A young person who wants to go into hotel management typically needs a bachelor’s degree. Or at least, that’s true here. Not so in Switzerland, where a high-school student would attend classes part time while also working at a paid apprenticeship for a hotel, take one more year of training after high school and be set in a well-paid career.
Meanwhile, the cost of attending college surges upward and there is pressure in Washington to spend a trillion dollars forgiving student loan debt. High-school students find their studies irrelevant and unengaging while the workplace is rife with “education inflation,” in which jobs that used to require a high-school education and maybe a little bit more now require a four-year college degree.
The COVID-19 pandemic made clearer than ever the inequities in our education system, as some students learned online with the help of tutors and well-resourced parents while others lacked even reliable broadband. It laid bare the stresses of college students who couldn’t afford their tuition and of graduates without the money to pay off their college debts.
What if the problem with college education isn’t that we don’t have enough of it, but that in some ways, we have too much?
Education inflation not only leaves graduates (and even more, college dropouts) with crippling debt loads, but contributes to inequality and hampers the ability of many a bright student to enter the middle class.
The Swiss apprenticeship model is a particularly ripe avenue for exploration. In order to do that, a few things would need to happen. Companies would have to stop demanding degrees that aren’t strictly necessary. They would have to participate in the training of a workforce and know that if they do, it would be far more likely to provide them with employees who have the skills they seek.
It turns out that about 30 percent of Swiss students enroll in full-time, college-prep courses; they must pass a rigorous test to be accepted into the college track. Most of the rest attend high school part time and work as apprentices part time in their chosen fields. They might need an extra year or even two of schooling after high school, or might go right into full-time jobs.
Flexibility is built into the system. Students can switch apprenticeships if they are drawn to a different career. They also can switch to a college track, even after starting jobs post-graduation, by taking a one-year course of education to catch them up on college-oriented studies. By that time, many of them have gained the maturity and perspective, as well as experience using their academic skills on the job, to succeed in college — which, by the way, is tuition-free. Switzerland can afford that by not trying to provide college for all or even most students.
A Harvard Business School report on education inflation outlines how it harms American workers as well as employers.
“Degree inflation hurts the average American’s ability to enter and stay in the workforce,” the report says.
Less than two-thirds of U.S. college students graduate within six years. Imagine the waste of educational resources, and the students’ money and time, when they come out unable to qualify for a good job or work in the field they’d chosen.
For that matter, education inflation doesn’t just affect students at this level. More jobs that used to require a bachelor’s degree now additionally require a master’s degree.
Ironically, one of the reasons for the degree inflation was that more high-school students were attending college, leading employers to feel that they no longer were hiring the cream by hiring college graduates.
Robust, quality public schools starting with preschool; a concerted effort to bring employers into the education mix; a college system that might enroll a smaller percentage of high-school graduates but which grants far more of them a degree, and at low or no tuition cost; an apprenticeship system that gives high-school studies more relevance and prepares students with empowering real-life skills for jobs that now require a college degree.
Karin Klein is an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times.