President Trump wants Americans to expand
apprenticeships nationwide to draw people back into the workforce. It's a
worthy goal, especially if it means fewer college students.
This week,
President Trump is expected to make the expansion of apprenticeship
programs the centerpiece of his administration’s labor policy. The
president will visit a technical school in Wisconsin on Tuesday and give a
policy speech at the Labor Department on Wednesday that will flesh out his
proposal. But, please, hold “The Apprentice” jokes, if you can.
The apprentice model, in which younger workers gain specialized
skills by learning directly from veterans in a given trade through hands-on
experience, has a long and venerable history in America—not just on Trump’s
erstwhile reality TV show—and it’s one that we need now more than ever.
Currently
there are millions of unfilled jobs for skilled workers across the country at a
time when the labor force participation rate—the share of Americans actually
working or looking for a job—is hovering at a four-decade low.
That alone makes expansion of apprenticeship programs a sound policy. Details
of Trump’s plan aren’t out yet, but the administration reportedly likes the
existing programs because they’re funded largely by companies that do the
training or by labor unions, and could be expanded without a major increase in
federal spending.
These programs also serves what should be a larger national goal:
reducing the number of young people seeking degrees at four-year colleges. For
too long, Americans have prized college education as the sole pathway to a
respectable middle-class life. Meanwhile, trade and vocational schools have
gained a kind of stigma as the sort of places blue-collar and working-class
types turn to as a last resort before becoming hooked on welfare and opioids.
That’s nonsense. Simply put, not everyone has to go to college for
four years to have a productive, fulfilling career or gain entry to the middle
class. For many people, especially working-class Americans in rural and
semi-rural areas, college isn’t a realistic option but trade or vocational
school is. Beyond that, keeping more of America’s youth out of our
hopelessly politicized institutions of higher learning, and putting them to
work as skilled laborers, might do the country real and lasting good.
For Many,
Apprenticeships Are a Better Deal Than College
If Trump
wants to reinvigorate the middle class, supporting vocational and
apprenticeship programs should be a priority, just as it was for the Obama
administration. With unemployment last month hovering around 4.3
percent, its lowest since 2001, businesses have been complaining they can’t
find workers with the requisite skills to fill vacancies, even as the number of apprentices and programs has increased in recent
years.
There are
myriad reasons for this scarcity of workers. Partly to blame is the
aforementioned stigma of vocational and trade schools, but it’s also partly
because we’ve come to believe that if you want a decent job you need to have a
bachelor’s degree, even if it’s in, say, bowling management or puppetry.
Hence, a
higher education glut. Last year, some 13 million Americans were enrolled in
four-year colleges versus only about a half-million apprentices in training.
One of the big differences between the two groups, besides what they’re
learning, is the amount of debt they’re carrying. The average college graduate
in 2016 now carries more than $30,000 in
student loans—and that’s a conservative estimate.
By contrast, most apprenticeship programs are sponsored by
industries that want to hire skilled workers. They need these workers so much
they’re willing to pay them while they’re learning the skills of the trade, and
the vast majority have a job waiting for them—with an average salary of
$60,000—when they complete their apprenticeship.
The Cultural Case For
Questioning College for All
Beyond the
economic arguments for more apprentices and fewer undergrads, there’s also a
compelling cultural one. In case you haven’t noticed, many of our colleges and
universities have become little more than centers for left-wing political
indoctrination while actual education has become a secondary priority. Students
do less academic work, have more free time on their
hands, and paradoxically get more A grades than their parents’
generation did.
The American
Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a nonpartisan higher-education
organization that publishes data on the quality of America’s colleges and
universities, publishes an annual survey of college curricula titled, “What Will They Learn?” Its 2015 survey found that basic
subjects like U.S. government, American history, literature, mathematics, and
economics “have become mere options on far too many campuses.” As a result,
students have “great gaps in their knowledge,” in part because so few schools
have required courses in fundamental subject areas like U.S. history or
government.
The transformation of American higher education into a massive
political enterprise focused on churning out progressive activists has been
decades in the making. But in recent years it’s picked up steam. One can see it
in the spate of campus protests every time a conservative is invited to speak,
or the “occupation” of college buildings by minority student groups demanding
administrators cater to their specific curricular and administrative whims.
Most recently, students at Evergreen State College in Washington
have been freaking out ever since a white biology professor had the temerity to
object to a college-sponsored “Day of Absence,” when white people were supposed
to stay home. The entire affair is important to understand what’s happening in
American higher education.
The Evergreen tradition, dating from the 1970s, held that on the
Day of Absence, ethnic-minority students, professors, and staff would stay home
to remind the white majority how essential minorities are to campus life. But
this year, the school’s director of the First Peoples Multicultural Advising
Services office (which is a real thing at Evergreen) announced that the Day of
Absence, set for April 14, would be inverted: white people would be
“encouraged” to stay off campus while minority students and faculty held
“community-building” workshops on school grounds.
When
professor Bret Weinstein objected in a private email to the administrator that
the reformulated Day of Absence amounted to a “show of force, an act of
oppression in and of itself,” and students found out about his objections, all
hell broke loose. Writing in The Weekly Standard, Charlotte Allen describes the
ensuing “student protests”:
At Evergreen State that has actually meant:
invading a professor’s class to taunt him with charges of racism; occupying the
library and the college president’s office while the campus police, ordered to
stand down, barricade themselves in their headquarters; delivering F-bombs,
derision, and assorted demands—firing the police chief, confiscating the guns
of the rest of the police, setting up mandatory race-oriented ‘cultural
competency’ training for the faculty, excusing the protesters from their
end-of-term assignments, and providing free gumbo for a radical potluck—to the
cornered president, George Bridges; and creating such a threatening atmosphere
for the professor in question, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein (another
target of the firing demands), that he had to hold his class on May 25 in a
public park in downtown Olympia. If a photo posted on Instagram is to be taken
at face value, it has also meant wielding baseball bats and posing ominously on
the balconies of student apartments.
Details
about what the Trump administration has in mind for apprenticeships are still
scant, but expanding these programs, shifting more students into them and away
from four-year colleges, is a sound policy goal. The last thing the country
needs right now are more twenty-somethings with bachelor degrees from
left-leaning schools who don’t know who won the Civil War or which country
America defeated to gain its independence. To borrow a line from Sen. Marco Rubio, we
need more plumbers and fewer philosophers—or at least fewer philosophy
students.
John is a
senior correspondent for The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.
