Are Apprenticeships an Option for America’s Youth?
A college education is not everyone’s cup of tea. The United States needs other ways to instill job skills in the younger generation. Could apprenticeships be the answer?
The German apprenticeship system is sometimes viewed as an appealing alternative to the U.S. focus on higher education as a pathway to jobs. But replicating the German model in the United States would require huge — and, for some, hugely unpopular — changes to the structure of the economy, and may not be such a good idea.
In her new study for the Cato Institute, Apprenticeships: Useful Alternative, Tough to Implement, Gail Heriot, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, encourages apprenticeships in America, and suggests solutions to pitfalls new apprenticeship programs may face. With the belief that, while difficult to implement, apprenticeships could be useful in a rapidly changing labor market, Herlot outlines various ways to encourage apprenticeships and successfully build an American-style apprenticeship model.
Heriot goes on to contend that traditional colleges and universities are ill-suited to predict future job trends and prepare its students for rising job demands, suggesting instead that alternatives such as apprenticeships may help students succeed in a changing labor market.
Traditional higher education curriculum is catered more toward what faculty members are interested in teaching rather than what skills students may find most useful in a rapidly changing job market. Colleges and universities are designed to resist external and internal political pressure, through tenure, while public subsidies insulate them from market discipline, making such institutions unfit to respond to changes in the labor market.
Difficulty in predicting changes in the job market is less likely to occur with apprenticeships where students are working directly with teachers who are in-touch with the realities facing their profession.
While implementing apprenticeships, employers may face the problem of the ‘runaway apprentice’: an apprentice who quits after the employer invests in him, but before the apprentice is useful enough to make the employer’s investment worthwhile. One possible solution Heriot suggests to this problem is to ensure that apprentices can take out a loan to pay for their own instruction, thus creating the right incentives for both teachers and students to invest in an apprenticeship program. Other solutions include providing yearly bonuses or enacting non-compete agreements enforced by the courts.
Modest public subsidies could also mitigate the ‘runaway apprentice’ problem and avoid the need for a large bureaucracy. For example, a $5,000 voucher could be funded and administered at the state level for a two-year apprenticeship program where the employer substantially increases the apprentice’s salary from one year to the next. Both parties could split the $5,000 at the end of the program, creating incentives for the employer to impart valuable skills to the apprentice, and for the apprentice to complete the program.
“Creating apprenticeship opportunities is going to require some real thought,” concludes Heriot. “Encouraging apprenticeships as an alternative or supplement to higher education, which is clearly serving many people poorly or not at all, is certainly an idea worth pursuing.”
