Youth Apprenticeship: Lessons from the U.S. Experience.

Overview & Synopsis

Although there is no fixed definition of youth apprenticeship, a consensus is emerging on four basic components: student participation, educational content, location of instruction, and credentialing. Except for some recent pilot projects, no youth apprenticeship programs in the United States have all four components, but educators have some experience with each component. German youth apprenticeship systems avoid many problems that plague U.S. education, but philosophical and practical differences cause problems with an analogy between the two countries. Four school-to-work programs in the United States share some features with youth apprenticeship: agricultural education, cooperative education, career academies, and tech prep. An assessment of how the four components of youth apprenticeship work in these four program models shows that, first, although many programs have expanded their enrollments beyond at-risk youth or traditional vocational education students, two negative tendencies emerge: programs tend to become internally differentiated and perpetuate the divisions between types of students and college-bound students are only tenuously involved. Second, efforts to integrate academic and vocational content remains limited. Third, none of the four models even approaches the transformation of workplaces into integral parts of the basic education system. Fourth, credentialling is currently ad hoc. (Conains 10 references.) (YLB)