An “academics only” approach to skill development has failed; it’s time to consider apprenticeship programs as well.
“…The 2016 election heightened the nation’s awareness of the economic woes of many American workers, especially blue-collar workers lacking a college degree. Wage stagnation, while worsened by the slow recovery from the Great Recession, is not a new trend. Men’s long-term earnings have stagnated with each passing cohort from those entering the workforce in 1967 to those entering in 1983. (Women’s earnings increased 59 percent over the period, but from a low base.) Another concern about declining opportunities in America is the erosion of middle-class jobs due to some still debated combination of outsourcing and automation.
Commentators and political factions blame these labor market problems on everything from bad trade deals, to declines in manufacturing jobs, to corporate greed, to outsourcing, to an uncompetitive tax and regulatory environment, to lax immigration policy. But there is another contributing factor that receives less attention: the weaknesses of secondary, postsecondary, and job-training systems in preparing students for well-paid jobs and rewarding careers.
U.S. researchers too often equate “skills” with years of schooling, completion of degrees, or scores on tests of math and verbal capabilities. In their well-known book, The Race Between Education and Technology, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz argue that increases in educational attainment have been too slow to yield healthy economic growth and reduce wage inequality. This view of skills is one driver of the expansion of higher education spending over recent decades. In 2014, the United States spent $27,900 per full-time equivalent student in postsecondary education, 81 percent more than the OECD average of $16,400…”
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/10/17/the-virtue-of-aprenticeship/
