America's Workforce

In early 1998, the United States is enjoying an economic boom that has lasted, with a few minor downturns, for more than fifteen years. The combination of increasing productivity, rapid job growth and low inflation have made this county the world's economic powerhouse.

But these good times may be coming to an end, due to a shortage of qualified young workers to fill the job opportunities that are being created. The Chairman of The Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, has expressed his concern that this shortage may soon lead to wage-driven inflation. Dr. Norbert Walker, the Chief Economist of the Deutsche Bank Group has gone so far as to suggest that the U. S. loosen its immigration laws to admit more German workers, since we are so evidently incapable of training our own.

In other words, the educational problems we have heard so much about over the past decade or two are now beginning to have serious economic consequences.

Background

One of the most controversial issues in American k-12 education is the process known as "tracking." This is the procedure of dividing students into different groups or 'tracks,' most often one track for college-bound students and another for the non-college bound. Nearly all industrial countries have some form of tracking built into their educational system. But in the U.S., a sentiment has grown up that tracking discriminates against the non-college-bound, and is therefore unfair. To accuse an educational reform of being a form of "tracking" is usually to kill it, regardless of its any other merits.

What is less commonly understood is that U.S. high school students are subjected to a particularly vicious form of "tracking" as soon as they leave school, whether with or without diploma. Those tracking directly on to college will find counselors, recruiters, job fairs, interviews, scholarships, grants and other kinds of support and financial assistance ready to help them. For the rest, their track leads them out of the school to the sidewalk. They're on their own now, most of them with minimal skills, poor work habits and very little to qualify them for work at more than minimum wage. Our educational system turns out millions of these lost youths every Spring, with seasonal regularity.

Millions of other young people choose college without any desire for more classroom education, only because they don't have any attractive alternatives. They have no idea what subjects they want to take or what they want to do with their lives. Many of them drop or flunk out of college after a few semesters and join their former classmates.Together, they drift in and out of low-paying, uninteresting jobs. They often move out of their parents' house, then back in again, unable to support themselves with the skills they have.

Of those who do go to a four-year college, only about 50% will graduate within six years. And the majority of all young people who go to college can only do so by taking out student loans, often leaving them deeply in debt. These can be difficult to pay off even for those who graduate, and more so for those who do not.

Eventually, in their late twenties or early thirties, most of these young people begin to settle down. By that time, they have managed to pick up a trade or craft, or have gone to a community college for training in a marketable skill. Meanwhile, society has lost the benefits of the contributions these young folks could have made, and has had to pick up the tab for having let them wander about aimlessly, with no one to teach them discipline, responsibility or a marketable skill.

In the U.S., we look at this state of affairs as though it were somehow normal. It's not. Virtually every other industrialized country has some way of seeing to it that their young people begin learning a trade or crafts as soon as they finish their secondary education. The most common 'track' for the non-college-bound student in other countries is some kind of formal apprenticeship training.

Apprenticeships

The basic idea of apprenticeships is ancient and very simple. A master craftsman takes on one or more young people as an assistant in his work, and in return, agrees to teach him the skills of his trade. In the industrial world, the master craftsman usually works for a corporation. Today the apprentices are paid a training wage of about one-third the wage of a regular worker, but receive full medical coverage and other benefits. Most young people live at home during their apprenticeship.

Apprentices' practical training today is often supplemented with classroom work in special schools and training centers, usually for one or two days per week. In Germany, this combination of work under the direction of a Meister and classroom training constitutes the famous "Dual System," which is given credit for much of Germany's industrial success.

The apprentices begin with the simplest and most basic jobs and advanceto more complex ones. At the end of a three to three-and-a-half year period, and after passing both practical and academic examinations, the apprentices are officially certified as journeymen (Gesellen) in their trade. They then enter the job market as full-fledged, experienced workers. At this point, they are usually in their late teens, and are able to command the wages of a skilled craftsman. This is how young people learned to throw pots in ancient Egypt, and how they are learning to make BMW's, puff pastry andhouses, and to manage hotels and offices in Germany today.

After certification, and several years experience, a journeyman may elect to go through the extra training and certification to become a Meister. Not uncommonly, he or she may choose to spend some years in a college or university‹experience and maturity making the idea of formal training more attractive. In Germany, it is altogether possible for a person under 30 to become a meister, an age at when many American young people are getting their first steady job.

The advantages of an apprenticeship system over adolescent drift are many. Young people are brought into the workforce immediately after secondary school,without losing years of productivity and personal growth. They learn real, marketable skills; they receive further education in both job-related fields and in the liberal arts , and they are paid for their work. Society has gained the services of a trained workman, and the new journeymen has a skill and a sense of self-worth that is more than touchie-feelie. He or she can really do something, and do it well, both in their own eyes and those of their peers and employers.

As important as anything else, these young people have become accustomed to associating and working with adults. The pervasive and usually pernicious effects of the "youth culture," are adulterated, and with that culture go many of the behavioral problems we associate with the bored young people who "hang out" around the U.S.

Apprenticeships in the U.S.?

For decades, much of the academic and educational establishment has been concerned with the school-to-careerproblem. Some form of apprenticeship program is one of the most often proposed solutions, and there have been many conferences, papers, committees and studies discussing ways to create such a system in the U.S. But doing so is not an easy task, even though nearly everyone who has studied apprenticeship systems is convinced of their merits.

The biggest single obstacle to the creation of an American apprenticeship system is that most U.S. students, parents and employers have never met a teen-aged apprentice, or known anyone who has been through an apprenticeship program at a young age. (Apprenticeships for adults are not uncommon in some fields.) Until the advantages of this kind of post-secondary training can be demonstrated to a critical mass of the people involved, the whole idea will remain in the realm of theory. But once that happens, we believe, a youth apprenticeship system will spring into being virtually overnight, driven by customer demand.

Other barriers to an American apprenticeship system include:

1. The Free-Rider Problem - It costs a company money and time to train an apprentice. Companies worry that after they have invested in their training, apprentices will go elsewhere to work, perhaps even to the competition.

This is, of course, a real problem, but it is not one unique to apprentices and journeymen. In America's fluid job market, companies are constantly hiring away each others' talented people.

American companies today spend billions of dollars training and retraining their young employees. The real question is whether an apprenticeship system is a cost-effective method of doing that training. The experience of many countries suggest that it is. But, as we have said, nothing will be so convincing to management as actually having young graduates of an apprenticeship system in their work force‹hence the importance of pilot programs and other small-scale experiments.

2. Parents & students alike have become so accustomed to the current system, in which the only alternatives are going to college or going nowhere, that they are determined their child will get a college education, no matter what! Students have the same attitude, since at present there really is no good alternative in the U. S.

In the next few years, somewhere around 60% of the jobs available early in the next century will not require a B.A. What they will require, however, is a good work ethic and specialized job-specific skills--exactly the kind of training a good apprenticeship system provides.

If a young person really does want the kind of training a university offers, there are many of them available and a multitude of ways to finance the costs. But for the young person who wants to become a fine carpenter or auto-mechanic or pastry chef or tool-and-die maker, apprenticeships are the royal road to success.

Bottom-Up Rather Than Top-Down