I didn’t spend much time in college, myself. I learned in the first week that I’d be expected to read about something, then talk about something, then read more about it, and talk more about it, and never actually DO anything. Within a few months, I’d put my hand on the first precision metalworking machinery of my life, and discovered not just an aptitude, but a lucrative lifetime career.
In last week’s column I wrote about the massive influx of federal spending that will energize and reinvigorate the industrial sector in the United States. To me, it follows automatically that industry will reinvigorate the trade school and apprenticeship traditions in America.
Both the Trump and Obama administrations have leaned into apprenticeships through grant funding and new federal opportunities. Policy think tanks and national labor unions endorse the importance of young people’s return to practical work, and major employers agree.
Since the Middle Ages, apprenticeships have been a vehicle to young adulthood and economic independence for working class young people, but have fallen out of favor with Americans. But like trade schools and vocational training, apprenticeships came to be thought of as markers of academic failure, rather than professional preparation. This shift in opinion was not a natural migration of the market, but the practical impact of policy shifts that artificially extended adolescence and excluded young people from paid, professional work.
Compulsory schooling laws, particularly for those over 14, stalled young people’s preparation for ‘real world’ jobs, while labor laws prevented them from gaining actual experience. First the overly restrictive public high school, and later college - another institutional, heavily politicized suspension of real-world conditions - came to be seen as mandatory. In the 1960s, when fewer than 1 in 5 Americans held college degrees, the difference in earning potential of the average college graduate and the average high school dropout was enormous. But when the supply of bachelors’ degrees increased, employers sorted through applicants without any real markers for how graduates would perform in their companies and factories. As college degrees were fetishized, a kind of academic inflation allowed employers to demand masters’ degrees for positions that had barely required a bachelor’s. The ability to suspend real-world experience became the mark of diligence and quality, but a terrible predictor of preparedness for any given industry.
Apprenticeships offer not only skills training to young people, but meaningful connections to authentic adult experiences. Stereotypically angst-ridden and apathetic young people, given a meaningful outlet for their unparalleled energy, would gain much more from an introduction to skilled labor than another year of algebra and English literature. A pathway to economic independence, as well as personal fulfillment, could make “it gets better” a literal lifeline rather than a patronizing lecture.
Employers, meanwhile, gain a pipeline of enthusiastic potential employees, and can train up apprentices with exactly the complex practical skills necessary for increasingly complex industrial tasks. Through practical learning and dedication, students become vital assets who can command significant starting salaries, or start businesses of their own.
Parents readily accept the developmental potential of music lessons and team sports as supplements to school education, while counseling children not to get too invested because “you’ll never make a living doing that.” When they show an early interest in trying out careers, dressing up as doctors and firefighters, we find it adorable. By the time they can fully benefit from apprenticeship, we view work as a distraction from education. At a time when they’re forming the habits to last a lifetime, we treat as extraneous the kind of things they might actually make a living doing.
Apprenticeship was once at the heart of American economic mobility, before youth labor restrictions and a longer compulsory school career prolonged adolescence and deprived young people from the fulfillment and rewards of gainful work. The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts nearly ten million skilled manufacturing jobs will be vacant in the next decade. Apprenticeships will help address this yawning skills gap and provide economic mobility to a generation drowning in college debt.
Revisions to national high school curricula, career counseling programs, college accreditation, and scholarship funding can increase student access and employer investment in apprenticeships. Apprenticeships can, in turn, revolutionize our workforce with exactly the kind of practical skills and critical thinking that can only be gained by actual - not academic - work experiences.
