College up-close in 2022 doesn’t really resemble the “college” in our minds. It’s an increasingly flexible, adaptable and creative proposition.
Here’s a head-scratcher. Only about 37% of young adults complete a college degree. Yet college—in the traditional sense of a bachelor’s degree from a four-year institution of higher learning that a student pursues full time on campus—is still imaginatively linked with the supposed American Dream and assumed to be the one and only road to success. Now, the simultaneous crises of crushing student debt loads and the complexities of workforce shortages are prompting questions about the return on investment for the usual college path.
College up-close in 2022 doesn’t really resemble the “college” in our minds. It’s an increasingly flexible, adaptable and creative proposition. Increasingly, higher education institutions have had to create opportunities for students to earn credentials in “stackable” increments, through alternative routes such as paid apprenticeships, public-private partnerships or early college programs. The savviest students are letting industry, their K-12 public school system or a combination of the two cover some—or even all—of their college tuition costs.
These varied strategies reveal the efforts of a country to solve a multitude of challenges—for students, who will soon become an indebted and underpaid workforce; for employers and industries at large, standing off against a jaded population (cf., the ongoing Great Resignation); and for higher education institutions themselves, which are increasingly struggling to justify astronomical tuitions and which, according to studies, overestimate their debt-burdened graduates’ entry-level salaries by 100%.
If these strategies are any indication, those institutions may look to public universities as the bastions of progress toward a more equitable playing—or learning—field for the next generation of students. Here, we look at the struggles and successes of a few key strategies as they attempt to reshape the future of higher education.
In 2021, the U.S. Department of Labor found that there were over 85,000 new apprentices age 24 and younger. Still, Noel Ginsburg, founder and CEO of CareerWise Colorado and co-chair of the Advisory Committee on Apprenticeship, which works with the U.S. Department of Labor, still calls his a “nascent field,” whose potential to transform the American workplace and workforce is barely being tapped.
CareerWise, a modern youth apprenticeship company that connects students and employers, draws inspiration from Switzerland’s model of placing 70% of high school students in one of 230 vocational fields, from catering and agriculture to banking and insurance. Switzerland’s economy consistently ranks as one of the world’s most competitive, and its success can be partially attributed to this well-established integration of business and education. It turns out 16- and 17-year-olds might not be willing to make their beds, but they just might make an excellent employee.
The U.S.’s skilled-labor shortage, which CareerWise was created to address, was not a theoretical problem for Ginsburg. As owner of the manufacturing firm InterTech Plastics, he knew about it all too well.
Alumnus Kevin King came on during his senior year in high school and five years he’s an Automation Engineer there. He helped to design systems to make products cheaper to produce, enabling them to compete with Chinese manufacturers, while not sacrificing quality. As an entry-level apprentice, King earned just over $11 an hour. Now he’s salaried at $77,000-plus per year, and InterTech is paying for his bachelor’s degree in engineering, which he’s in no rush to complete.
“Honestly,” Ginsburg says, “it’s cheaper [for a company] than paying a recruiter $40,000 to recruit somebody from Ohio that will move here for a few years and then want to go have kids and go back [home]. The company has won, three years running, the top Innovation Award in the plastics manufacturing field. “This was for projects that apprentices were a part of and, in some cases, drove.”
Ironically, King had veered onto this path the day he dropped off the college track. “In high school, I coasted,” King says. “The fact that I passed so many AP classes is a sign of a failure of the system, and less a sign of my own ability.” He’d identified a passion for engineering while acting as fabrication director for his high school robotics team and was motivated to pursue that vein. “I really liked building things with my hands,” he says.
Today, InterTech’s workforce pipeline relies partly on apprentices. Dozens of other companies, JP Morgan Chase and Amazon among them, are adopting similar approaches.
The move to swiftly scale up game-changing opportunities like CareerWise would seem to be a no-brainer, but there’s a thorny catch: Businesses need skilled workers now; developing them takes time. This is where both old-school partnerships and brand-new collaborations between community colleges and car companies are playing key roles.