MACCLESFIELD, England — Ishan Goshawk, an apprentice with global pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, donned a lab coat and safety glasses and entered a room filled with robots. 

His first stop was a machine programmed to fill dozens of tiny vials with a compound he needed for an experiment. Everything seemed in order, so Goshawk went to check on a second robot, a gleaming apparatus that, he noted, cost half a million pounds (about $620,000). When the first robot finished filling the vials, Goshawk would bring them here, to test how efficiently drug compounds can be purified using different solvents.

Most students here and in the United States wouldn’t get access to expensive equipment like this until graduate school. Goshawk — a 21-year-old undergraduate student and one of 149 “degree apprentices” employed by AstraZeneca across the U.K. — started using them his second week in.

“It shows the trust we’ve been given,” said Goshawk, who is working nearly full time while studying toward a degree in chemical science at Manchester Metropolitan University that his employer is paying for. By the time he graduates next spring, he will have earned roughly 100,000 pounds (approximately $130,000) in wages, on top of the tuition-free education.

Degree apprenticeships like Goshawk’s have exploded across England since their introduction a decade ago. More than 60,000 apprentices began programs leading to the U.K. equivalent of bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the 2024-25 academic year, in fields as varied as engineering, digital technology, health care, law and business. 

Close to 90 universities in England and Wales now participate, including elite institutions like the University of Cambridge. Major British and multinational companies — Deloitte, Rolls-Royce, Unilever, JP Morgan and Microsoft among them — have signed on. 

The programs are so popular that it’s become harder to get some coveted apprenticeship slots than it is to get into elite colleges like Oxford or Cambridge. Nearly half of the students who create accounts with the United Kingdom’s centralized college admissions service now say their first choice is a degree apprenticeship, according to one expert. At AstraZeneca, which is headquartered in Cambridge, there were 3,300 applicants for 18 degree apprenticeships last year, the company says.

England has embraced degree apprenticeship as a solution to a wide range of challenges, including high youth unemployment, spiraling student debt and rapid technological change. The programs have been sold here as a way to both retrain existing employees and to get more low-income students through college and into the workforce. 

Now, as apprenticeship advocates in the United States embark on their own effort to expand the programs, for many of the same reasons as the United Kingdom, some are pointing to England as a leader to follow. 

But skeptics say unreliable funding and the ad hoc approach to apprenticeships in the U.S. could make it difficult to replicate the English success story. And if the United Kingdom provides a road map, some say it also offers a cautionary tale. 

While many countries focus apprenticeship on young adults and technical careers, England’s system spans two-thirds of occupations and serves everyone from school dropouts to older employees seeking master’s degrees. 

This all-in model has strained the country’s apprenticeship budget and led to a recent decision by government leaders to end master’s level apprenticeships for anyone over the age of 21, starting next year.  

“It’s trying to do too much lifting, and it’s coming up against a lot of tension,” said Ethan Kenvarg, a consultant for U.S. companies and governments who specializes in apprenticeships. He warns against the United States similarly turning to apprenticeships as a catch-all solution to the nation’s education and workforce challenges. 

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In a classroom at Middlesex University, in northwest London, 18 undergraduate students in a sales apprenticeship were learning about ethics and professionalism one Tuesday this fall. The instructor had them read a case study in which an employee leaked his company’s new product launch plan to a friend at a competitor, then asked the students how they’d respond if they were that friend. Would they share the plan with their boss, so they can steal market share?

One group of apprentices decided they’d tell their boss — keeping quiet could jeopardize their own job security, they explained. Another would notify their company’s general counsel, reasoning that the disclosure was a legal matter, not an ethical one. But a third group saw no problem with using the leaked info. 

“Is it not our job to win business?” asked Sulayman Warraich, a third-year apprentice with Samsung. “I feel like this is what we’re paid to do.”

Louise Sutton, whose company, Consalia, co-created the apprenticeship with Middlesex, gently challenged him. “Does your company have a sales code of conduct?” she asked Warraich. “Does it say, ‘Win at all costs’?”

Employers in England that hire apprentices are required to set aside at least 20 percent of their working hours for off-the-job training. In many cases, they give degree apprentices a day off each week to study. Apprentices might attend class on their day off, or in three- or four-day “blocks” each month. Some take classes online. 

Because apprentices work nearly full time, they often take fewer classes per term than a typical university student, spreading them out over a longer time period.

Still, juggling work and school can be challenging. Warraich said it’s “nearly impossible to be perfect at both work and uni.” He’s chosen to “put in 100 percent at Samsung and put university on the back burner,” he said, concentrating on his classes enough to pass but not to compromise his job performance.

There are other drawbacks, too. If an apprentice discovers that they don’t like the work — or their employer — they can’t simply switch to another field or company the way a typical college student might transfer between majors or colleges. Their only option is to leave and apply for another apprenticeship elsewhere.

Close to a third of undergraduate degree apprentices don’t make it to the end of their programs, according to government statistics. Surveys show that the main reasons they quit include not getting on with their employer and receiving a better job offer.  

Yet many degree apprentices say the programs are well worth the tradeoffs. While their peers are racking up an average of 53,000 pounds of student loans (about $70,000), they are able to graduate debt-free, with years of on-the-job experience and a virtual Rolodex of industry connections. 

In interviews, degree apprentices often describe their choice as a “no-brainer.”

“I wanted a degree, but I didn’t want to pay for it,” said Goshawk, who chose an apprenticeship over the elite Imperial College London. “I feel like I’m coming out a few years ahead” of friends who pursued traditional degree programs.

Related: Apprenticeships are a trending alternative to college — but there’s a hitch 

Apprenticeship has deep roots in England, going back to the guilds that flourished during the Middle Ages and still exist today. For much of its history, however, apprenticeship was viewed as a lesser alternative to university, said Tom Bewick, a consultant who has worked on apprenticeship policy on both sides of the Atlantic.

That’s changed, he said: Apprenticeship degrees have “broken down the cultural snobbery that used to exist.” 

The popularity of degree apprenticeships both delights and worries Elizabeth Gorb, the former longtime director of apprenticeships for Manchester Metropolitan University. One of England’s first — and largest — providers of the programs, it now enrolls some 3,000 degree apprentices, she said. 

While it’s been exciting to see the programs take hold, Gorb said, she worries they’ve become so competitive that they could lose their ability to act as levers of social mobility. Government statistics show that, nationwide, degree apprentices are half as likely as traditional undergraduate students to have received free school meals as children (a proxy for poverty) — and half as likely to represent a minority ethnic background. 

To increase the number of available slots, “we need more employers to get involved,” said Gorb. 

To encourage companies to offer apprenticeships, England requires all large employers to pay into a fund they and other, smaller companies can tap for off-the-job training. 

Even so, smaller companies have been slower to get involved than larger ones, which are entitled to the money they pay through the apprenticeship levy. While smaller companies can tap the levy pool for up to 95 percent of their off-the-job training costs, some say they can’t afford the 5 percent share or spare the staff. 

Companies that do participate see benefits — both in terms of attracting a more diverse group of workers, and in retaining employees. At AstraZeneca, one of the first companies to partner with Manchester Metropolitan, more than three-quarters of apprentices remain with the company after completing their programs, according to Kim Hardman, the company’s director of apprenticeship.

Apprenticeships can also bring more women into the traditionally male-dominated science and math fields, said Lucy Kidson, apprenticeship program senior manager at financial company AJ Bell. While most computer science programs at English universities only accept applicants who have focused on math and computer science in secondary school, AJ Bell and many of the other companies that partner with Manchester Met take students from all academic backgrounds. Nearly half of the degree apprentices the company has hired have been female.  

There are costs and benefits for colleges, too. At Manchester Metropolitan, the apprenticeship unit has grown to a staff of 100, including new hires in business development and skills coaching for apprentices. 

But while the programs are less profitable than traditional university programs, Gorb says they pay off in other ways. Offering degree apprenticeships has helped the university diversify its revenue stream, opened up relationships with hundreds of local, national and global firms, and led to improvements in student satisfaction and job placement — key metrics by which colleges are judged. It’s also raised the university’s profile nationally and internationally.

“It’s complicated and a lot of work, but I think it’s put the university on the map,” she said. 

Related: San Francisco turned to apprenticeships to lure and keep teachers in preschools and boost access to child care

Experts attribute England’s success in growing degree apprenticeship to steady funding and a centralized approach to apprenticeship. The country has standardized the skills and knowledge apprentices need and made sure that students have opportunities to learn about apprenticeships beginning in middle school.

In the United States, where universities are confronting declining enrollment and doubts about the relevance of their coursework, degree apprenticeships — or apprenticeship degrees, as they are known here — are more of an ad hoc phenomena. 

For now, they’re offered primarily by two-year colleges and are mostly confined to teaching and nursing. But the programs are starting to crop up in other high-need fields, such as child care and social work, and proponents argue they have the potential to expand into many more.

In a time of deep political division, apprenticeship degrees enjoy rare bipartisan support. Proponents from both parties see them as a way to help employers fill jobs, colleges fill seats and students graduate debt-free.

But while the U.S. has increased its investment in apprenticeship significantly over the past decade, the country still lags far behind England, which spends 60 times as much on a per capita basis, according to the trade association Apprenticeships for America. And though President Donald Trump has pledged to support 1 million apprentices a year, he has also proposed a $1.64 billion cut to workforce programs, which include apprenticeships.

Skeptics like Bewick doubt Congress would ever impose an English-style levy on American employers. And getting employers to agree upon single standards for each occupation would also be difficult, said Nicholas D’Antonio, a researcher who has helped set up apprenticeships for some major U.S. employers.

“I don’t see them relinquishing autonomy in the name of a national system,” he said.

Without reliable funding and consistent rules, many U.S. employers will remain reluctant to invest in apprenticeship, said Rebecca Agostino, who helped lead a doomed effort by British company Multiverse to expand into the United States. 

When Multiverse, an apprenticeship intermediary led by Euan Blair, the son of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, arrived stateside in 2021, the tech sector was booming and companies were eager to invest in workers, Agostino said. But when tech hiring slowed, employers stopped spending on apprenticeship, and the company — which has trained tens of thousands of apprentices in the U.K. — abandoned its expansion plans. 

Given the differences in how the two countries fund and structure apprenticeships, D’Antonio argues that it’s time for the United States to find its own way forward. “We have to stop aspiring to European models, because they don’t reflect the society we live in,” he said. 

One idea is to focus apprenticeship degrees on fields where labor shortages are acute and on-the-job training is required. That’s the approach taken by Reach University, a 5-year-old nonprofit college that offers apprenticeship degrees in teaching and health care, and is helping other colleges launch programs of their own. Reach has set a goal of 3 million people enrolling in apprenticeship degrees nationally by 2035. 

AstraZeneca, which has trained hundreds of apprentices like Goshawk to date, isn’t waiting to see how things turned out. This year, it dipped its toe into the U.S. market, partnering with the two-year Montgomery College to train its first two American degree apprentices, at its facility in Gaithersburg, Maryland. 

Malachi Reid, who starts classes as early as 8 a.m. and finishes work at 11 p.m., says the long days are worth it. When he was in eighth grade, his mother underwent an 18-hour surgery to remove a tumor on her inner ear. As the hours dragged on, he worried he might never see his mom again.

Now, Reid is part of an enterprise that might one day spare other children that fear. 

“To maybe one day come up with a drug that could take away the tumor without the invasive surgery — that really inspires me,” he said. 

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org. 

This story was supported by a fellowship from The Institute for Citizens and Scholars, which received funding from the ECMC Foundation.

This story about degree apprenticeships was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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