<i>&gt;We need publicly subsidized apprenticeships to replace the assumed role of the outrageously expensive 4 year college degree as the primary means of acquiring skills for the modern labor force.  There is a place for higher education - [...] - but it cannot be expected to be the sole gateway to the middle class.</i><p>Unfortunately, your apprenticeship idea does not address a key driver of why college institutions act as gatekeepers of desirable employers.  It&#x27;s not so much the &quot;training&quot; but more of the &quot;signaling&quot;.[1]<p>As a thought experiment, let&#x27;s pretend that the USA de-emphasizes college and promotes apprenticeships.  The USA has roughly 3 million high school graduates every year.  It&#x27;s safe to say that most of them are not really interested in college purely for the &quot;skills&quot;, or &quot;well-rounded education&quot; including Shakespeare and Calculus III.  They&#x27;d rather just earn a middle-income salary right away and college is just that &quot;hoop to jump through&quot; to make it happen.<p>Well, businesses like Google, Ford Motor, Goldman Sachs, etc are not going to be interested in dealing directly with a vast sea of undifferentiated high school graduates to offer internships.  They need a pre-selection process.  Therefore, a new &quot;clearinghouse&quot; institution would naturally emerge in the marketplace to &quot;evaluate&quot; (test) and &quot;filter&quot; (rank) these hopeful apprentices.  (Perhaps Donald Trump could create a spinoff business to do just that.)<p>Once the clearinghouse is in place, the hopeful candidates will want to demonstrate &quot;talent&#x2F;smarts&#x2F;whatever&quot; so they get the best internship offers.  That will then lead to tutoring, coaching, preparation, etc and <i>all those services cost money</i>.<p>Because of how humans work, we&#x27;d just be replacing variable $FILTER=&quot;college&quot; with $FILTER=&quot;clearinghouse+coaching&quot;.  That new model may cost less overall to society because C+C doesn&#x27;t spend 4 months dissecting Shakespeare but let&#x27;s not kid ourselves that this new model is &quot;more fair&quot;.  A future complaint would be, <i>&quot;I took out a $20k to pay for clearinghouse coaching but instead of landing a coveted apprenticeship slot at Google Inc, I&#x27;m a barista at Starbucks.  It sucks because The Whole Point of the apprenticeship system is to TRAIN me!&quot;</i><p>You see, the core problem remains because companies don&#x27;t want to &quot;waste internship training&quot; on poor candidates.  Everybody wants the best of the best and apprenticeships don&#x27;t fundamentally change that human desire.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Signalling_(economics)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Signalling_(economics)</a>