Learning from the Swiss Apprenticeship Model

Publications Mentioned:

Return on investment of apprenticeship systems for enterprises: Evidence from cost-benefit analyses

by Samuel Muehlemann & Stefan C Wolter

Chapters

0:00 - Intro

3:35 - Swiss Apprenticeship 101

6:56 - Path Selection and Funding

13:46 - The Status of Apprenticeship in Switzerland

18:58 - Borrowing Across Borders

25:15 - The ROI to Employers

29:47 - Evaluating Indiana’s Apprenticeship Model

33:45 - Imbuing Prestige in American Apprenticeship

38:49 - Striking the Balance

43:01 - The Influence of Accountability

Transcript

Jeff Selingo

Michael, as you know, I've been to Switzerland several times in the last few years because one of my best friends works there. And every time I return, I tell you what a country, Great transportation system, beautiful cities and mountains, of course. But what always impresses me is their education system. 70% of Swiss young people are doing an apprenticeship in high school.

Michael Horn

And it's a system that's held up as an example for the rest of the world, including the U.S. which in turn, as you might expect, always seems to be sending delegations there to learn from the Swiss. But then they return and say, Switzerland, it's the size of like Vermont and New Hampshire combined, about 9 million people. We can't possibly copy it across this big great country we have, but maybe we can learn some lessons from them. That's what our aim is today on Future U learn more about the Swiss apprenticeship system and where it holds lessons for the US as part of a two part series on Future U.

Sponsor

This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a non profit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org subscribe to future u wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoy the show, send it along to a friend so others can discover the conversations we're having about higher education.

Michael Horn

I'm Michael Horn.

Jeff Selingo

And I'm Jeff Selingo. Michael, recently we had curriculum night for our older daughter who is going into 10th grade next year. And it was almost like back to school night where you get to walk to different classrooms to hear about the curriculum and pick up papers on what's available. And the math department had this graphic on their paper that showed the various pathways through math in high school. There were bubbles and solid lines and dotted lines to show the various pathways through math. And what it showed was that there isn't one pathway but many and you can cross between them. In other words, it was permeable.

Michael Horn

And I'm going to guess, Jeff, that you're telling me this because permeability is one of the features of the Swiss apprenticeship system.

Jeff Selingo

Yes, Michael, that's right. I think in the US when we hear apprenticeships in high school, our mind goes right to tracking.

Michael Horn

You're absolutely right, Jeff. But in Switzerland, young people have the ability to connect and move across those pathways. And what's even more notable, as we'll learn in today's discussion, is two things. Number one, those pathways go all the way up to what is essentially the PhD level. So you have highly educated professionals. And second, at a time when there is concern about underemployed college graduates in the U.S. those in Switzerland that cross paths have better career outcomes.

Jeff Selingo

Our guest today on the first episode of this two part series on apprenticeship degrees is Katie Caves. Katie is the Director of the Center on the Economics and Management of Education and Training Systems, known as CMETS. She is also a senior researcher at CES, the Chair of Education Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Katie was an undergraduate at Berkeley and earned her PhD at the University of Zurich where her research focused on the economics of education. Katie, welcome to Future U.

Katie Caves

Thanks so much for having me.

Swiss Apprenticeship 101 

Michael Horn

So let's jump in with a quick explainer, if you will, for our audience about the Swiss system. We know Switzerland has a robust apprenticeship system, but how do students figure out if they want to pursue that pathway or pursue a university pathway after high school? And then how does the apprenticeship system itself work? What role do employers in the government play?

Katie Caves

The Swiss education system is really interesting. And the reason it's garnered so much interest, especially among Americans and a lot of other countries globally, is that 70% of Swiss young people are doing an apprenticeship in high school. So from starting in about 10th grade to 12th or 13th grade, instead of just doing the college prep curriculum. And if you're coming from an American perspective, that's really surprising because you're like, whoa high school is all about college prep. The only definition of success is university. And so one of our first reactions to that is kind of this fear of like, whoa, tracking bad news bears. And that given our history, is a very reasonable response.

Katie Caves

And so people either come at it from a point of being kind of defensive is too harsh. But being like, how could you do that to people? Or they come at it with like, whoa, how is that possibly working? Because, you know, Switzerland is a pretty advanced country. It's very innovative, It's a relatively rich country. Like, it's not like it's a society in collapse. So it's like, how is this working? Is it working? Is it working for everyone? What's going on? And one of the key things that we tend to focus on in our research when we're looking sort of across lots of different education systems is permeability. And that's where we have different pathways. But also you have the ability to connect and cross across those pathways. And all the pathways go all the way up.

Katie Caves

In Switzerland, you can get a professional degree that is the same level as a PhD. You can get different degrees. It's not called a PhD because you're never stepping foot in the university. It's fully professional, but you have formal qualifications, real educational qualifications, fully on the professional side, all the way at the very top. And if we look at that from....a lot of the researchers that work on this are economists. If we look at that from an economic perspective, we can say, hey, what's the causal effect of all these different education programs? And once you actually manage to isolate it down to the, you know, the effect of the program, which is really tricky because people make different choices for reasons. But once you actually manage to do that, the people who get the most out of their education, they have the highest earnings, they have the lowest risk of unemployment. They're those super highly educated professional people. And we also know that the people who take mixed paths, so they're cross, they're using those crosswalks in some way, they do better than the people who take either the pure academic path or the pure vocational professional path. And so this is where it starts to get really interesting. We're like, oh, something's happening here and it's not Switzerland, guilds, something that happened 500 years ago, which frankly isn't very interesting or exciting from a policy standpoint because that's just luck. It's something that actually happened and happened recently. The permeablility of the Swiss system has really only been increasing since the 1970s. Before that it wasn't what it is today. And so it's something that's been developed over time recently.

Katie Caves

And it's something that's really working well for a lot of people in a lot of cool ways.

Path Selection and Funding 

Michael Horn

Super interesting. So we're going to come back to that permeability point in a moment. I just want to make sure I understand once people have then picked the apprenticeship sort of pathway, if you will. So they're out of high school now and, and maybe they haven't gone that mixed pathway or the university pathway. What, you know, if 70% of high schoolers are doing apprenticeships, what percentage are going into the apprenticeship pathway and how does it get funded by the government?

Katie Caves

So the first big, the first big difference, challenge, how is this going to happen? How is this going to work? Is that moment between 9th and 10th grade when you have to decide, am I going academic high school or am I going apprenticeship high school. And within apprenticeship there's 250 odd occupations. How am I deciding that? How am I deciding what company I want to work at? How am I getting a job at the company? I'm 15. What am I doing? So there's a lot of prep going through it. You know, teachers will give assignments that help students explore, like, what am I good at? What kind of environments do I like working in? Is it a classroom? Do I really like sitting and taking tests? Because look, some of us do, and that's fine. But you know, maybe you rather would be outside working with people, working with computers, something like that. So though there's sort of some prep into that, there's a very robust career guidance and counseling system that operates outside the high schools, the, the schools. So the one advantage of that is our career guidance counselors, they might want to do all of this stuff, but they're always going to be the first person when something happens where they're going to be putting out that fire. You know, if there's a social, emotional need that's going to always come before, like, hey, let's talk about what you enjoy doing. So, you know, it's, it's, it's helpful in Switzerland for the way that they've done that. They've separated it out. And so students have access to this career guidance and counseling starting in like seventh grade, really robustly. And so they're prepared to make that decision. And there's a special job market just for apprentices. They apply just for an apprenticeship position. They're not applying against someone. It's not an entry level job, it's an apprenticeship. And then if they don't have a position, if they're not able to find something by like sort of the middle end of ninth grade, then there's special events where they'll actually really work harder to try to connect them to an apprenticeship. So that's the first challenge point. And then we have, once we graduate from that secondary education, so once we get out of either the apprenticeship or the academic high school, the academic high school only prepares you to go to university. That's really all it's good for. That's what it's for. It's specialized. There's nothing wrong with specialization. So those students mostly are going to move on to university. If they don't for some reason, or if they choose not to, or if they get into university and realize they hate it, it's actually increasingly common for them to go back into a shortened version of an apprenticeship because they're like, hey, I actually don't. This isn't going to work for me. And you can't really get anywhere. There's really interesting research on what happens with different terminal degrees. If you end with just the academic high school, you don't have a lot of options because you don't have a skill. You know, that really assumes you're going to go on and get the university degree. The apprentices also have the same opportunity to go across. So the apprentices can go either during or after their apprenticeship. They do this sort of one year set of classes. You could think of it as like the AP core, like that really like college prep, like the stuff you would have done if you were to be in college prep. You can do it during the apprenticeship if basically you do extra school time during the apprenticeship or you can do it after. And that's really common, increasingly common. And a lot of those young people will go to the universities of applied sciences where they do that plus an exam and they go over to the traditional universities. So that's the broad strokes of how people move in the system. And then you were also asking about funding. And this is something that's really interesting and it's something where those of us who research this, especially from like sort of an economics perspective, we have a lot to work with because there's differences across countries, even if the system, system seems really similar. So like Austria, Germany, that kind of thing. This works in really different ways. In Switzerland. It's actually cheaper for the government from the, from the public sector perspective to run apprenticeship programs compared to academic high school. And the reason for that is the apprentices are in the workplace three or even four days a week, whereas the academic high school, they're in school five days a week. So they need 100% of teachers and they need all of those, you know, all that resources that, that needs to be there for the apprentices. The employer is paying for their salary. It's not a ton, it's between 500 and about 1500amonth, which is a great salary for a student, you know, for a 16 year old, that's awesome. Especially compared to like potentially paying for that education. And the employer is also going to pay for any equipment and materials. Their staff are the trainers. So all of that stuff is not public expenditure. And then the one or two days a week that they're in school, that is public expenditure. But obviously a dollar goes a lot further when you've got, you know, you can, the schools will have different students on different schedules and you can fit a lot more students into a school with the same level of care and attention.

Jeff Selingo

Katie, is this all when, when you're speaking of the government, just to help our listeners understand, especially from the States, are you talking about at the, you know, the federal level or. I know you obviously have cantons which are very similar to states here in, in the United States who largely fund a lot of K through 12 education here. And that's why policies differ from, from state to state. How is that managed at the, at the federal level versus the canton level?

Katie Caves

This is a really important question. You're right that Switzerland is structurally quite similar to the US. Our Constitution is actually based on the American Constitution. And the cantons have pretty much full authority when it comes to K12 academic education. When it comes to vocational education and training, though, the curricula for each occupation are set at the national level. And the reason for that is that Switzerland is small. It's about the size of Connecticut with 8 1/2 million people. We're one labor market in the U.S. that's not how it has to be in the U.S. we're talking about state systems for legal and like plainly rational reasons. But in Switzerland, it has to be one, because if you move 15 minutes, you're in a different canton, depending on which canton less. So the, the cantons are responsible for paying for the vocational high schools. So the part where they're in school and managing that, and obviously there's federal money that sort of equalizes if one canton is richer than the other and that sort of thing. But the cantons are running the school part. The federal government is mandating the curriculum, and that in turn mandates what happens in the school and at the workplace. And then the cantons are also responsible for sort of quality control, making sure everything that's supposed to be happening is happening.

The Status of Apprenticeship in Switzerland

Jeff Selingo

So I want to go back to this permeability issue that you brought up earlier, because I think it's one of the important principles there. In other words, there isn't this strict system of tracking like there are in other European countries with strong apprenticeship programs. So I'm kind of curious. What's the impact on how the apprenticeship pathway is seen versus how somebody who goes to university is seen? And I'm asking that because, as you know, one of the big challenges in the US Particularly is around social status when it comes to higher education. People don't hold the apprenticeship or jobs that don't require a college degree here in the US in kind of the same regard. So how are the vocational pathways perceived in Switzerland?

Katie Caves

This is a really interesting question because I'm sure if you asked the eight and a half million people in Switzerland this question, you would get eight and a half million different answers. And so one of the things that some of my colleagues at ETH have done is they, they looked at social status and the way that they operationalized that, the way they made it measurable was they looked at the students who have options. So the students who are in a place academically where they get to choose. It is true...And this varies depending on which canton you're in. I'm in Zurich, which is the canton that has actually the most sort of like high stakes testing atmosphere around it. And I really wish that wasn't the case. I sit in Zurich and I'm like, guys, I say all these nice things about the system, like, why are you doing it the weirdest possible way? I don't know how long that will last. And it's something that historically has been disappearing in cantons where they have an exam that you have to pass. I think Zurich is the only one that still does it. But so we look at those students where they have the grades to do either one, and we see, okay, are all of them choosing to go the academic pathway? Because if that's happening, if you really see these start cutoffs, then, then you know that the social status of the, of the apprenticeship is really not good. And what they actually found is that a solid chunk of our highest scoring test takers, I'm not going to say our smartest kids because tests measure one particular thing, but a solid chunk of our high highest scoring test takers are choosing the apprenticeship pathway. And when we do site visits, sort of more anecdotally, when we do site visits, when, when we're doing our annual institutes or when people come to us and want to learn about the system and we sort of go out and look at things. A lot of times we are in companies where the apprentices are those students. You know, if you look at the banking apprentices, that's very competitive or there's a certain kind of, they call it a poly mechanic, it's kind of mechanical engineering, advanced manufacturing kind of thing. These are really academically challenging. Then these students are really, really smart. And all of them are just saying, well, yeah, but I didn't want to sit in a classroom for four more years. I'm sick of this. And especially, especially among boys, you know, they can be really smart, but they're like, I'm going to go do an apprenticeship in it. I'm going to go be an app developer, I'm going to learn something real and I'm going to have colleagues and I'm going to get money and it's going to be awesome. And so I think that, that even before we get to the permeability component that's already in there, and then with the permeability and especially with that, they call it the vocational baccalaureate. That chunk of courses you can take that's like the AP core, students don't have to lose any time. You can do an apprenticeship, do the vocational baccalaureate at the same time, take the exam right after and go straight to ETH where I teach, which is one of the best universities in Europe. And that's huge. From an economic standpoint, we make decisions based on our expected utility, like how valuable will this be for me? And if a program is a dead end, like historically vocational education has been in the United States, no rational person should do that if they have any other alternative. Because we know that the more years of education you get, every year gives you a 10% wage bump and it reduces your risk of unemployment and all these things. A rational person who has options shouldn't choose a dead end program. No matter how much they like wood shop or welding or whatever it is, they should always choose to do the program that has the highest expected value. And so what permeability does is it enables every program to give you access to lots of further options.

Jeff Selingo

You're singing from our hymnbook, Katie. I will tell you. I think Michael and I might be moving to Switzerland pretty soon with our own families. We, I, I love it there. I've been there a couple of times. But, but this whole idea of the permeability, this whole idea of giving people purpose because they actually want to work with their hands, or this idea, by the way of apprenticeships in, in banking and things like that, where by the way, so much can be learned on the job rather than in a classroom. I think is, is critical. So I want to talk a little bit about the idea of, of how do we adapt this in, in other parts of the world, right? And there's a lot of talk in, in the US about, you know, to do what the Swiss are doing or do what the Germans are doing or doing what the, you know, what the, what the, the UK is, is doing.

Borrowing Across Borders

Jeff Selingo

You know, are there models in other countries that we, we ought to take stock of and, and borrow from, in your, in your view, you know, what, what should be copied, what shouldn't be copied? You, you clearly know that US is, is so much bigger than all these other countries. And the excuse I always hear from people in the US is two things. One is bigger scale, much bigger scale. And second is, well, we don't want to track students. Well, I think you just answered the whole tracking thing with permeability. But. But what would you take from these different models? What can. What do you think the US can learn from not only the Swiss model, but models in other European countries?

Katie Caves

One of the really challenging parts about looking at international education systems, and even if you're looking at, like, trying to be really causal about it and saying, like, oh, did this change that? And, you know, and not just being like, oh, well, that country's rich. They must be doing something great. One of the big challenges is that we're not. We usually think we're talking about the same thing. We're using words like apprenticeship, and everybody's using the word apprenticeship, but we're not talking about the same thing even a little bit. And education systems don't live in the abyss. They live in the labor market and the society and all that that they're in. I also really hate it when people get really historically deterministic and say, oh, well, they just do.

Katie Caves

That's culture. Because, no, we can get more specific than that. Culture comes from institutions, and we can figure out what the institutions are, and we can try. So I don't like going to either of those extremes. I don't like saying, let's do the Swiss model because that works in Switzerland. And I don't like saying, well, we can't do the Swiss model because it's hundreds of years old, because that's inaccurate and also completely defeatist. So what we try to do in our research is we try to pull out, why does this work? What is the thing that makes this work in Switzerland? And so that lets us focus on things that you can actually do, and then you can figure out how to do them in your own country. And that's when it gets really exciting because we're not trying to say, like, oh, do this with. I mean, I get really frustrated. The German system works really well in Germany, but a lot of the reason it works is because of the German labor market and how regulated and high friction that labor market is compared to, for example, somewhere like Switzerland or the United States. And so if we just copied that wholesale, it would immediately fail in the United States. People know that intuitively. They know that they can't just fully copy, but it's tempting. We want to be like, well, someone's got to have this figured out. So the things that we try to focus on are the things that are making it work in all of these countries. So permeability is a huge one permeability is one of my personal favorites. It's very high on my personal research agenda, trying to really identify, like, what is it, how does it work? Another one is something we call education employment linkage. And what that really is, it's just power sharing between the education side and the employer side when it comes to certain crucial decisions. So we're not saying, here's the Swiss VPET law, you have to do it exactly like they do it. But what we are saying is, hey, in Switzerland, certain decisions, employers have a lot of power in deciding in saying what those decisions should be. In Switzerland, it works through these employer associations. We don't have those in the US, so then we're trying to figure out, okay, who can speak for employers. And this is something really cool that's going on in Indiana. They're building these talent associations where they're saying, okay, who is the person who can speak for this occupation and say, hey, this apprenticeship needs to have more work based learning or it needs to have, you know, these competencies in the curriculum and not those competencies and that sort of thing. So we need employers to have a certain amount of power and it's a balance because we want the education side. You know, the education side is usually advocating for more general education, so more languages and math and stuff like that. Whereas the employer side is going to want just specifically what they really need in that occupation and not more. Because if you try to teach more stuff that's not necessarily relevant, then we take away from work based learning time. And we know that employers train because in, in labor markets like the United States and Switzerland, employers train because they earn returns on training. What that means is at the beginning you're paying this apprentice a small salary, but they're really not productive. And so you lose money at the beginning and then they get better and better and better over time. And you sort of make that back in the second half of the program and then at the end you break even or maybe earn like a small percentage. In Switzerland, on average it's an 8% ROI. So it's not huge, but it's enough that we're not panicking about poaching. We're not panicking about like, I have to keep all of my apprentices, we're saying, hey, yeah, go on to college, come back later. Like, don't worry about it. We didn't lose enormous amounts of money doing this. And so it makes the system sustainable. That is very tied to education employment linkage. Because then we can say, hey, this occupation is really expensive to train. You know, in Switzerland, the high school level apprenticeship is three or four years depending on the occupation. And that comes down to the ROI. Because those poly mechanics, they are really expensive to train. They have to learn how to use CNC machines and all this crazy stuff that just takes a lot more. Bankers need a laptop, they're not so expensive to train, they're only three years. It's not about skill level, it's just about like, hey, we need an extra year before we can get our return on this. The employers are also going to be having a role in deciding like, hey, we want more work based learning. We want them to be allowed to do productive things when they're in work based learning. And so that linkage, that's another really important one. And it leads to that employer ROI, which is really important for sustainability. So we try to focus on concepts like that and not necessarily on, oh, in the UK they do training levies. That works for them. It's like, no, no, no. Why, why does that work for them? You know, we're trying to figure out. It works for them because it helps them get to that ROI. But the way that Switzerland gets to the ROI is really different. And how do, how can we figure that out and what's appropriate in our context and not trying to build institutions that we see in other places, but trying to carry out functions that we see being very important across the successful systems.

The ROI to Employers 

Michael Horn

One sort of question off that that I'm just curious about, like are the employers measuring ROI then in the Swiss system? Because in the United States I would say most employers don't really know sort of the benefit, you know, cost benefit of their training and education dollars. Who's calculating that?

Katie Caves

This is one of my favorite victory of research stories. So in Switzerland nobody was calculating that until right around 2000 or so. A professor at the University of Bernstef, Volter, he and some co authors started looking into this because there is sort of an interesting theoretical question in the economics literature of like, why would an employer participate in something like this? Because an employer would participate, would do fully firm-specific training. So like not, not the whole occupation, but like just in my company that makes sense because then you probably get to keep the person. But if you're training for a whole occupation and your neighbor's not training, they could take your people. This is the whole poaching argument. And so there was this really influential paper from Ashmoglu and Pishka where they were saying like, why, you know, it doesn't make sense why would they do this? They, they should only want to do firm specific programs. And Stefan Wolter and his colleagues, they were like, no, no, we know, we think they're actually making money on this. And so they actually started measuring it and it's really finicky to measure because it's not just the main components are the cost factors of the apprentices salary, the trainer salary for the time that they spend training and not working, and equipment and materials. The main benefit factors are the productivity of the apprentice on unskilled tasks, plus the productivity of the apprentice on skilled tasks, times how productive they actually are because that's what's going up over time. And then potentially depending on the industry and occupation, saved hiring costs if they stay times how many of them actually stay. And there's a lot of very finicky stuff in there about like, because it's not just the trainer's salary, it's how much time are they spending not working and working with the apprentice or are they working slower and training? You know, like it's really, it gets really finicky really fast. But they started measuring this and at the time in Switzerland there was kind of, kind of like a bill in Congress to say like, hey, we should start giving the, we should start subsidizing the employers. And the sort of people who worked in the department, the ministry that controls this, they were saying no, no, no, we don't think that's that, we don't think you should do that. One of them was, was my current boss, Ursula Reynolds. She was in charge of the education system at the time. And she was like, no, no, no, no, we don't want to do this. And then Stefan Wolter shows up with this study and he's like, look, they're earning an ROI on this. They're, they're getting that 8% return. And because of that, because we understand the cost factors and all that, now we can say if we did start subsidizing them, we, we would have to subsidize non training companies enormously to convert them into training companies because there's a reason they don't train, they don't have the right kind of work, they don't have the right kind of staff, they don't have a training environment. Like it's not that they're just, they could and they're not and we could give them 500 bucks and then they would, we would have to basically pay for the whole thing in order for it to work. And then training quality would suck because they would have this apprentice and they still wouldn't have work for them. They would just be getting money to pay their salary. So it's really, it's a, obviously like, I think it's cooler than probably your average person does, but it's a really cool example of a well timed research study that was able to come in and say, hey, hey, don't start subsidizing this because it's a deadweight loss and our training quality goes down. Companies are doing this because they're earning returns. Now in terms of who measures this. After that study, the Swiss government funded Stefan Wolter and his team to continue doing that every few years. And now it is a metric that people think about. But before that and even today, if you ask like a head of HR or a CEO, oh, why do you do training? They're like, oh, it's so good for society, you know, we're giving back that sort of thing. They wouldn't do it if they weren't earning returns. But that's never going to be the top line of what they say. And that's fine, they're not lying. But it's not necessarily how people think about it. Even if it is how they make those decisions. Decisions when it comes like down to, you know, the business cycle does something funky. We're in a recession and it really has to be a decision. So they're not always thinking about it, but it is really important.

Evaluating Indiana’s Apprenticeship Model

Michael Horn

No, that incredibly helpful because it's something that looms, I think on a lot of this conversation here. Last question as we wrap up here and let's make it a lightning round question. You mentioned Indiana earlier. It's obviously piqued your interest. They visited you, you've profiled them. They're doing a lot of things there to try to make an apprenticeship, apprenticeship system viable and work in the state. Two things that they're doing right, two things where they still have work to do.

Katie Caves

Okay. I'm so excited about what they're doing. I think they're phenomenal. One thing they're doing really well is they're approaching this systemically. So they're not just trying to build an apprenticeship program for high schoolers. They're trying to build an education system that is permeable. So they're trying to those full pathways and all of that. A second thing that's super exciting that they're doing is that they're, they're building these talent associations. They're, they're working not just from the government or from the grassroots or something. They've got everything happening all at once. And so the employers are getting organized and they're doing the talent associations and the, you know, the, the legislature is thinking about, oh, we need a qualifications framework if we're going to make this, you know, we need boxes to put these wonderful programs into and that sort of thing. So they're taking a really sort of holistic all stakeholders approach. That is super exciting to see. Things that they're not doing well. I don't think there's anything that they're like not doing well that they should fix. I think that what the biggest problem they have is that they are the first in a lot of ways. Not to say there's not good work happening in other states and really cool examples of cool stuff. But like no state in the US has a qualifications framework even though pretty much every other country in the world has one. We don't have any of those. So they have to do a lot of things for the first time. And when we're talking to them from a research perspective, the best we can be like is like this is how it works in other places and this is why that works. But we can't tell them here's how it has to work in the United States. And they have to be the ones to figure that out. Which means they're going to have to make a lot of those mistakes. I think that is the...you wanted two but I think that's kind of the big, the big scary thing is like they have to do a lot of this stuff for the first time and so they have to be out front doing the scary thing, making the mistakes.

Jeff Selingo

So this is just so fascinating. As, as we said, I think Michael and I are going to want to move to, to Switzerland just because we always say why can't we have this here in the US but it's something that we're going to be talking about next when we return on Future U. Thanks for being with us.

Katie Caves

Thank you.

Michael Horn

This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a non profit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. Ascendium believes that system level change and a student centric approach are important for our nation's efforts to boost post secondary education and workforce training opportunities. That's why their philanthropy aims to remove systemic barriers faced by these learners, specifically first generation students, incarcerated adults, veterans, students of color, adult learners and rural community members. For more information visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

Jeff Selingo

Welcome back to Future U. You and I want to give our audience a little bit of what happens in the background during interviews. Michael, because, you know, we're not in the same room. So we often message each other back and forth when a guest says something significant. And at one point during that interview with Katie, I messaged you saying, makes me want to move there to Switzerland. And you wrote back, seriously. You know, I can't imagine that you think we have anything equivalent to the work based terminal degree that Katie was describing. This is no doubt a driver of the relative difference in prestige of CTE programs in the US between the US and Switzerland, I would imagine. Right.

Imbuing Prestige in American Apprenticeship 

Michael Horn

Yeah, I. And I think that's also the question, I guess, Jeff, can we imagine a work based terminal degree in America that would hold some prestige that, you know, people would want to strive toward? In other words, that, you know, I. Look, I don't know for sure, but I suspect when you were looking at all those math pathways, Jeff, for your daughter, part of you was looking at that algebra to calculus pathway and thinking about its, I'll call it the strange supremacy it has in the minds of colleges and therefore for parents as well. Right. And by extension, students, even when that quote unquote prestigious pathway or class holds zero intrinsic interest for the students themselves. Now, to be fair, the American system, I think, has sought to introduce stackable credentials, you know, in different ways to connote skills, create on and off ramps that would over time add up to a degree so folks can get work experience and the like, but they just really haven't taken hold in our system because of the siloed nature and the cultures of colleges that are fixated on departments retaining their influence and of course, a focus on credit hours rather than, you knew I was going to go here. Mastery of learning. But fundamentally, I think we need to build pathways that are grounded in work first and foremost, but then have this path to culminating in something. And here I'm going to say something that maybe is controversial, that only a few get right, that, but is also connected to success at work. So there is this sort of elitist prestige element to it. But I think that's what it'll take to sort of cross that barrier. But there is this interesting connection here then, Jeff. Those sorts of degrees or credentials would, I think naturally have connections to hands on learning, career connected learning. It wouldn't be just done in a classroom that's separate from applicability and the like. And Katie's point here about young men needing to see the fruits of their labor more than girls. We're obviously stereotyping but on average, that's an interesting callback to our conversation that we had with Richard Reeves earlier in this season of Future U.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah, exactly, Michael. This is one of the things I like most in the Swiss system is that there are all these jobs in the US that we think you need to have a four year degree for social media manager or marketing or project manager or think about the third of the Ivy League, Michael, that goes into banking and the majority of them men. And here in Switzerland, Katie told us that if you look at the banking apprentices, it's very competitive. You know, she mentioned the kind of mechanical engineering, advanced manufacturing, and when she did, I hearkened back to our visit earlier this year at the College of Western Idaho and their mechatronics lab where we saw mostly men in those classes, but many were older, having come to that career later in life. But you know, they wanted to work with their hands. And Katie said these students in Switzerland, they get to work with their hands, but they also pursue this highest level of academics. They don't just want to sit in a classroom for four more years. And that's particularly true of boys. And so, Michael, I keep going back to this culture piece. You know, you always remind me about, you know, so much of what we have in education is because of culture, what's embedded in our universities, but it's also embedded in our parenting culture. And I assume that if I told my neighbors in suburban D.C. that there is this pathway to a great job in engineering and it will include working in a factory that makes trains for perhaps they'd say, no, we're going to go to engineering school, right? We're not going to go that pathway. But if I said, well, you can do both, you can go to both a great school and at the same time do the work that hands on work in a factory, for example, I actually think they would jump at that chance and perhaps we're moving slowly in that direction. Recently I was with Randy Bass of Georgetown University who we had on the show way back in season one, and he was telling me that the old C.P. snow this idea, you know, 50 plus years ago that C.P. snow wrote about the two cultures in education, right, the tension between the sciences and the humanities. Now he thinks those two cultures on campuses are between academic work and experiential learning. And I thought that was really fascinating in terms of the tension that he sees in American higher ed right now. And it's really coming about because there is so much more hands on learning happening in higher ed than there was five or 10 years ago. Now we might say there's not enough, especially given what we see happening in Switzerland. But it's clear that this tension is there. And that's really the dichotomy that we face now, not only on campus, but I also think between universities, employers, on one hand there are the interests of employers, right? They want training for their jobs. And on the other hand there are academic institutions and as Katie said, they reliably push for more general studies style coursework. So our institutions need to prepare our workforce and preserve our democracy simultaneously.

Striking the Balance 

Jeff Selingo

And so Michael, how do we strike this balance if there are these two cultures increasingly emerging on campuses between kind of general education, academic work and hands on work, how do we strike the balance between them?

Michael Horn

So first, Jeff, I'll plus one the observation that Randy made and I think it's really a profound insight and I guess when I'm hearing you, I also think part of the culture changing is that parents aren't as sure that they want their kids to go to college as maybe a generation earlier. So maybe we're seeing start of this. But here's maybe my bigger hot take, if you will, of the day, which is that if we're talking about the preservation of democracy, so not the general studies part of the question, but the preservation of democracy question, to me, I see our K12 schools on the front lines of that question. But my own view is that by the time you get to higher ed, like sure, there are a few who are drilling into political philosophy and the like and you know, we could, we could give a few more disciplines here, but if you haven't established the foundation in basic literacy around the institutions in our country by the time you're done with K12, shame on us is what I say. From my perspective, it's too late. And so to me believing that higher ed actually has this job of preserving democracy, I think it's like the sort of thing that sounds nice in polite company and polite conversation, but it's completely divorced from the reality and what's actually happening on the ground. It's more buzz phrase than reality. And so I guess I would personally worry less about that part of the question. And you know, it's an interesting I was reading Karen Klein's relatively recent book that she published, Rethinking College: A Guide to Thriving Without a Degree. We often talk about how important college is for people, how it can change their perceptions of self and so forth. But something I took from her book is we forget that for a lot of students like they just are not that interested in college as it's presently constructed. The experience of sitting in a college class debating De Tocqueville or organic chemistry or English 101, it's just not something that they actually want to do. It's not going to change their perception because they don't have interest. And so I guess I'd hearken back to when we had Rick Levin on the show a few seasons ago and he said community colleges ought to completely abandon the academic transfer parts of their mission and just focus completely on, on being great institutions of workforce preparedness. But now how do you build a system that does that? And obviously we can't just copy paste the Swiss playbook. It's different. It had existing employer associations. But you see in Indiana, they're developing talent associations as a way to capture that piece and allow employers to be more unified on what are their training needs, what experience do students need to have and how can we align those and how do we derisk it for the employers? And if you could bring banking and pharma and more to the table like prestigious places of work. Well, I think that could get interesting because we directly hit at that barrier that Randy referenced. We'd start to change the incentives of what prestige looks like and then obviously money flows and the pathways of top talent will have a lot to say about how we start to perceive it. Last quick thought on this is it's interesting to note that perhaps, you know, a century and 20 years ago or so, the origin of the MBA for a while captured some of this, you could argue, but because I think it was built within the existing structures of higher ed of universities and was always sort of looking for legitimacy within the academy. It really isn't at all that earn and learn degree. Right. That Katie's describing in Switzerland. But maybe it suggests that if we free it from those structures and sort of need to claim that legitimacy, maybe we can do it here. In any event, Jeff, it's not just the dichotomy between employers though and universities, but let's add high schools in here as well. Right? Because as Katie described, there's this moment between 9th and 10th grade when you have to decide am I going academic high school or am I going apprenticeship high school. And I think we were both like, whoa, in America, like there's no way we could make that decision today because there's just not much career preparation or exposure today. Right, Jeff?

The Influence of Accountability 

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. And Michael, you know, there's that famous quote like tell me how you will measure me and I will tell you how I will behave. And the reason why there's not much career prep in high schools is because they are measured by college. They're measured by how many students go to college, the percentage of that high school graduating class going to college. You know, I was interviewing a high school counselor for my new book that's coming out in the fall, and they were going through their college stats right where. And she was showing me this PowerPoint presentation. And I thought she had first put together the PowerPoint presentation for me, but then I noticed the title slide said she had put it together for the School Accountability Committee. Right. So it is. It's a. It's a school accountability Committee. It's made up of people on the school board as well as parents. And the entire deck was about, okay, here's where our students have applied, where's where they've been accepted. Here's, you know, other stats about, you know, other schools in the. In the. In the area, things like that. And it all went back to accountability for that school, the accountability for that counselor, because the counselor is essentially judged on how well they do at getting in students into college. I was talking to another counselor who said, parent. A parent said to him last year, great job this year. And he was like, well, what does that mean? Is that like, did I win the super bowl or something? No, but it was really meaning that their college placements were great, and the parents thought the school had something to do with that. The counselor had something to do with that. So when counselors are constantly being measured against college and where they're getting these students in, and not, by the way, about how these students are learning their social, emotional, or career prep or how they're thinking about their careers, of course everyone's going to move in that direction. You know, I think of Fairfax County, Virginia, for example, they require college and career counseling in their schools, and their counselors are called college and career counselors. But, you know, even in that county, as, you know, one of the wealthiest counties in the US So much of the focus, even though it says college and career counselor, so much of the focus is around college, getting students into into college. And so I really do think that we need. I love this idea from Switzerland on how do we move preparation, especially around career earlier in, not only in high school, but even getting it into middle school, so that people are not that we're tracking students into certain careers, but we're at least having them think about what does this person do or that person do. Right. My kids are binge watching Grey's Anatomy right now, right. They had no interest in the medical field, but now they see what these jobs are. You know, just from tv, remember years ago, everybody wanted to be, you know, and when CSI was popular, right. Everybody wanted to go into, into, into criminology and things like that, right. And so the same thing here that, you know, I'm not sure TV is the best thing to teach students about careers, but they need something in that, in that, in that way.

Michael Horn

I think you're right, Jeff. And without that foundational knowledge, they can't have meaningful agency to make informed choices. And that's how you escape tracking is you give the student the knowledge and ability to make those choices for themselves, not have it be done to them because, oh, you're a, you know, ex minority and you are a woman and therefore this. Right. Like that's what we're trying to escape from. And we can do that if we give them the knowledge to make meaningful choices. I think, Jeff.

Jeff Selingo

So Michael, we're going to end the show there. You might remember Katie talking about Indiana building a model similar to Switzerland. And on the next part of this two part series that's exclusively sponsored by Ascendium, we're going to take a closer look at what Indiana is doing. That will be on a future episode of Future U. And until next time, thank you, thank you for joining us.