In 2020, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) partnered with the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) and funded contractor Urban Institute and its partners the Capital Research Corporation and Mathematica to conduct the Implementation Evaluation of the Youth Apprenticeship Readiness Grants (YARG) and the State Apprenticeship Capacity Assessment as part of the existing Apprenticeship Evidence-Building Portfolio.

The YARG implementation study aimed to understand how YARG grantees developed and expanded Registered Apprenticeship Programs (RAPs) to support youth apprentices (16 to 24 years old) and which factors are associated with design and implementation. This brief describes the experiences of the 14 YARG grantees and organizes the grantees into a typology of youth apprenticeship expansion models. Youth apprenticeship programs are supported by a variety of education and training, employer, and supportive service partners. YARG grantees can coordinate these partners in different ways to serve youth participants, and the typology of youth apprenticeship expansion models characterizes how grantees coordinate the work of their partners to expand youth apprenticeship.

This brief develops a typology of five different models of youth apprenticeship expansion used by the YARG grantees across their registered apprenticeship programs. The typology is based on information collected from the YARG grantee applications, follow-up clarification calls with grantees, and the grantees’ quarterly narrative reports to the DOL. The models describe different strategies for organizing partners, training, and services to expand youth apprenticeship. The five models are the secondary school–based registered apprenticeship model; the postsecondary school–based registered apprenticeship model; the intermediary model; the regionally coordinated registered apprenticeship model; and the youth-supporting mixed-age registered apprenticeship model. The five models do not encompass an exhaustive typology of the YARG grantees’ activities in expanding youth apprenticeship, nor are the models mutually exclusive. An individual YARG grantee might implement several of these models as a part of its grant activities, depending on its partners and the needs of the registered apprenticeship programs it supports.