U.S. plans for new factories, new tech hubs—even new homes—are about to crash into one very inconvenient fact. As a recent RAND paper makes clear, not enough people work in construction to turn those plans into actual, hammer-and-nail reality. Not even close.
That one bottleneck threatens everything from America's competitive edge in high-tech manufacturing to its exit from a grinding housing crisis. The answer may seem simple: Just hire more construction workers. But construction jobs often require four or five years of training in an apprenticeship program. And as researchers found, those programs have not scaled up fast enough to meet the need.
“The impacts could be substantial,” said Marwa AlFakhri, a labor economist and associate policy researcher at RAND. “The cost to build anything will go up. Housing will get put on the back burner. But we'll also fail to meet a lot of our benchmarks for new manufacturing and semiconductor facilities. There just aren't enough people to do the work.”
In fact, the United States would need to add more than 430,000 new construction workers to keep up with demand—this year alone. That's according to estimates from Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade group. It would require roughly one in eight high school graduates to trade their mortar boards for a hard hat.
The United States would need to add more than 430,000 new construction workers to keep up with demand—this year alone.
Apprenticeships are not the only way to fill that gap. Immigration and community colleges also supply workers. But state and federal leaders have looked to build up apprenticeship programs in recent years as a key part of the answer. President Donald Trump doubled federal grants for apprenticeships in his first term. U.S. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer has promised to maintain that focus on apprenticeship programs— “growing those, investing in those”—in his second.
But like many improvement projects, this one has a few structural issues that need to be addressed: a low ceiling and a leaky pipeline.
The typical apprenticeship program is very small and very competitive. Nearly half of the roughly 7,000 construction programs registered in the U.S. have only one or two apprentices in training, researchers found. Program coordinators said the problem is not a lack of interest; it's a lack of capacity. Some said they bring on new apprentices only once every two years and have to turn away most applicants. As a result, while hundreds of new apprenticeship programs have opened in recent years, they have not generated enough of a bump in new apprentices.
That's the low ceiling, and it makes the leaky pipeline that much harder to explain. Around 40 percent of apprentices drop out before they make it to the end of their program. That's despite the earn-while-you-learn promise of apprenticeship programs—and the value of a credential, which one study pegged at more than $240,000 over the course of a 36-year career. It's possible that some of those apprentices are leaving early to accept a full-time job. But researchers found that as many as half of those who leave do so in the first six months of their training.
“This was really surprising for us,” AlFakhri said. “We're talking about an opportunity that's paid, that can lead to meaningful employment, and that can offer a pathway to the middle class. If we could close that completion rate gap, that could meaningfully change the supply of construction workers in the near future.”
Just providing more up-front information to apprenticeship candidates might help. The work is hard, the hours are long—and the fact that so many drop out so early in their training suggests they didn't fully appreciate what they were getting into. Support programs could also help ensure that apprentices have what they need to make it through the pipeline.
Raising the ceiling to increase capacity for more apprentices is going to require more significant work. It's often not just a question of funding, but of time—and of safety. Apprenticeship mentors are also on the clock with their own work to do. And state laws often sharply limit how many apprentices they can look after at any one time. Amending those laws to allow mentors to oversee two apprentices instead of one would double capacity. But it has to be done with research and evidence that it wouldn't undermine safety on a busy worksite.
Even with those changes, though, apprenticeships alone will not meet America's need for construction workers. Currently, registered programs produce around 35,000 new workers a year, researchers found. Unregistered programs might double that. Community colleges and technical schools add tens of thousands more. So does immigration. Add them all up, and the nation still falls around 250,000 workers short of its estimated need.
RAND's paper began with a question that more people should consider: Will apprenticeships and other career pathways produce enough workers to build America's future? “The answer,” researchers wrote, “is a resounding 'no.'” To build that future, they concluded, the U.S. must first find a way to build up its construction workforce.
