The Students Who Never Quite Joined

Business schools have every reason to celebrate the rise of apprenticeship programs. They have widened participation, made higher education more inclusive, dramatically improved graduate employability, strengthened partnerships with employers and created a model in which students can earn a salary while completing their degree. In countries such as France, where apprenticeship reached just over 1.05 million active students in 2024, it has become one of the defining success stories of business education.

Success, however, has a way of hiding what is no longer being measured.

Business schools monitor employment rates, salary progression, employer satisfaction and graduate outcomes with increasing sophistication. Yet one of the most valuable indicators of an institution’s long-term health rarely appears on a dashboard:

Do students actually develop a sense of belonging to the school?

For many apprenticeship students, the answer may be less obvious than institutions assume.

Speak candidly with apprentices and a striking pattern quickly emerges. They can describe their manager, their colleagues, their projects and the culture of their company in remarkable detail. Ask them about the school’s traditions, the communities they joined, the friendships they built outside the classroom or the moments that made them feel part of the institution, and the conversation often becomes noticeably quieter.

This is not because apprenticeship students are less committed or less engaged. Many are simultaneously meeting demanding academic and professional expectations, often carrying a heavier burden than traditional students. Yet that extraordinary investment does not necessarily translate into a stronger sense of belonging. The apprenticeship model has been designed exceptionally well to integrate students into professional life. But in doing so, it may unintentionally weaken something business schools have historically relied upon without ever having to design explicitly: a lasting sense of institutional belonging.

That matters because business schools do not simply produce graduates. They produce alumni. And the difference between the two may become one of the defining strategic challenges of the next decade.

APPRENTICESHIP – THE FLIP SIDE OF SUCCESS

The most visible strategic risk created by the growth of apprenticeship is financial. As these programs become more important within schools’ operating models, institutions also become more dependent on public funding mechanisms that can change quickly and are often shaped by political priorities. But alongside that visible exposure lies a quieter and potentially more enduring threat: the gradual erosion of students’ sense of belonging.

The symptom is easy to recognize. Apprentices often leave with a degree and strong professional experience, yet without ever developing a deep attachment to the institution that awarded the qualification. They are academically enrolled, professionally integrated and often highly employable. Emotionally, however, they can remain at the edge of the school community.

We argue that this erosion of belonging unfolds across three connected stages: when students choose the business school, while they move between school and company, and after graduation when the institution expects them to become engaged alumni.

The first stage begins before students even arrive on campus. In a traditional higher education model, applicants may choose a business school for its academic culture, faculty, values, international outlook, student life or the kind of community it represents. In an apprenticeship model, the calculation can become far more instrumental. What matters most is often whether the program provides access to a desirable company placement and whether the school can help secure it.

That changes the psychological contract from the outset. The school is no longer selected primarily as a place of identity or affiliation, but as a gateway to employment. Instead of joining a community, students may feel they are purchasing access to an opportunity. The relationship begins with a promise of labor-market value rather than an invitation to become part of a community.

This distinction matters because belonging is shaped partly by the reasons students enter an institution in the first place. When expectations are mainly utilitarian, commitment is more likely to be directed towards the professional future the school unlocks than towards the institution itself. The erosion of belonging therefore does not necessarily begin once students are on campus. It may have started long before their first class.

The second stage unfolds during the program. Apprentices spend a substantial share of their time in the workplace rather than at school. This is precisely what makes the model professionally powerful, but it also reduces access to the ordinary experiences through which students traditionally become attached to an institution: informal conversations after class, student societies, campus events, international exchanges, shared rituals, cross-program friendships and the sense of progressing through school as part of a collective.

These experiences may appear peripheral because they rarely feature in a curriculum map. In reality, they are often where identity is formed. Students remember the late-night group project, the association they helped build, the competition they entered, the professor who stayed behind after class, or the friendships that crossed national and academic boundaries. None of these experiences appears on a transcript, yet together they create the emotional architecture of an institution.

For apprentices, that architecture is often more fully developed inside the company. Their mentors are colleagues. Their network is shaped by teams and managers. Their sense of progress is tied to projects, promotions and professional recognition. The employer becomes the place where they are known, trusted and given responsibility. The school remains the place where they complete the academic requirements attached to that professional journey.

The company becomes their primary community. The business school becomes the place where they earn their qualification.

This is not a criticism of apprenticeship students. It is the predictable result of a model designed primarily around employability rather than integration and community. Schools have become remarkably good at designing professional immersion. They have been far less deliberate about protecting institutional connection when students live between two worlds.

The third—and potentially most consequential—stage becomes visible only after graduation. Alumni engagement rarely appears out of nowhere. It is usually the continuation of a bond formed over years of student life: shared memories, collective experiences, friendships, traditions and pride in belonging to a particular institution. If that bond was never fully established, the school cannot simply manufacture it later through newsletters, networking events or fundraising appeals.

THE HIDDEN COSTS FOR BUSINESS SCHOOLS

For business schools, the erosion of belonging is not a minor side effect. It threatens one of the foundations of institutional strength: the capacity to create a community rather than merely deliver a degree. A school in which students are present only intermittently, and where attachment is driven mainly by access to employers, risks becoming transactional rather than communal.

That matters because business schools have historically offered more than academic training. For generations, they created identities as much as qualifications. Students did not simply graduate from an institution; they became part of it. They left with a professional label, a network and a sense of shared memory. Identity was never produced by curriculum alone. It was created through belonging.

Belonging should therefore be understood not as a soft student-experience issue, but as a strategic asset. It influences whether graduates recommend the school, recruit fellow alumni, return as mentors, contribute as guest speakers, support scholarships, open doors to employers or choose the institution again for executive education. These behaviors are rarely captured in the year of graduation, but they accumulate into network capital over decades.

The consequences also extend beyond alumni relations. A deeply connected graduate community strengthens recruitment because prospective students trust the testimony of alumni. It reinforces corporate partnerships because graduates carry the institution into their organizations. It supports reputation because alumni become informal advocates in markets where brand perception matters. Alumni engagement can also shape the indicators and perceptions that influence rankings, including career outcomes and the strength of the school’s network. And it can improve the educational experience itself, as engaged alumni provide internships, projects, speakers and mentoring for future cohorts.

If apprenticeship students develop their strongest professional identity inside their employer rather than their school, institutions may slowly weaken this strategic asset without immediately noticing. Employment outcomes can remain excellent. Employer satisfaction can rise. Enrollment can grow. Yet beneath those visible indicators, the school’s long-term network may be becoming thinner.

The irony is striking. Schools can report rising apprenticeship numbers, stronger employer partnerships and impressive graduate outcomes—all genuine achievements—while quietly depleting the relational capital on which their long-term reputation depends. The cost may remain invisible for years, only emerging later through weaker alumni participation, thinner mentoring networks and declining institutional advocacy.

Some of these consequences surface indirectly in today’s rankings. All of them shape tomorrow’s reputation.

There is also a risk to the distinctiveness of the business-school model itself. Schools increasingly compete in a market where curriculum, faculty profiles, career outcomes and even international opportunities are becoming easier to imitate. Knowledge is more accessible than ever, and artificial intelligence is accelerating that convergence. Employers are also becoming genuine providers of learning, further blurring the line between academic education and professional development.

In that environment, the value of a business school cannot rest solely on what it teaches. It must also rest on the relationships, identity and community it creates. Content can be replicated. Connection is far harder to copy.

BELONGING AS A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

This is not an argument against apprenticeship. It is one of the most important innovations in contemporary higher education. For many students, it represents the most accessible and financially sustainable route into higher education. It strengthens employability, broadens participation and brings business schools closer to the realities of industry. The question is not whether apprenticeship should continue. It clearly should.

The real question is whether schools have devoted as much attention to designing belonging as they have to designing employability.

Business schools have become remarkably good at designing employability. They now need to become equally intentional about designing belonging.

Integration cannot remain an unintended by-product of the educational model. It must become an explicit strategic objective—and, like other strategic objectives, it must be measured. That means creating real opportunities for apprentices to participate in the wider life of the institution, mixing cohorts more deliberately, redesigning extracurricular activities around divided schedules and ensuring that apprentices are visible not only in the classroom, but in the stories, rituals and leadership of the school.

It may also require schools to rethink how they measure success. Employment rates and salaries are necessary, but they are not sufficient. Institutions should ask whether apprentices build friendships beyond their immediate cohort, whether they participate in associations and events, whether they feel represented in the school’s culture, whether they can name the experiences that made them proud of the institution and whether they expect to remain connected after graduation.

Schools should also involve employers in that effort. Companies benefit when apprentices develop stronger peer networks, build relationships beyond their immediate workplace and gain a sense of purpose that extends beyond a single role. Employers can help by protecting time for campus activities, encouraging participation in school communities and recognizing that the educational experience is not confined to formal teaching days.

The challenge is not to recreate the traditional full-time student experience for apprentices. That would ignore the very features that make apprenticeship valuable. The challenge is to design a different form of belonging: one that reflects divided presence, integrates workplace and school identities and gives students meaningful reasons to see the institution as more than a provider of credentials.

This may become one of the most important areas of differentiation in business education. In a sector marked by strong institutional isomorphism, schools increasingly look alike in curriculum, rankings, faculty and career outcomes. What remains difficult to imitate is the depth of the connection between an institution and the people who pass through it.

The institutions that thrive over the next decade may not simply be those that produce the most employable graduates. They may be the ones that produce graduates who, years later, can still say with pride: this is my school.

A degree can be awarded in a single day. A sense of belonging takes years to build. If it is never built during the student experience, it is extraordinarily difficult to create retrospectively.

If business schools want apprenticeship to remain sustainable as part of their identity, they cannot rely on employability outcomes alone. They must design belonging as deliberately as they design curricula, careers and employer partnerships. Otherwise, they risk producing a generation of graduates who succeed in the labour market while never truly connecting to the institution that helped launch them.

Twenty years from now, no dean will regret having produced employable graduates. The deeper regret may be producing graduates who never felt the school was theirs.

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Benjamin Stevenin is the former Director of Business School Solutions and Partnerships at Times Higher Education. Hendrik Lohse is Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior @ EM Normandie Business School.

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