The Swiss system has long been the gold standard for apprenticeship. Switzerland is one of the wealthiest and most developed countries in the world, and about 70% of its students start their careers as apprentices. Some go on to earn bachelor’s degrees, but many don’t—because apprenticeship is in many ways seen as equivalent.
As with all gold standards, the Swiss system has no shortage of would-be imitators. For decades, delegations of American researchers, workforce administrators, and educators have made pilgrimages to Switzerland to see what all the fuss is about. They come back inspired, but then quickly run aground.
The United States, after all, is not Switzerland.
Neither is Indiana. But the state has an ambitious plan to finally succeed where others have barely gotten started.
The Big Idea: A coalition of business and education leaders there released a strategic plan last month that they hope will create 50K youth apprenticeships statewide in the next decade. It’s part of a larger push in this country to get serious about apprenticeship as a companion to traditional college—and if Indiana succeeds, the state could become a model in its own right.
The coalition, CEMETS iLab Indiana, has been laying the groundwork for years, with more than 200 leaders on board, pilot projects underway, and plans to maximize legislative changes that are in the works.
Katie Caves has been working closely with the coalition in Indiana, and while she’s realistic about the challenges of translating the Swiss model, she’s optimistic about what she’s seen. As lab director at Center on the Economics and Management of Education and Training Systems (CEMETS) at ETH Zurich’s Chair of Education Systems, Caves is often one of the first stops on any Swiss learning tour.
“We work with a lot of states and a lot of countries, and one of the really important factors in making this actually work is having everybody at the table: government, schools, districts, businesses, employer associations, and local community leaders and funding—all of that,” she says.
“Indiana is the only place in the U.S. right now that has managed to put together all of those pieces.”
‘An Additional Pathway that Works’
The apprenticeship program is fully funded by the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. Claire Fiddian-Green, president and CEO of the foundation, says the idea came from a 2016 report from the National Conference of State Legislatures that recommended improving career and technical education and vocational training in the U.S. to build a world-class education system. The report specifically named the Swiss model of youth apprenticeship as one to watch.
There, young people can start working as teenagers in apprenticeships, learning both technical and soft skills on the job, while simultaneously pursuing a high school diploma. The skills they learn after they graduate and advance also count as credits equivalent to higher education degrees and certificates, allowing them to start a master’s degree, for example, even without having earned a bachelor’s degree. CEMETS iLab Indiana hopes to build a similar model.
“College is and will always be a really important pathway, but it does not serve the majority of students in our country and in our state of Indiana,” Fiddian-Green says. “And it also is not what every employer needs for the jobs they are trying to hire people for.
“We believe it’s really important to develop an additional pathway that works in partnership with colleges and that’s led by employers, and the Swiss system really is the gold standard.”
The Details: With five committees representing K-12, higher education, and industry leaders, the iLab aims to create a statewide apprenticeship model based on learnings from Switzerland as well as the seven pilot apprenticeship programs that currently operate in Indiana, dating back to 2019. They also looked at CareerWise Colorado, another youth apprenticeship program based on the Swiss model.
They’ll use what they call “talent associations” to unify the voices of industry leaders, who will lead the development of curriculum and pathways. For now, they are starting with four industries facing increasing talent shortages: banking, healthcare, life sciences, and advanced manufacturing and logistics.
Participating students will start their junior years of high school in the apprenticeships and continue for three years—including one year post-graduation. From there, they’ll have the option to continue their education or otherwise advance in their chosen fields through promotions.
Changing High School Requirements—and Needs
In many ways, Indiana is an ideal state to pioneer a new statewide youth apprenticeship model. For one, it’s similar in population to Switzerland, which gives them somewhat of a blueprint for scalability. And more importantly, the state is already making some changes to high school diploma requirements that will allow for greater flexibility to follow a personalized course of study, including career and technical education.
Fiddian-Green says they hope to be able to allow students to spend full days at the work site, too, rather than the current norm of just a few hours.
“If the student is only there for two or three hours in the afternoon or the morning, it’s really hard to come up with a transportation solution, unless that child has their own car or can access a bus or public transit,” she says.
Right now in the seven pilot programs, there are about 450 apprentices at 40 schools working with about 100 employers. Each of the apprentice’s schedules has been customized for that student and employer. “That makes it very hard to come up with systemic solutions,” Fiddian-Green says.
On the Ground: Elkhart County, Indiana, which has the largest youth apprenticeship cohort in the state and was the first of the seven pilot programs to launch, has already seen a lot of interest from students and parents.
Dan Funston, superintendent of Concord Community Schools in the county and co-chair of the iLab’s high school committee, says it was a challenge to convince parents that youth apprenticeships could be a promising path for their kids, but employers really helped. Kids go home and tell their parents about what they’re learning on the jobs, which has been meaningful to parents.
From the perspective of a superintendent, Funston sees apprenticeships not just as a nice-to-have option—but as a necessity, especially for first-generation college students and English language learners.
“In Elkhart County, over 70% of our kids say that they want to attend a two- or four-year school, but only a little over 40% of them actually enroll in the fall,” Funston says. “Our kids have to be lifelong learners, and they have to have a high level of educational attainment for the jobs of the future.”
A Larger Shift: Deborah Kobes, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, says that more and more states are looking at youth apprenticeships on a broader scale. Indiana and Colorado are the most similar, with both modeling after the Swiss, but other states including Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Maryland are also building robust programs.
“It’s a really great time for the U.S. to explore what apprenticeship could look like, and we should make sure that we’re also building an evidence case around these different models so that we can take the best of what’s working in these early adopter states and bring that to the rest of the country,” Kobes says.
A Boon for Higher Ed and Industry
In addition to making space for more work-based learning in high schools, the iLab also needs buy-in from higher education institutions to be truly effective.
On the Ground: Kenith Britt, chief operating officer and chancellor of Marian University and co-chair of the iLab’s higher education committee, says part of his job is to help other colleges and universities see the benefit of a youth apprenticeship program—rather than looking at it as competition.
Right now in Indiana, only 53% of high school graduates are pursuing a two- or four-year degree. Britt is focused on the other 47%—most of whom are not working in the trades or other fields that are well-suited for apprenticeship. He sees those young people as being left behind in the education system, and apprenticeships could help bridge the gap between high school and college.
“Let’s say you’re 18 or 19 and you choose to go into an apprenticeship and you finish that and start working, at some point that student is going to need to re-engage in higher education, whether it’s a two-year degree or four-year degree or graduate program,” Britt says. “That’s where higher ed has a strong track record of being available.”
For industries such as banking, one of the four focus areas for the iLab, this alternate path to higher education can help fill talent shortages as well as help young people advance in their careers.
For example, a high school student might get a banking certificate after apprenticing in their junior and senior years of high school. Then for the third year of the apprenticeship, they might partner with a local community college or university and earn an associate’s degree and other certifications, like in Microsoft Excel. After gaining more work experience, they might earn the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree and then be able to pursue their MBA and move up to a management position.
“From the employer side, getting individuals and being able to train them on our industry would be tremendous,” says David Becker, chairman and CEO of First Internet Bank and co-chair of the iLab’s governing committee. “Particularly in banking today, our needs are changing on an annual basis, if not monthly—even, in some cases, the skills and talents that we need. It’s a win for both sides.”
One lesson committee members have learned from their trips to Switzerland is that employers will need to be the ones leading the way in developing the new model. Currently, the pilot programs rely on intermediaries—usually nonprofit organizations—to run the programs. In the future, the talent associations will be the ones in the driver’s seat.
Challenges Still Ahead
Caves of ETH Zurich is optimistic about what Indiana is doing, but aware that it will take a lot of systemic—and even mindset—change to make it work.
For starters, many work-based learning programs in the U.S. require very little actual workplace experience—sometimes as little as 5% of time in the program. Part of the reason is that academic credit still trumps workplace experience for young people in the eyes of many hiring managers and schools.
“It’s about expanding our definition of credit because right now, credit only applies to academic credit,” Caves says. “We’re usually talking about college credits, maybe high school credits, and that limits us to reading, writing, arithmetic. We want to move to a place where we have two different pathways that are really truly functionally differentiated and specialized.”
Caves, who is American but lives in Zurich, notes other cultural differences that make it difficult to use the apprenticeship model as it exists in Switzerland in a place like Indiana. High school sports, for example, might interfere with a 9-to-5 workday.
While the U.S. has a ways to go in setting up systems that accommodate youth apprenticeships and in creating frameworks for qualifications that equate academic achievement with workplace experience, Caves is heartened by what she sees happening in Indiana so far.
“It’s unbelievable,” Caves says. “They’ve got hundreds of people working on this and spending real quantities of time on it. Look at the big civil engineering projects of the past—like when they reversed the Chicago River. This is up there, but social.”