We need a great deal more of this:
Entering 2025, community colleges are expanding apprenticeships and other experienced-based learning programs to address America’s labor shortage crisis and meet a growing demand for alternative forms of higher education.
“Community colleges are going beyond their traditional role of instruction, helping to organize, register, and assist companies in running their apprenticeship programs,” John Colborn, executive director of Apprenticeships for America, told The College Fix.
“By expanding these services, they reduce barriers for employers to offer apprenticeships,” he said in a phone interview earlier this month.
A recent report by Colborn’s organization shows the number of community colleges with active apprenticeships has grown from just 30 to over 200 between 2016 and 2023.
I’d be happier if it was two thousand community colleges, but I’ll take what I can get.
Seriously: considering how colleges’ traditional educational courses have been debased into (essentially) Marxist wokism, there is a profound rationale for colleges, especially community colleges, to start turning some of their classrooms into workshops.
And I don’t even want to hear that government (of any kind) needs to get involved in this initiative, for any reason. No; this belongs entirely in the purview of businesses who would benefit from having a ready pool of trained workers in their trades, as opposed to the usual escapees from the grease pit at JiffyLube, no-hoper high school “graduates” or illegal immigrants.
There are not many instances where I’d want to copy the Germans, on anything; but I’ve always been a huge fan of their clinical observation — that not everyone should go to college, but an awful lot of the people left over would benefit greatly from trade schools — and it deserves comprehensive implementation on this side of The Pond.
Honestly, nobody loses in this operation; not the workers, nor the companies and especially not the colleges who participate.
Having said that: so beneficial an opportunity is bound to fail, because OMG every child is special and shouldn’t have to get their precious little hands soiled by working at Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs (or Victor Davis Hanson’s “Muscular Jobs”, if you prefer).
Fach.