Why the U.S. Fails at Worker Training
When asked about Donald Trump’s June 2017 executive order calling for the expansion of apprenticeships, Anthony Carnevale says it’s just “good PR.”
Carnevale—the research professor and director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce—believes the high costs of apprenticeships and the U.S.’s dark past with job training will stymie the effort, which aims to help people find jobs in an economy that is rapidly changing primarily because of technological advances. According to Carnevale, apprenticeships—in which aspiring workers learn a trade from a skilled employer in exchange for low wages—can be extremely expensive. The high cost deters employers from participating.
The U.S. has never gotten job training and retraining right. Under the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, the federal government invested billions of dollars in programs aimed at helping Americans adjust to a changing economy, such as the automation of the steel industry in the late 20th century and foreign competition in places like Japan and China.
But these programs came under scrutiny for many reasons, including the fact that they tended to pigeonhole
