The Job: IRAPs Are Dead—Now What?

Raytheon Technologies rolled out the country’s first ever industry-recognized apprenticeship program in October 2020—a move hailed by the administration at the time as a major milestone in expanding apprenticeships and creating more job opportunities for American workers.

Two years later, the entire federal program is dead.

The Biden administration paused it shortly after taking office, and the official end arrives next week. Only 130 or so of the programs, mostly in healthcare, ever got off the ground—so there aren’t a lot of lessons to draw from the initiative itself.

But the problems it aimed to solve—and the debate it kicked off about the role of government and industry in modern American apprenticeships—are still highly resonant. “It’s good to be talking about IRAPs again because it really is an instructive policy discussion, even though we’re in a massively different situation now,” says Michael Prebil, a senior policy analyst with the Center on Education & Labor at New America.

Industry-recognized apprenticeship programs, or IRAPs, were controversial from the get go. The stated aim was to cut “red tape” and let companies register programs more quickly—but critics saw an end run around quality standards and organized labor.

Introduced by the Trump administration, the programs were not directly approved by the Department of Labor or most state apprenticeship offices but by third-party organizations, such as industry associations, community college systems, and nonprofits. Those “standards recognition entities” had to get federal authorization and were intended to function something like accreditors do in the higher education system. Congressional Democrats and others worried about quality control and a lack of requirements, such as mandatory wage increases for workers, that are included in the federally registered program. 

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