By Adam Vitcavage
Across the country, higher education leaders are asking a hard but necessary question: How do we ensure education actually leads to opportunity—especially for learners who can’t afford to step away from work to earn a credential?
At SUNY Empire State University, leaders like Maureen Kroning and Krystal Ripa are part of the team that is answering that question with a clear and powerful response: apprenticeship.
SUNY Empire has long been rooted in partnerships, but in recent years the institution has sharpened its focus on workforce development as a core part of its mission. As employers across New York face talent shortages—particularly in healthcare and public service—SUNY Empire recognized that traditional education pathways alone were not enough.
That realization led them to apprenticeship, and with great guidance from colleagues in the community colleges and the networks around us, they put the model into practice.
“We started paying closer attention to what CareerWise was doing,” shared the SUNY Empire team. “This helped us to realize we had real capacity in the apprenticeship space—and that apprenticeship could work in places where traditional models weren’t working.”
Krystal Ripa, Director of Workforce at SUNY Empire, brings more than a decade of experience building pathways and pipelines in health education. Her work is deeply data-driven and grounded in equity. With declining population trends and growing workforce gaps, she sees apprenticeship as both a workforce solution and an economic mobility strategy.
“Apprenticeship removes barriers,” Krystal explains. “Less debt. More access. The opportunity to keep working while learning. That matters—especially for first-generation students and working adults.”
SUNY Empire recently captured this vision in their blog, “The Equity Engine: How Apprenticeships Open Doors to Opportunity,” positioning apprenticeship as a model that aligns employer needs with learner success while dismantling long-standing structural barriers.
For Maureen Kroning, who splits her time between workforce innovation and serving as a visiting professor of nursing, the urgency is especially clear.
“We need apprenticeship to meet the critical shortage of healthcare workers,” Maureen says.
Nursing and healthcare education face a steep cliff: educators are required to hold advanced degrees and industry experience—often for significantly lower pay than clinical roles—leading to chronic staffing shortages and burnout. Apprenticeship offers a way forward, allowing professionals to stay connected to the workforce while teaching and training the next generation.
Beyond healthcare, SUNY Empire supports apprenticeship pathways in roles such as teacher assistants, project managers, workforce development specialists, human resources associates, community health workers, and direct support professionals—working closely with employers to ensure coursework aligns directly with on-the-job training.
A defining feature of SUNY Empire’s approach is that apprenticeships are employer-driven. SUNY Empire serves as the Related Technical Instruction (RTI) partner, intentionally “crosswalking” academic coursework with real workplace learning.
The result is a model where everyone benefits:
“There’s something powerful about learning inside the organization,” Maureen notes. “Even orientation alone creates value—but apprenticeship goes so much further. Employers are deeply invested, and apprentices feel that.”
SUNY Empire’s work reflects what CareerWise has long championed: apprenticeship as a modern, scalable solution that puts skills, equity, and opportunity at the center of education and employment.
As institutions like SUNY Empire step into this work, they are not just responding to workforce shortages—they are helping redesign systems so more people can thrive and become an active agent in their own economic mobility.
“The amount of lives these apprenticeships are going to touch is just incredible, and the opportunity to make a real difference with this model is undeniable,” Maureen says.
We couldn’t agree more.
