“We don't need hundreds of disconnected training programs that produce credentials and hope the labor market absorbs the graduates,” Sims says. “We need workforce ecosystems designed backward from actual jobs.”

YUPRO Placement serves as the intermediary for the pre-apprenticeship. That means AWS doesn’t have to do the participant recruiting and screening, community colleges don’t need to act like a staffing company, and workforce nonprofits don’t have to be an employer of record

Lipson says policymakers must ask whether we’re dealing with a skills problem, a matching problem, a true lack of demand with too few entry-level jobs, or a price problem where young workers cost too much relative to expected productivity.

The U.S. Department of Education says these integrated, next-generation strategies should feature a credential registry, learning and employment records (LERs), and a skills-based job description generator.

Yet most credentials fail to adequately capture the skills and knowledge of students who earn them, keeping employers in the dark and closing doors for jobseekers without four-year degrees