Bill Kerr: Why aren’t there more learn-and-earn programs? Rising college costs and shortage of workers in critical sectors underscore the need, especially as a growing cohort of young workers are looking for affordable options to launch their careers.

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. My guest today is Chad Rountree, CEO of Propel America. The nonprofit lines up college-credit-earning healthcare jobs for high school graduates from underserved communities. The tuition-free program’s on-ramps to good jobs are the product of partnerships between employers, high schools, colleges, and community organizations. We’ll talk about how Propel America coordinates these collaborations—from recruiting student workers to arranging the coaching and supports—to help them complete the training. We’ll also discuss what it takes to help them advance academically and professionally. Chad, welcome to the podcast.

Chad Rountree: Thank you Bill. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Kerr: Chad, let’s just begin with a bit of your background and what drew you to Propel America.

Rountree: So I’ve dedicated the last 15 years of my career to educational equity. And over the last decade, in particular, I’ve been really focused on the transition between K–12, higher education, and workforce. So I actually began my career in education as a classroom teacher, then school and district leadership, and then more traditional college access work—and now at Propel America, where we’re focused on building and scaling high-quality, more direct-to-career pathways. But more personally, my journey began, actually, in a very similar place to the young people that we serve at Propel America. So modest upbringing with limited access into the world of work. And in looking back, I didn’t have a strong grasp on my strengths, my passions, and how they could show up in the workplace. And so when I walked across the high school graduation stage with my new diploma in hand, admittedly I knew with a great deal of conviction that taking four years to go figure that out on a campus was just a luxury that I could not afford. But like many of us, I had a high school teacher: Ms. Clark. She helped me actually go on to earn a culinary arts credential. And so this was accelerated training. Eight months later, I was 18 and a half years old, working full time as a sous chef. From there I went on to run restaurants until my mid-twenties, and that was my jumping-off point. Quality training yielded modest income and real-world professional working experience. And being a chef as my first career, it also gave me stability. And that, in and of itself, was transformative. It gave me the space to figure out what it is that I want to be when I grow up. And so I ultimately landed on the desire to pour into young people in the way that Ms. Clark poured into me. And so I became an educator, plowed myself through community college, bachelor’s, master’s, Harvard [Center for Education Policy and Research], and now find myself well into the second leg of my career. But this idea of young adults needing access, needing strong jumping-off points, needing pathways that balance both a paycheck and a learning agenda are needs that deeply resonate with me.

Kerr: Thank you for sharing that story. And we can all celebrate the Ms. Clarks that are in the education sector, while also acknowledging that the education sector is not where we want it to be. So maybe you can tell us a little bit more about the specific market failure or the needs that Propel America addresses. In the traditional model, someone graduates from high school, they enter college, they may have a summer job or a weekend kind of gig as a bartender, and then after four years or five years, they get their diploma, and they go out into the workforce. Talk about how your model is different from that.

Rountree: Well, Bill, well said. And to your point, this dream script of graduating from high school, seamlessly transitioning into higher ed, and then seamlessly transitioning into a job that is, in fact, commensurate to the degree that you’ve earned is not what is uniformly playing out for 18- to 24-year-olds. And we know who’s tending to fare well in the more direct-to-degree routes. And immediately entering the workforce is often being perceived as the lesser of the available options. And I would argue that which post-secondary path one takes is immensely more nuanced than your high school GPA. And so we believe that our work, it is essential, it’s actually about a more essential shift to be more responsive to our young adults—those that are navigating the realities of poverty, those that are looking for a different exchange of value, those that need scaffolded learning, and ultimately, those who cannot choose either a degree or a job, but those that, in fact, need both. So, actually, think about two learners of ours. And at Propel, we call them “fellows.” On one hand we have Qua’eesa, a 24-year-old from Newark, New Jersey. Upon graduating from high school six years ago, she chose the route of immediate employment. She needed a paycheck. And in that decision, she delayed all post-secondary education. She always had the desire to work in healthcare, though. And now, after working in a low-wage, low-growth job the past six years, she feels stuck. She needs access—access to the certification to be hired, the support to navigate a training experience, the financial support, the social capital. And then, on the other hand, we have Joseph, an 18-year-old from Philadelphia, and he’s on the other side of this spectrum. Here, in a couple months, Joseph is going to walk across the high school graduation stage, receive his high school diploma, celebrate this monumental milestone, only then to be faced with a daunting—and what I’d argue as a false—set of options: either pursue a traditional degree, take on insurmountable debt and delay meaningful earnings, or immediately enter the workforce in a low-wage, low-growth job. And it’s worth noting that both Qua’eesa and Joseph—they don’t fit the archetype of those who we know tend to do well in the traditional college routes. They don’t come from wealth, they didn’t have access to one of the more selective universities. And yet, being condemned to a minimum-wage job should not be their contingency. And the other segment of our value chain is our employers. They’re struggling to find entry-level talent, and overall talent costs are high. And so to your question, I would frame the market failure that Propel America is tackling actually through the lens of outputs and inputs. On one side, we have an estimated 13 million young adults, 18- to 24-year-olds who are currently locked out of the opportunity to build an upwardly mobile career. They’re in search of a pathway, one that’s endorsed by employers. They’re looking for coaching and support. Meanwhile, across our economy, there are a range of jobs that are in high demand, very little supply, jobs going unfilled. And so then, from an input perspective, we have deep beliefs that this is not a challenge of talent scarcity. It exists. Rather, this is a systems-design challenge that’s implicating K–12, higher ed, and industry. And so Propel America, we are a national nonprofit organization founded in 2019. In our operating thesis to address this market failure is, if we can provide the academic and technical training to recent high school graduates in ways that are accessible and affordable with the full support to drive retention and completion and support placement with employer partners, we can ultimately support young adults in building careers, all while playing a meaningful role in providing skilled talent for a critical industry.

Kerr: I’m going to want to drill down with you on both the participants, the fellows, and also the employers and others that are in this. But it strikes me that you hear a lot about skills-based hiring. You also hear a lot about college for all. And Propel America seems to be doing both. And so I’m curious about these models and how they coexist for you.

Rountree: They very much do coexist. So I’d actually begin by describing Propel America’s founding team members as recovering proponents of the college-for-all model. Many of us were former K–12 state district school leaders. Each of us has our own stories, our accomplishments related to everything from improving test scores, creating college-going cultures, hanging college pennants in hallways. I remember lunch in a middle school and naming each one of the home rooms after big-name top-tier universities. We all had the best of intentions. But there’s a clear shadow side here. Even the best charter schools across the country on average are getting 50 percent college bachelor graduation rates. And so this is a major challenge in our society, in our economy, and one that unfortunately is growing each year. We need more structured, more expansive pathways that allow young people a better shot at developing both the knowledge and the skills to contribute to the workforce. And so our model: jobs-first higher education. And to your question, this is a both/and solution. It’s a blend of both college with an index toward more quickly entering the workforce. So it’s accelerated job training, market aligned. It’s employer endorsed. It culminates with our fellows earning college credits and an in-demand credential. It’s Pell-eligible with financial stipends, so there are no out-of-pocket costs for our learners. And it leads to a middle-skills job in a matter of months, not years, like the more traditional paths. And so, from a skills and competency perspective, our aim is for every fellow to enter the workforce being able to demonstrate three things: the knowledge and skills to do their job properly, the commitment in supporting their team at being successful, and also the ability to build trusting relationships and operate as a team player. But this question of how do skills-based hiring and the role of higher education, to me, this actually has more to do with our thinking on innovation and how to actually drive scale. And so we are unapologetic about traditional degree routes and the inherent experience there; it’s not serving all learners well. And while the broader higher-education landscape may be imperfect, it is not useless. And the opportunity that we see is to actually repurpose their existing infrastructure, their distribution channels, their services and products, and their funding mechanisms in order to reach the people who have currently been left out. And so our higher-ed partners are playing a critical role here. And in particular, their access to Title IV funding, by way of Pell, to subsidize the training costs for our learners, it’s an essential component of our model. And with our relationships with employers, we’re aligning this training to real employer needs. It’s technical training that our higher-ed partners are providing. It’s the power-skills development and the full-wraparound retention services that we’re offering. And combined, we are creating local talent pipelines, where our fellows are equipped with both college credits and a credential, a building block for a future degree. Our fellows have developed the very skill sets that our employers are hiring for, and we’re filling essential frontline vacancies with vetted employer partners.

Kerr: That’s amazing. We have to unpack a lot of those various components. Chad, we have a very diverse listener base, and some of us won’t be as familiar with the Pell Grant program. Can you tell us a little bit more of its background and how it links to Propel America?

Rountree: Yeah, so Pell is Title IV. It’s a federal revenue source that the government leverages to subsidize people from low-income backgrounds in pursuing their post-secondary aspirations. And so we have locked in to leveraging Pell dollars by way of our partnerships with higher ed. And we are encouraged by the current conversation around short-term workforce Pell, in that it would allow our higher-ed partners to create additional pathways that would meet this new criteria, thereby allowing us to serve additional young people and meet a growing need from employers from a role perspective.

Kerr: I don’t think we’ve yet introduced that you focus on the healthcare sector. And so perhaps spend a minute describing how that particular sector became the focal point and whether you’re intending to expand, ultimately, to other sectors. Or is there something particular about the healthcare sector that warrants exclusivity?

Rountree: That’s a great question, because we didn’t initially focus there. Five years ago, when we launched Propel, we attempted to apply this model across a variety of industries. So recruiting, training, partnering with employers in IT, trades, healthcare. And one of the early lessons that we learned was the need to reduce complexity in order to get farther, faster, as it pertains to establishing proof of concept. So about two years ago, we listened to our current fellows, our employers. We scanned the external market to determine where we could focus and, ultimately, still drive highly differential impact. And from a fellow perspective, at that time, we were experiencing the most momentum with young adults, them actually raising their hands and expressing interest in our healthcare pathways. And then, when you think about healthcare as a sector, it’s an industry that’s struggling with severe shortages. The American Hospital Association describes the talent shortage as a national emergency. And at the same time, it’s also an industry that’s projected to experience outsized growth—upwards of 20 percent over the next 10 years, representing a significant portion of our overall economy. And at its core, healthcare as an industry, it’s critical to the overall health and vitality of the communities we serve. I see our focus on healthcare as, actually, a competitive advantage. It’s an enormous opportunity of national consequence. We’re no longer bumping up against the many other workforce development players in the space. And from an impact perspective, our efforts now extend well beyond economic mobility. The majority of our employer partners, they’re nonprofit hospitals, they’re serving some of the most disenfranchised communities across our country. So to succeed here is to ensure our communities also continue to have access to quality healthcare.

Kerr: Great. Chad, you’ve already introduced the many different stakeholders that are in the system ranging from the Pell Grants and the funding to the employers, to the partners and so forth. Can you just describe a little bit, what’s your particular business model? How does it function? And tell us a bit more about the role that the employers can play in the program.

Rountree: Yep. Again, Propel America, founded in 2019, still a relatively young organization. We’re a multi-state effort, serving Louisiana, Camden, Philly, Newark, and Los Angeles—an employer-driven model. So we have a portfolio of large regional hospital systems that we’re deep in partnership with. We have a portfolio of partners that consist both of local community colleges, but also four-year universities that have national reach that we’re plugging our model into. And from an operating-model perspective, we have centralized a majority of our operating model to create scale, to create leverage. We’re aiming to create economies of scale, build functional expertise where applicable. And there remains aspects of our work that are also intensely local. And so we’ve gotten smarter about what is the talent that we actually need to deploy locally. And those team members tend to be those who are closest to our end users—and that being our fellows and our employers. And so we have fellow recruiters and coaches, boots on the ground, but then also team members who are responsible for managing our employer relationships. And then, from an economic perspective, we’ve been intentional in building a model with an eye toward both financial sustainability, but also positioning us to drive impact at scale. And so we have a couple of earned revenue streams, with our higher-ed partners and also our employer partners. Higher ed, at a time where we’re seeing declining enrollments, value being questioned. There are still real pockets of innovation where higher ed is, in fact, aligning its product to real employer needs. And we’re helping to generate enrollment and ensure completion. And so our higher-ed partners are investing in our partnership to support this collaboration. And our employers are investing in our work by way of a per-hire contribution. Outside of earned revenue, we’re also leveraging public funds. And so Title IV, Pell, our higher-ed partners are leveraging this to drive the tuition-free training that we’re offering students. And we’re also pursuing additional public funds at the local and state level to create additional margin for us. So you think about SNAP—Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program—WIOA dollars, and various grants by way of State Department of Commerce and Labor. And the rest is currently being subsidized through philanthropy. And we’re incredibly grateful to our philanthropic partners who share in our mission, who have been on this journey with us, those who are supporting us and driving double impact, both for young people and our employers.

Kerr: If I could add just a couple more details to round out the picture before... We’ll go into the fellows in one second here. Physically, where are individuals during this kind of period with Propel America? Are they at home? Are they in one of the institutions, one of the colleges that are supporting this? Are they onsite? How does that process play out? And I know that you have several tracks that people sort themselves into—technicians and so forth. So maybe just describe a little bit more of the occupation that sits at the end, as well.

Rountree: Let me actually start at the end of that question. So the two primary roles that we are supporting is “certified medical assistant” and “sterile processing tech.” Majority of our pathways are hybrid in nature and they span anywhere from four to 12 months. It’s a blend of weekly synchronous and asynchronous engagement. On average, we’re requiring about a 25-hour weekly commitment. There are monthly clinical sessions that are located at our hospital partners. And so these are structured and instructor-led sessions, high quality at bats, targeted practice—with everything from checking vitals to administering EKGs to taking blood. And then the experience then culminates with an externship, which is a four-week, 40-hour-per-week commitment where our fellows are onsite with our hospital partners. So the majority of the program hybrid, it allows our young people to work simultaneously as they plug in, and then as they get closer to the end of the experience, they’re able to fully transition into these roles.

Kerr: So take us maybe one step further back upstream and tell us, how do you recruit your fellows and a little bit more about their demographic profiles.

Rountree: So recruitment in our world is everything. We are aiming to create “Propel fellows” that, ultimately, are avidly sought by way of our employers. And so the young adults that we serve, 95 percent are learners of color. Around 90 percent identify as women. On average, 70 percent are full Pell recipients. Many of them have children, and, in fact, most are working. And over the last 12 to 16 months, we’ve experienced over 100 percent growth in applications, compared to years prior. And across that same period, roughly 30 percent of all applications being generated are actually the product of word-of-mouth referrals from current fellows and alumni. But more broadly, to your question, we have a multi-pronged recruitment effort. We have four primary levers. One, we are partnering with forward-thinking high schools and charter management organizations—so those who are supporting each graduating class as seniors and actually accessing the full array of post-secondary paths that exists in a community, pursuing individuals like Joseph, who I spoke about earlier in this conversation. We are partnering with community-based organizations. So those entities in a community that have relationships with young adults who may have stopped out of traditional higher ed or those who are now finding themselves stuck. Individuals like Qua’eesa, who I alluded to earlier. We’re also mobilizing our employers to publicly endorse our work via their respective channels. We are finding that, for our young people, they need to hear from employers, they need to hear that our employers are willing and committed to hiring from these innovative workforce development pathways. And we’re seeing that it’s a powerful signal of trust for our young people that they deeply value. And then, lastly, we’ve recently stood up a digital social media effort where we are casting our net far and wide, working to generate applicant interest.

Kerr: Yeah, so in entrepreneurial terms, young company, 2019, thereabouts, as it gets started, you mentioned you achieved the product market fit. Now you’re growing 100 percent year over year, which is kind of the exciting phase. So tell us a bit about your current numbers, but also what are you aiming for at say, 2030? What’s the size of the Propel America that you’re building, Chad?

Rountree: Yeah, so when we began in 2019, we started with a pilot of 34 fellows. And this year, four and a half years later, we’re serving around 450 fellows. And again, for many of our young people prior to Propel, the only option available to them to earn money immediately out of high school were entry-level roles and those offering minimal opportunity for advancement. Propel is proving that young people across our country, they have passion, they have purpose, and when that is met with preparation and access, lives can be changed. To underscore your question, I actually want to go back to Qua’eesa’s story. She’s a newly hired certified medical assistant from Newark, New Jersey. She was referred to us from one of our K–12 charter networks via their alumni program. She began her training with us last fall. Qua’eesa already had some experience as a care professional, but she didn’t have access, as I alluded to, both to the certification but also the support to navigate a training experience. And through Propel, she engaged in weekly skills training, professional development, an externship, had a one-on-one coach to guide her through the pathway. Qua’eesa ultimately finished her externship in February, was hired a week later by RWJ Barnabas Health. And given the impact that this pathway has had on Qua’eesa, Qua’eesa is now paying it forward, actually referring friends and family to Propel, and one of whom is actually slated to enroll in this year’s upcoming fall cohort. So it’s encouraging to see impact play out in this way. But more broadly, from an impact perspective, our fellows are growing their incomes and they’re persisting in the workforce. With earnings, on average, we’re seeing our fellows realize about a 30 percent to 35 percent increase in wage gains. And again, this is the result of tuition-free training, a time investment of under a year. And on average this is about a 10 to 15 percentage point increase when compared to the average wage premium that a two-year degree is creating. And on the workforce persistence front, our fellows are persisting at a rate about 75 percent as they enter the second year of the workforce—so outpacing industry average attrition rates for roles that tend to hover in the 50 percent to 60 percent range. And to date, we’ve maintained a hundred percent of our employers year over year while also growing our employer portfolio.

Kerr: That’s amazing. And it’s so encouraging to hear those numbers also the success that stays and lingers there. Maybe we can turn to the other side, which is, Chad, tell us something about the challenges that you’re facing right now, either in terms of bringing fellows on board or partners on board or just in running what is a scaling organization.

Rountree: Yeah, we’ve learned a lot over the last four and a half years or so, and we’re fortunate to have exciting and growing interests from both employers and young adults. But to your question, this work hasn’t come without its own set of challenges—and particularly in managing the day-to-day operations of our model. And so, with our fellows, we essentially have less than a year to move an individual through a rigorous and intense training program, develop their hire-ready skills such that they can immediately drive value for our employers. And so we’re looking for young adults who can run fast, run hard, those who are committed and engaged, and those who possess some level of conviction that this is the right path for them. And so we have done and tested everything from tightening up our admissions process to not only include the requirements of our higher-ed partners, but we’re also beginning embedding the externship and the hiring requirements from our employers at the top end of our experience. We’re having fellows now complete an intense onboarding experience. Fellows are working through a week-long experience that’s hybrid in nature, fellows need to show us that they’re comfortable or willing to learn how to leverage technology, work with a coach, work with their peers. We’re piloting different ways to leverage technology and predictive analytics to strengthen and differentiate our support. At its core, we have assembled a full-stack model, all the support a fellow needs—from the hard- and the soft-skill development to the planning to the financial support, the access to the credentials, speed to market. And the other substantive bottleneck that we are experiencing actually comes down to the clinical components of our model. This has been a real challenge in order to define placements, particularly when considering the current state of our hospitals—again, many of whom are navigating razor-tight margins, staffing is lean, and they have limited dedicated teaching staff. And so we’ve had to be creative in hiring additional instructors to support, find placement sites beyond our partners. And admittedly, this is an area where we’ve not yet found a scalable solution and know the entire field schools across the country are struggling to resolve this pain point.

Kerr: That’s understood. You’d mentioned earlier the wraparound services that Propel America provides. Can you break that down just a little bit more for our listeners?

Rountree: Yeah. It’s essential in understanding the starting place of our young people. Those that we’re working with, most are working part-time. They’re balancing family responsibilities. So designing our program to build around our young people, adapting to their needs and not the other way around, was an important design priority of ours. Every fellow is given a dedicated coach. They’re guiding them through the experience. And every fellow’s engaging in this experience alongside a cohort of peers, where they’re not only supporting each other from a peer perspective, but they’re also working together, building those hire-ready skills via team-based learning. And then this coaching and cohort experience actually persists six months beyond the point of hire to ensure that our fellows are successfully making the transition, persisting in the workforce—delivering economic stability for our fellows, but then delivering ROI for our employer partners. And then, at the end of the day, this is about access. It’s a tuition-free training opportunity that’s underwritten through Pell. Our fellows have access to both a stipend and emergency funding for when the inevitability of life happens. And you have a foot in the front door, with a guaranteed interview with an employer partner at a reputable hospital system.

Kerr: That’s great. Chad, we’ve talked about the sort of screening that is brought into making sure that the candidate fellow is going to be someone that will really excel in the program and so forth. As you think about the longer-term nature, beyond getting that first job, what do you coach or instill in the fellows to make sure that they have continued success further into their careers?

Rountree: We are a couple years into being exclusively focused on healthcare, but what we’re seeing from our fellows is that the vast majority of them actually have the intention of pursuing the route of nursing—whether it be licensed practical nurse, registered nurse, or more advanced health practitioner roles. And we’re also seeing our fellows express interest in more of the lab work side of things. And so they’re transitioning into more specialized phlebotomist-like roles. And again, by way of our model, our fellows have earned around 30 course credits that are in their back pocket that can be applied to their next degree, whether it be in allied health, or if they one day make a more substantive career pivot in the way that my own personal journey played out, they have those to be leveraged at a later time. And then finally, we are encouraged by our employer partners who have packaged their employee benefits to help further underwrite their existing team members’ ongoing professional career and educational goals. And so we’re ensuring our fellows have access to those benefits.

Kerr: That’s great. Continue maybe on that last point. If you think about the broader ecosystem, I’m going to just kind of ask you if you had a magic wand or something you’d really like to advocate for as the changes that could be done elsewhere to enable Propel America, give us a short list of those.

Rountree: There’d be two areas that I’d highlight. And I think the first is with the importance of career exposure in high school. And the second would be around the importance of short-term Pell. And so in high school, we believe it is essential that we are educating high schoolers about the variety of paths that exist in a local community, that we’re creating opportunities for students to try on different roles in low-stake ways, embedding early-career exposure, work-based learning opportunities, ensuring graduates are not only earning diplomas, but they’re doing so alongside building a deep understanding of their passion, their strengths, how it could be applied to the world of work, and an understanding of a full array of the paths that exists, whether it be a two- or four-year route or a more innovative solution like what we’re offering. And on short-term Pell, look at the young people that we are supporting economically vulnerable learners of color, low income. They don’t have a ton of financial flexibility, if any at all. And with the traditional routes, oftentimes students are required to postpone meaningful work across minimally a four-year time horizon. And in most cases, because of rising tuition costs, learners are taking on high debt loads, and most of them not making it to the college graduation stage unscathed. So simply put, Pell for us is solving an access gap for students. It’s a critical financing mechanism in our model. And because of Pell, we’re able to provide high-quality training experiences that is launching young adults into well-paying, in-demand jobs with college credits in their back pocket and solving critical talent needs in a high-demand field. And so short-term Pell, with the right guardrails in place, we’re able to de-risk the post-secondary experience for young adults and fundamentally change the experience for young people and the talent needs that our employers are navigating.

Kerr: Great. Well, I’m going to steal the magic wand back for a second here, and then ask you what lies ahead you as the CEO of Propel America. Where are you kind of steering the ship over the next few years?

Rountree: Broadly speaking, I believe there’s a dearth of outcomes-based, scalable programs in our country focused on economic mobility, and we see the local, the specific programs that are effectively working, and yet there remains a chasm-size hole in opportunities for students who either stop out of traditional higher ed or those who never enroll to begin with. We have a current aim of supporting 1,000 young adults by 2025, and driving what I would describe as a virtuous cycle of local impact in our existing markets. And we’re also concurrently working on landing our 2030 plan, where we will determine what is the level of scale that we want to pursue in the next chapter of our growth. What new roles do we want to apply our model to? Which new markets do we want to aim to serve? How might we lean into the growing interests in apprenticeships from a model design perspective? And at its core, we have designed our model to be interoperable. We’re eager to continue building out our higher-ed portfolio, our employer portfolio, and our backbone of supporters. And so I would encourage the audience to find us at propelamerica.org, reach out, and I would love to continue the conversation.

Kerr: Chad, I’m sure our audience has been amazed by where you’ve come in five years, and we’ll look forward and support you for the next five. Chad Rountree is the CEO of Propel America. Chad, thanks for joining us today.

Rountree: Thanks so much, Bill.

Kerr:We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.