Although apprenticeship programs in the United States are largely private systems that are paid for largely by program sponsors, the National Apprenticeship Act of 1937 authorizes and directs the Secretary of Labor to formulate and promote labor standards that safeguard the welfare of apprentices. The responsibility for formulating and promoting these standards resides with OATELS. OATELS had a staff of about 176 full-time equivalencies and an annual appropriation of about $21 million in 2004. In addition, because of budgetary constraints, OATELS officials do not expect resources to increase. At the national level, OATELS can register and deregister apprenticeship programs (i.e., give or take away federal recognition), issue nationally recognized, portable certificates to individuals who have completed registered programs, plan appropriate outreach activities targeted to attract women and minorities, and promote new apprenticeship programs to meet workforce needs. In addition to this national role, OATELS directly oversees individual apprenticeship programs in 23 states. In these states, the director for the state’s apprenticeship system and other program staff are federal employees who monitor individual apprenticeship programs for quality and their provision of equal opportunity. Labor can give authority to states to oversee their own apprenticeship programs if the state meets certain requirements. Labor has given this authority to 27 states, the District of Columbia, and three territories. In these states, which we refer to as council-monitored, the federal government is not responsible for monitoring individual apprenticeship programs; instead, the state is. It does so through state apprenticeship councils. OATELS does, however, conduct two types of reviews to determine how well the state fulfills its responsibilities. Quality reviews determine, in part, conformance with prescribed federal requirements concerning state apprenticeship laws, state council composition, and program registration, cancellation and deregistration provisions. Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) reviews assess the conformity of state EEO plans, affirmative action activities, record-keeping procedures, and other activities with federal EEO regulations. In addition to these reviews, OATELS may also provide state agencies with federal staff to assist in day- to-day operations. The number and type of construction apprenticeship programs are distributed differently across federally- and council-monitored states. Council-monitored states not only have more programs, but these programs are more likely to be jointly sponsored by employers and unions than sponsored by employers alone. On average, a construction apprenticeship program in federally-monitored states trains about 17 apprentices and in council-monitored states trains about 20. Beyond this average, it’s important to note that there can be great variation among programs, with some having over 400 participants and others 1 or 2. Figure 1 identifies states where programs are federally- and council- monitored. Both the federal and council-monitored states collect data on the individual programs they oversee. Labor maintains a large database called the Registered Apprenticeship Information System (RAIS) and collects information about individual programs, apprentices, and sponsors for apprenticeships in the 23 states where it has direct oversight and in 8 council-monitored states that have chosen to report into this system. The other council-monitored states, 20 in total, maintain their own data and collect various pieces of information on apprenticeship systems. Labor does collect aggregate data on apprentices and programs from these states. In all states, individuals can enter the construction trades without completing formal apprenticeship programs, but many construction workers, particularly those working in highly skilled occupations that require extensive training, such as the electrical, carpentry, and plumbing trades, receive their training though registered apprenticeship programs. To complete their programs, apprentices must meet requirements for on- the-job training and classroom instruction that must meet the minimum standards for the trade as recognized by Labor or the state apprenticeship council. Programs in some trades, for example, commercial electricity, may take 5 years to complete but programs to train laborers may only take a year. Beginning apprentices’ wages generally start at about 40 percent of the wage of someone certified in a particular trade and rise to about 90 percent of that wage near completion. Apprentices’ contracts with their program sponsors specify a schedule of wage increases. Although OATELS is responsible for overseeing thousands of apprenticeship programs in the states where it has direct oversight, it reviews few of these programs each year. Also, while its apprenticeship database collects much information about individual participants and programs, Labor hasn’t used these data to systematically generate program performance indicators such as completion rates. As a result, it lacks information that would allow it to identify poorly performing programs and adjust its oversight accordingly. Furthermore, despite many technical upgrades, Labor’s database hasn’t provided information that meets the needs of federal apprenticeship directors or the needs of other stakeholders. OATELS has reviewed very few of the apprenticeship programs in the states where it has direct oversight. Federal apprenticeship directors in these states reported they conducted 379 quality reviews in 2004, covering only about 4 percent of the programs under their watch. These reviews are done to determine, for example, whether sponsors have provided related instruction and on-the-job training hours in accordance with the standards for the program and whether wages reflected actual time in the program. The number of reviews conducted varied across states. On average, 22 quality reviews per state were conducted, but one director reported conducting as many as 67 reviews while another reported conducting no reviews at all. In addition, programs in council-monitored states were almost twice as likely as programs in federally-monitored states to have been reviewed within 3 years. (See fig. 2.) Several federal officials said over the past several years they had placed primary emphasis on registering new programs and recruiting more apprentices, particularly in nontraditional areas such as childcare and health. In addition, they told us it was not possible to do more reviews in part because of limited staff. In addition to having fewer reviews, apprenticeships in federally- monitored states had fewer staff dedicated to monitoring activities than council-monitored states. In 2004, each staff person in a federally monitored state was responsible, on average, for about 2,000 apprentices, according to federal program directors; to put this in context, case loads of monitors in federally-monitored states were almost twice as large as those in council-monitored states. In federally-monitored states, on average there were about 2.5 staff to monitor programs, less than one-third the average in council-monitored states. Labor’s practice of assigning federal staff to monitor programs in 18 of the council-monitored states rather than to programs in federally-monitored states compounded differences in staff resources. Directors in council-monitored states reported that at least two federal employees, on average, monitored programs in their jurisdiction. As important as the number of staff, is how they spent their time. About a half of the staff in federally-monitored states spent 40 percent or more of their time in the field performing monitoring, oversight, and providing related technical assistance, according to federal program directors whereas one-half of the staff in council-monitored states spent about 70 percent or more in the field. Although Labor collects information to compute completion rates and track participants who do not complete programs in the time expected, it does not use these data to focus its oversight efforts on programs with poor performance. During a site visit in a federally-monitored state, a monitor showed us how she computed cancellation rates by hand for apprentices in programs that she felt were not doing an adequate job of training apprentices to see if her hypotheses were correct. In the absence of performance information, directors and staff in federally-monitored states reported that a variety of factors dictated which programs to review. These included size, newness, location, date of the last review, sponsor’s cooperativeness, as well as the location of staff resources. In addition to not using program data to target reviews, Labor has not collected and consistently entered into its database information about why apprentices cancel out of programs, although its database was designed to include such information and having it could help target reviews. Officials told us that voluntary cancellation or transfers to another program were at times associated with program quality, while other nonvoluntary reasons, such as illness or military service, were not. Currently, recording the reason for an apprentice’s cancellation in the database is an optional field. We found that no reason was recorded for 60 percent of the cancellations and the remaining 40 percent did not effectively capture the reasons for leaving. Of the 18 reasons entered, the most common reasons were “Unknown,” “Voluntarily Quit,” “Unsatisfactory Performance,” “Discharged/Released,” and “Cancelled with the Occupation,” some of which did not provide useful information to target reviews. Also, other entries were close duplicates of one another, such as “left for related employment” and “left for other employment.” Labor also treats as optional data entries for its equal employment opportunity reviews: including the date of the last review, compliance status, status of corrective actions, and other information that would improve the efficiency of managing reviews. As a result, such data were available for about 5 percent of programs in Labor’s database in fiscal year 2004. Without this information, it is more difficult to determine when programs had their last EEO review and to readily identify programs with known problems. Despite many technical upgrades, Labor’s database hasn’t provided information that meets the needs of its federal directors or the needs of other stakeholders. While acknowledging that Labor’s database has been updated and improved, 22 out of the 23 directors of apprenticeship programs and their monitoring staff have expressed dissatisfaction with the present system.