-Worried about paying for college?

If you're an apprentice, you may not have to.

You get paid to learn.

During his 2018 campaign, Governor Gavin Newsom said he would create 500,000 new apprenticeships in the decade after taking office.

He said it's a way to help boost California's economy.

Research shows it's also a way that students can get high-paying jobs.

So far, firefighters lead the pack, with nearly 18,000 new apprentices since Newsom's inauguration in January 2019.

That's according to Adele Burns, Deputy Chief of the state's Division of Apprenticeship Standards.

For the California Firefighter Joint Apprenticeship Committee, or Cal-JAC, creating these apprenticeships requires buy-in from fire departments and unions, as well as the state, which subsidizes apprenticeship training, just like it subsidizes public colleges and universities.

-We have these two openings, you'll take a chainsaw, open them up [crosstalk] -Today, the majority of professional firefighters in California are trained through apprenticeship programs.

The pay varies, but in large, fire departments, such as Los Angeles County, apprentices can make nearly $73,000 a year.

Once they finish apprenticeship training, they get a raise.

The state reimburses the departments for a piece of the total training costs, typically about $10 an hour for each hour of training.

In addition to its hourly reimbursement, which is provided to almost any apprenticeship program, California allocated more than $130 million for its apprenticeships in the last budget year.

Of all the new apprentices in California, around three-quarters have come from either the building trades, such as carpentry, or from firefighters.

The remaining apprenticeships are scattered across various industries, such as healthcare and education.

For CalMatters, I'm Adam Echelman.