Where will U.S. business and industry find the well-qualified workers we need to make our nation competitive in the new world-economy? Everybody is asking that question as they look at the shrinking labor pool and the generally low level of skills among current high school graduates. One answer is to forge closer links between work and school.
Most students see no connection between what they've done in high school and the job they get after graduation -- and they're right. Employers don't ask about the courses new graduates took or the grades they got; the fact that a kid has a diploma is enough. So many kids think school is a big waste of time -- and they treat it that way.
How can we deal with this problem? Suggestions include creating more ambitious school and business partnerships, as well as beefing up the vocational training programs in our schools. But while we're casting about for answers, it's worth looking at the way another industrialized nation successfully combines work and school for its late adolescents - I mean West Germany's apprenticeship system, which is described in Stephen F. Hamilton's Apprenticeship for Adulthood: Preparing Youth for the Future (New York: The Free Press, 1990).
Hamilton calls West Germany's apprenticeship program the "primary bridge from school to career," and in fact 60 percent of students between the ages of 16 and 19 participate. Students can opt for white-collar or blue-collar jobs, and some of the placements with top firms are highly competitive. The jobs these German teenagers fill are regular entry-level positions paid at regular entry-level salaries -- the kind, according to Hamilton, "normally reserved for people over the age of 20 in the United States."
But work is not seen as a replacement for school: During the two or more years of apprenticeship, students go to school one day a week, where they take courses designed to reinforce and complement what they have learned on the job. Furthermore, the jobs themselves have a strong training component. So, unlike the so-called youth jobs in the U.S., where the most a kid learns to do is flip hamburgers or bus dishes, a German teenager is acquiring skills that could lead to a career, perhaps even with the company he is working for.
Another important feature of the apprenticeship, Hamilton believes, is the opportunity teenagers get to work side by side with a range of adults. In some of the companies, the adults who are training the apprentices assume the role of mentors. But even where that is not the case, these German students get introduced to the world of work by adults who are part of it - it's one thing for parents or teachers to talk about punctuality and persistence and another thing altogether to learn them by seeing adults exemplify these qualities.
The West German apprenticeship program is a joint effort of the government, trade unions, companies who employ apprentices and other groups, with the companies paying the bill. Since the costs include training as well as wages, the program is not cheap -- according to Hamilton, the net sum for a large commercial or industrial company could run as high as $3,000 per apprentice per year. But, Hamilton says, Germans make the same connection between a well-educated work force and economic success that we are beginning to, and "apprenticeship training is widely regarded as the wellspring of the highly skilled workforce that sustains the nation's international competitiveness."
Of course, the West German system reflects the history and cultural assumptions of Germany -- that's why it works so well, and that's why we couldn't simply import it into the U.S., even it we wanted to. But we can pay attention to some of its important features and try to incorporate them into the way we do business. I'm thinking especially about the way in which apprenticeship integrates work and school and integrates adolescents into the world of adult work.
It's plain that our current setup serves neither our young people nor the companies that depend on finding qualified employees. The kids who often see school-learning as irrelevant to the jobs they'll get when they graduate, spend their school years marking time. And they get out of school bored, disaffected and ignorant. At the same time, employers look in vain for employees with the skills and habits of mind necessary even for entry-level positions.
The answer is to reconnect school with work. I'm not talking about reinstituting the narrow, skills-specific programs we've seen in the past. They would not be good for kids, and they wouldn't produce the kind of employee that companies need in the modern workplace. The Finance Academy, American Express and Shearson Lehman Hutton's program involving paid internships in financial institutions and related coursework, and the spin-off programs sponsored by the newly established National Academy Foundation are examples of the kind of thing we need - and need in abundance.
The German teenagers who are able to go from secondary school graduation into jobs that demand good skills and offer the possibility of a future are not so different from our high school graduates who are dumped out into a job market for which they are unprepared. But the systems that produce them are different, and it's time to make some major changes in ours.