If Americans are to embrace apprenticeships, I believe coveted Silicon Valley companies, financial institutions, hospitals, and law firms must hire graduates who train outside of full-time academic programs.
Indeed, the director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, Anthony Carneval, doubts that Donald Trump can meet his apprenticeship goal given that “the model in America is ‘high school to Harvard.’”
At one time, America’s most celebrated citizens trained entirely outside of college, such as Abraham Lincoln, who studied to be a lawyer with the help of local attorney offices. But, as college became the default path to top professions in the 20th century, apprenticeships fell out of favor with America’s upwardly mobile culture.
In order to understand a way forward, I think it helps to understand that it’s possible for a country to have a system of apprenticeships for all types of careers and also investigate the historical reasons why American high skill professions shifted away from apprenticeships in the first place.
Read the full article about how history explains America's struggle to revive apprenticeships by Greg Ferenstein at Brookings.