USA: Ausbildungsprogramme importieren
Importing Apprenticeships
In the push to expand "earn-while-you-learn" programs, what lessons can the U.S.
take from approaches in Germany and Switzerland?
David Whalen was a junior
in high school when he learned about an apprenticeship program at the Siemens
factory in Charlotte, N.C., which manufactures generators and turbines. Through
the program he could get paid to work while earning an associate of science in
mechatronics engineering technology - a program that combines elements of
electrical and mechanical engineering - from Central Piedmont Community
College. Siemens would pay his educational expenses.
"I was planning on going
to school for engineering, but I knew how expensive it was," said Whalen, who
started at Siemens as a senior in high school and is now 21 years old. He
graduated from Central Piedmont in May and will finish the four-year
apprenticeship this summer, after which he plans to stay on at Siemens.
"It
does have its ups and downs," Whalen said of the apprenticeship experience. "You
don't have that university experience, living on campus and whatnot, but the
perks definitely outweigh the social loss that you have not going to university.
The degree is a good degree, and the money is definitely very nice for someone
my age. Plus, this is hopefully going to lead to a very long career with the
company."
"I know for a fact that I can get through this apprenticeship
program and still have a job and keep working as long as I want," Whalen
said.
As the U.S. has pushed to grow apprenticeship programs in recent
years, German companies like Siemens have been at the forefront. Germany is
known for its dual vocational education and training system, in which
apprentices train in a specific company while enrolling in a public vocational
school. Many credit Germany's apprenticeship program for being a key factor in
the country's relatively low youth unemployment rate.
Judy Marks, the Chief Executive Officer of
Siemens USA, said that when Siemens decided to relocate a facility to Charlotte
in 2010, the company couldn't find the skilled workers it needed. "So we turned
to our colleagues in Germany, which has a very proven apprenticeship model, and
tried to figure out how best to apply it in a country as diverse as the United
States," Marks said.
Siemens now has apprenticeship programs, all in partnership
with community colleges, at its locations in Alabama, California and Georgia, in
addition to North Carolina, and plans to start programs in Louisiana,
Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas.
"The apprentice model has made a
difference for us," Marks said. "Advanced manufacturing is not the manufacturing
of the past. It's highly computer driven and requires analytic skills, both of
which need more than a high school education."
"For a company to come here
and say, 'I need a CNC operator' and put an ad in the paper, that's no longer
working," said Richard Zollinger, the vice president for learning and work force
development at Central Piedmont, using a common abbreviation to describe an
operator of automated machinery. "They have to dig deeper into the pipeline and
they have to partner with educational institutions like CPCC."
Growing Interest in Apprenticeships
Apprenticeships are often discussed as a way to
bridge the "skills gap," in particular the gap in so-called middle skills, those
that require more than a high school education and less than a four-year degree.
Most apprenticeships in the U.S. have traditionally been in the building and
construction trades, but there is increasing interest in expanding them into
other fields like advanced manufacturing, information technology and health
care.
Models vary, but generally speaking they include a company training
component and a formal educational program offered in partnership with a
community college, four-year university, technical school or unaccredited
educational provider (labor unions, for example, sometimes provide the
educational component in line with industry standards). In these
"earn-while-you-learn" programs, students work part-time and study part-time and
earn a wage while they do it. In many cases, companies pay the cost of tuition
and the apprentice's other educational expenses.
Broadly speaking,
apprenticeships enjoy bipartisan support. The Obama administration directed
roughly 250 million dollars to expanding apprenticeships. In June, President Trump
signed an executive order seeking to expand apprenticeships "while easing the
regulatory burden on such programs" and carving out a larger role for industry
groups and unions in certifying their quality.
Advocates for apprenticeship
programs welcomed Trump's focus on the subject but expressed concerns about the
possible easing of wage and quality control standards that are in place for
registered apprenticeship programs, which are administered by the Department of
Labor and various state apprenticeship agencies. They also pointed out that the
president's push for apprenticeships - and up to 200 million dollars possible
funding for this purpose - came at the same time he had proposed cuts to other
work force and technical education programs in his budget.
A German and Swiss Educational Export
As interest in the apprenticeship model has grown,
both the German and the Swiss governments - Switzerland has a similar model -
have gotten involved in actively exporting the concept. Advocates for expanding
apprenticeships stress that the models can't be imported wholesale and that the
contexts for work and school differ vastly across the countries. But they say
the U.S. can borrow some general concepts, such as direct employer involvement
- and investment - in education and training.
The German Embassy in
Washington has been promoting apprenticeship programs through the government's
skills initiative. "One of the biggest challenges - and one which we are also
facing in Germany - is the emphasis which parents and young people put on
academic qualifications, whereas what industry actually needs are hands-on
problem solvers who have received training in a workplace context," Georg
Schütte, the state secretary at Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and
Research, said in written responses to questions. "In other words, we share the
United States' interest in enhancing the image of company-based vocational
training."
Schütte said that German direct investments in the U.S. in 2015
were about 255 billion dollars and that American subsidiaries of German companies
employ a work force of about 672,000 people. "High-tech German products can,
however, only be produced, sold and serviced in the United States if the
corresponding skilled manpower is available. We are therefore extremely
interested in strengthening the U.S. skills base," he said. "There are a lot of
challenges: companies must realize that it pays to assume responsibility in the
same way as their German counterparts - this means financing and organizing the
part of the apprenticeship that takes part in the company."
The Swiss and
United States (U.S.) governments entered into a formal agreement in 2015 to cooperate on
supporting apprenticeships and other forms of vocational and educational
education and training, at which time 18 Swiss companies announced plans to
develop or expand apprenticeship programs in the U.S.
As in the case of Germany,
Switzerland's ambassador to the U.S., Martin Dahinden, said developing the labor
force here was one of his country's motivations. "Switzerland is a major
investor in the U.S. - actually the number 6 investor - and there is increasing
interest in Swiss industry to invest more in the United States. One of the
critical elements is always the labor force, to find people with the right
qualifications," he said.
Various apprenticeship models in the U.S. have
German or Swiss influence or roots. In Chicago, the Midwestern branch of the
German American Chambers of Commerce has established the Industry Consortium for
Advanced Technical Training, or ICATT, a consortium of businesses that offer
apprenticeship programs in partnership with community colleges. Of the 30
participating businesses, about half are subsidiaries of German companies, while
the others are non-German companies that have embraced the concept. Because many
of the companies are small or midsize, the chamber centrally handles many
administrative aspects of the programs, which feature a three-year
apprenticeship followed by a two-year job guarantee.
"We currently have two
employees in the program. They work three days a week, go to school two days a
week and they're guaranteed a 40-hour check," said Julie Snyder, the human
resources manager at Principal Manufacturing Corporation, a family-owned
American company that's part of ICATT. "In the end they will have a degree, and
they will have the trade, they will have their journeyman card, and they will
have a career and hopefully will stay with the company that has sponsored
them."
Mario Kratsch, the director of the skills initiative at the German
American Chambers of Commerce in Chicago, stressed the fact that the
apprenticeship is combined with a two-year degree, after which a student can go
on to a four-year education if they choose to. "Everybody thinks that
apprenticeship is preparation for a job," he said. "It is not! What an
apprenticeship is [is] a first step in a career pathway."
"
The beauty of the
German model is it respects that fact that a person has to be educated on
multiple fronts," said Antigone Sharris, the coordinator for the engineering
technology program at Triton College, a community college in suburban Chicago
that partners with ICATT. "They don't just get a certificate and just know one
thing. They're actually going to be a well-rounded individual. They're taking
their gen eds with their tech classes and getting their associate degrees. And
associate degrees have always been transferable."
An Alternative to College, or an Alternative Form of College?
Eric A. Hanushek, an economist and senior
fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has cautioned, however,
that apprenticeship programs may not always be the sort of win-win many suggest.
"Even if the U.S. succeeded in expanding apprenticeships, the problem of skill
obsolescence remains," Hanushek wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in
which he argued that Germany's apprenticeship system can't be easily replicated
here -- and that the German system has problems of its own.
In a 2015 study
published in The Journal of Human Resources, Hanushek and three co-authors
looked at labor outcomes across 11 countries and found evidence of a "clear
trade-off" between short-term and long-term labor outcomes for workers with
general and vocational education, with that pattern being "most pronounced" in
countries with strong apprenticeship systems.
"Pooling individuals from the
11 countries with sizable vocational education systems, we find that individuals
with general education initially face worse employment outcomes but experience
improved employment probability as they become older relative to individuals
with vocational education," the article states.
"The pattern is most pronounced
in the apprenticeship countries of Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. In these
countries, the easier entry into the labor market is balanced by noticeably
greater withdrawal at older ages."
"There's a lot of attention on today's
problem and what can solve today's problem," Hanushek said in an interview.
"What I worry about is that we have apprenticeship programs that solve the
immediate problem, but as these people age and the world changes, they’re
unprepared to change."
Hanushek said what he objects to isn't the training
aspect of apprenticeships but rather the way they're being held up as a
"Band-Aid" to deal with weaknesses in the school and higher education systems.
"It's almost explicit in Trump's executive order," Hanushek said. The text of
the order states, in part, that "many colleges and universities fail to help
students graduate with the skills necessary to secure high-paying jobs in
today's work force. Far too many individuals today find themselves with crushing
student debt and no direct connection to jobs."
"[Trump] sort of says our
current education and training systems are failing, we're going to move toward
apprenticeships, an 'earn while you learn' system, and we'll just get around the
fact that our general education is failing. That's where I think the real
problem is," said Hanushek.
Mary Alice McCarthy, director of the Center on
Education and Skills at New America, said it's hard to know how transferable the
findings about other countries with large apprenticeship programs are to the
American context. Of apprenticeship programs, she said, "you need them to have
enough general academic skills in them that people can continue to build on
them. That's probably more of a design question than something intrinsic about
apprenticeship."
There are "two competing narratives" surrounding
apprenticeships, McCarthy said. She amended that slightly: "I don't know if
they're competing. They're almost two narratives that ignore one another. One is
that apprenticeship is something you do rather than go to college. College isn't
for everyone; do an apprenticeship instead.
"The other message, though - and
that would come more from the education reform community and groups like New
America - is apprenticeship can be another form of college. It's a different
modality of higher education and it should be delivered by the higher education
community, like community colleges, and it should connect to bachelor's degrees.
How can you make sure that an apprentice who's also getting an associate's
degree can go on to get a bachelor's degree in engineering or applied
engineering?
"It's two conversations," McCarthy continued, "both wanting to
raise up apprenticeship as a high-quality alternative to traditional college,
one more focused on it being a different modality of college and the other
focused on it being just a pure alternative."
Quelle: Inside Higher Ed, insidehighered.com, 08.08.2017