Partnerships between community colleges and employers to create apprenticeships have been around for decades. These traditionally have covered fields like the building trades--electrical, construction and others--as well as heavy manufacturing like the automobile industry. Inspired partly by a new federal apprenticeship consortium--and $175 million in grants doled out to 46 colleges and consortiums--the variety of such apprenticeships has expanded considerably to include fields such as culinary, healthcare, insurance, information technology and even marine engineering. The Registered Apprenticeship College Consortium (RACC), announced by Vice President Joe Biden in 2014 at the American Association of Community Colleges' annual convention, already includes more than 220 community colleges, according to John Ladd, project administrator at the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), which is running the consortium and its accompanying competitive grant program along with the U.S. Department of Education. Ladd has said that the DOL is happy to see such rapid growth in such a short amount of time, and this project has helped to lift up and equate apprenticeship as a post-secondary pathway. More efforts to align apprenticeship with postsecondary education are being seen. The American Apprenticeship Grants available through the program were announced in September and began flowing Oct. 1. "Through this project the strong role that community colleges can play in this effort can be seen through the number of grants that were awarded to community colleges, or where community colleges were a significant partner," Ladd says. Ladd also says that he hopes those grants become the fuel and the incubators for the next generation of activity in this space. In addition to the grant program, the RACC, comprising employers, labor-management groups and colleges, shares best practices among the thousands of apprenticeship articulation agreements between colleges and employers, and sets a standard among members for accepting the college - credit value of apprenticeship completion certificates. To date, Ladd says the consortium has seen a mix of colleges that already had been involved with local employer-based apprenticeships and "saw this as a natural next step," and others who "hadn't been doing something like this but decided to move in this direction," to create a new pathway for adult learners.