help them to successfully pass the aptitude tests in the trade of their choice.

We’ve been so successful at this form of pre-apprenticeship training that we created a separate organization called TradesFutures to administer the over 200 ARPs that are in existence today, which makes this the largest pre-apprenticeship program in any industry today in the U.S. But this is probably a subject for another blog post!

Dr. Thomas Kriger is the Director of Research at North America’s Building Trades Unions, AFL-CIO. From 2008 to 2012, Kriger was Professor of Labor Studies and Provost and Vice President for Academics at the National Labor College. He was Associate Budget Director for Research and Policy for the State University of New York System Administration from 2007 to 2008. From 1998 to 2007 he served as Assistant to the President and Director of Legislation and Research for United University Professions (Local #2190), the American Federation of Teacher’s largest higher education local. Kriger has held faculty positions at the University of Northern Colorado, Providence College, and St. Lawrence University and is the author of numerous publications on labor issues.

Abigail Seldin is Chief Growth Officer at Scholarship America, the leading administrator of private scholarships in the United States, where she leads revenue, partnerships, external affairs, and go-to-market execution. Last year, Scholarship America delivered 338M+ to students through 1,350+ unique programs for half of today’s Fortune 500, in addition to federal agencies, local governments, small businesses, sports teams, community foundations, and individual philanthropists.