Learning and working - together - apprenticeship programs for high school students - includes related information on resources

Nation's Business, June, 1992 by Joan C. Szabo

Precision Metal Forming (PMF) Industries, Inc., of Williamsport, Pa., often finds it difficult to locate the experienced metalworkers it needs to run its shop. A small firm with 50 employees, PMF manufactures stainless steel cylinders and contoured hollow shapes that are used in medical equipment and aircraft parts.

To help fill its need for workers, the firm recently joined five other metalworking companies in the Lycoming County area in a new school-to-work transition program. The demonstration project, which is supported by federal, state, and private-sector funds, is designed to give young people training and better preparation for metalworking jobs.

One of the students in the program is Jamie Rakestraw, a high-school junior who works two days a week as an apprentice in PMF's shop and spends three days in classroom instruction at the Pennsylvania College of Technology.

The Williamsport metalworking program, launched last fall, involves six employers, seven high schools, and 12 high-school juniors. The students are working to earn a high-school diploma and to receive transferable post-secondary credits and certification of competence in entry-level metalworking skills. Rakestraw and the other apprentices also earn a training wage of $80 a week from their employer.

The Pennsylvania Youth Apprenticeship Program is one of a number of demonstration projects already established or just getting under way throughout the country to better prepare young people for the workplace.

In Oklahoma, for example, the Metropolitan Tulsa Chamber of Commerce and area businesses have helped fashion a youth apprenticeship program scheduled to be launched this fall.

In Detroit, a cooperative-education effort between industry and educators is also helping to prepare students for technical jobs.

Six hospitals in the Boston area are benefiting from a youth apprenticeship program that prepares students for careers in health care.

The U.S. Department of Labor and other organizations have provided more than $10 million in two-year grants to six school-to-work transition programs. "In most of these projects, the Labor Department only funds about 10 to 20 percent of the total cost," says James D. Van Erden, administrator of the Office of Work-Based Learning, in the Labor Department's Employment and Training Administration. "We require the communities and businesses to offer resources because we don't want to fund the program and then have it disappear when the funding stops."

These public-private partnerships are useful in helping businesses underwrite significant training costs necessary to prepare young people for the work force, says Robert Martin, vice president/executive director of the Center for Workforce Preparation and Quality Education, an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The partnerships also help bridge the transition from school to work for young people, especially for those who do not plan to attend college. Statistics indicate that about half of U.S. youths do not go to college.

"More and more, the country is realizing that young people who don't go to college need some kind of a training system that encourages learning and earning simultaneously and mixes academic education with applied education on the job," says Anthony Carnevale, chief economist of the American Society for Training and Development, in Alexandria, Va.

According to a recent General Accounting Office (GAO) report, Transition From School To Work, many of the young people not bound for college "flounder in the labor market upon leaving school, jobless or obtaining jobs with few opportunities for advancement."

Many of these young people don't enter the work force until they are in their early 20s, and the nation cannot afford that loss of productivity, says Van Erden.

Inadequate school-to-work transition also undercuts the nation's international competitiveness. "In competitor nations, schools and employers typically work together to facilitate youths' work-force entry," says the GAO report.

In Germany, for example, about two-thirds of all young people ages 16 to 19 take part in apprenticeships. In the U.S., however, only about 300,000 individuals, mostly in their late 20s or older, were in apprenticeship programs in 1989.

The traditional U.S. apprenticeship program has been a vehicle for training a limited number of adults for a limited number of openings for skilled trades-people. A majority of U.S. apprentices prepare to be skilled craftspersons either in the construction industry or large-scale manufacturing.

But today's public-private initiatives involve the creation of new youth apprenticeship programs, while others involve a cooperative-education effort in which academic and technical courses lead to a certificate or associate's degree in a technical field.

All such programs must have high standards and offer students flexibility, says the Labor Department's Van Erden. "A young person who decides to take one year of an apprenticeship program can just as easily go back into the college-track plan," he says.