Author(s): Jobs for the Future (JFF)
Myriam Sullivan | Lois Joy | Dristi Adhikari | Vicki Ritterband
Published: Sept. 13, 2022
Report Intro/Brief:
“Registered Apprenticeship (RA) offers a promising pathway to well-paid work in industries with ample room for professional and salary growth. People who complete Registered Apprenticeships earn average starting salaries of $77,000, and their average lifetime earnings outpace those of their peers by more than $300,000.
Unlike apprenticeship systems in other parts of the world, the U.S. RA system isn’t built as a career pathway for young people. In fact, the average age of new apprentices in the United States is 29. While there has been a push on multiple fronts over the past five years to increase the number of high-quality apprenticeships for high school age youth, those efforts haven’t yet made a dent in disparities of outcomes for this group. Efforts to increase the number of younger apprentices in high-quality RA programs are especially important for Black and Indigenous youth and other young people of color, who have been disproportionately affected economically by the pandemic. While many are working again after the massive layoffs of the pandemic’s early days, the long-term impact of even temporarily losing employment experience and access to training can’t be underestimated.
Against this backdrop, Jobs for the Future (JFF) recently analyzed a decade of federal RA data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Registered Apprenticeship Partners Information Database System (RAPIDS) to glean insights about the system’s youngest apprentices—ages 16 to 24. The data was disaggregated by race/ethnicity and gender to better understand the challenges and opportunities among these groups: Specifically, how diverse is the population of young apprentices? Are they clustered in certain occupations? How do their exit wages compare to those of their peers? We found that although the number of young apprentices grew significantly between 2010 and 2020, the same inequities of access and outcomes, specifically exit wages, still exist for people of color and women of all backgrounds. The data points to occupational segregation of workers who aren’t white and female workers of all backgrounds as the primary reason for below-average exit wages (that is, these groups are overrepresented in occupations with the least amount of advancement potential).”
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