Long stigmatized as “junior,” community colleges might seem like an unlikely source of talent for major tech companies. Yet, increasingly, some of the biggest tech giants are turning to these two-year schools to find the skilled workers they desperately need.

“Community colleges are just absolutely key,” in companies’ search for new tech talent, says Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of a recent report on the future of work. Tech companies like Amazon, Google and IBM have all caught on, he adds, and the trend of using community colleges to establish talent pipelines for tech companies large and small is “taking off across the country.”

Americans are burdened with about $1.4 trillion in student loan debt. One in four has a low wage job, which is by far the highest proportion of any advanced economy. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of thousands of open positions in the U.S. in fields like cybersecurity, cloud computing, computer programming, data science, tech support and skilled manufacturing. In many of these fields, the “skills gap” between available candidates and open positions is only projected to grow. In the U.S. there are already half a million core technical workers in the high tech industry who do not have a bachelor’s degree.

Borrowing a page from the construction and manufacturing industries, the tech giants are setting up apprenticeships, new certifications and even degrees. These are exactly the sort of programs encouraged by President Trump’s June 2017 executive order that sought to make it easier for companies to set up Germany-style apprenticeship programs, though their genesis for the most part predates his presidency.

Tuition costs at community colleges are typically less than half those of an in-state four year institution. As a result they tend to attract low-income students and members of racial minorities, another reason tech giants—which are lately being held accountable for their poor diversity numbers—are interested in them.