Education, Labor Chiefs Study Possible Apprenticeship Plans

The chiefs of the departments of Education and Labor said Monday that they are reviewing experimental school-to-work programs in communities across the country, hoping to find some that can serve as models for the Clinton Administration’s national apprenticeship plan.

Education Secretary Richard W. Riley said the Administration is determined to link education and work to help non-college-bound high school students prepare for jobs.

Riley conceded, however, that the money allocated for apprenticeships in the Administration’s economic plan--$270 million in 1994 and $1.2 billion over four years--is small compared to the huge task of preparing the nation’s young people “for the high-skill, high-wage jobs that our economy must generate if we are to maintain our competitive edge.”

“For a major program, it’s not a large amount of money,” Riley told a conference of leaders of Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit corporation that for three years has used model programs to explore the viability of youth apprenticeship.

Under the program--whose major contributors include the Dewitt Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund and the Ford Foundation--150 10th, 11th and 12th grade students in Pasadena are learning printing and graphic arts, 100 11th and 12th graders in Pennsylvania are learning metalworking from 76 different employers statewide, and 115 juniors and seniors in Boston are learning skills needed in the growing health care field by working in local hospitals.

Apprenticeships differ from traditional vocational education in that they combine classroom work with paid on-the-job training. The programs often include two years of training after high school graduation. Upon completion, students receive certificates showing they have mastered work skills and, in many cases, are placed in jobs.

Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich said that the Administration is still trying to determine what the federal role should be in such programs. To be decided, he said, is whether the government should “set national standards, and provide seed money to weave together the best experiments in this country or to provide models.”

What is clear, he added, is that the Administration’s priority is to help get the majority of young Americans--except the 25% who graduate from four-year colleges--off the “downward escalator.”

The earnings gap between youths who graduate from college and those who do not is growing steadily, he said. Ten years ago, college graduates earned 30% more than high school graduates. Now the earnings gap has reached 60%, he said.

“Since the late 1970s, (those) with college and advanced degrees have done pretty well,” Reich said. “Everybody else is in trouble.”

America is the only major industrialized nation with no national program linking school and work, he said.

The youth apprenticeship models in the United States have been inspired by centuries-old European systems, in which as many as 60% of young people enter careers through rigorous multi-year programs that combine paid work and on-the-job training with related classroom instructions.

Reich said that such a system in the United States could end the cycle of one dead-end, low-paying, non-skilled job after another, a cycle that has become typical for many young Americans.

There is no future for non-skilled jobs in America, he said, because of automation and because foreign non-skilled workers will work for less.