The Swiss model: Who needs college when you can go to vocational school?
Youngsters like Bove, who opt for the vocational education, follow a dual-track approach combining practical training at a host company with a part-time classroom instruction at a VET school. Trade organizations determine skills that are most in demand in the labor market,ensuring that apprentices will be adequately trained for jobs in their fields.
So far, this approach has been very successful: less than 3% of Switzerland’s young people are unemployed, the lowest rate among 30 industrialized countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. (As a comparison, that rate is over 12% in the U.S and 22% in European Union nations).
Currently, approximately 58,000 Swiss companies provide VET program to roughly 80,000 apprentices – impressive numbers in a country of only 8 million people. They offer training in commercial, retail, healthcare, technology, and other fields. “Businesses regard training of young people as their social responsibility,” says Franziska Schwarz, Vice Director of the Federal Office for Professional Education and Technology (OPET), which oversees the country’s vocational programs.
Blowback
Note from Hot Air management: This section is for comments from Hot Air's community of registered readers. Please don't assume that Hot Air management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment just because we let it stand. A reminder: Anyone who fails to comply with our terms of use may lose their posting privilege.
Trackbacks/Pings
Trackback URL
Comments
This post needs pics of Swiss models
faraway on October 4, 2012 at 9:48 PM
This is why I am voting for Romney
GW_SS-Delta on October 4, 2012 at 9:49 PM
Here you go:
http://www.piercemattie.com/blogs/swiss%20man.jpg
strictnein on October 4, 2012 at 9:49 PM
This thread lies!
Where are the models?
lorien1973 on October 4, 2012 at 9:49 PM
We can either stop funding colleges or start funding trade schools equally. Either way, libertarian or statist, the market finds the natural balance.
elfman on October 4, 2012 at 9:54 PM
This.
Give young people another option. It seems like years ago, when I was young, you could go to “tech” school if you knew you werent’ going to be on a collegiate track. What happened to those?
In Atlanta, GA, just over 1/2 of high school students graduate on time. What are these people going to DO with their lives? Although, this is a separate problem, it is related. Kids who aren’t going to be going to college need some sort of practical skills training. There are only so many burger kings around here.
cep on October 4, 2012 at 9:55 PM
Color me suspicious. I keep hearing things like “ohhh…there is SUCH a shortage of people who can do X, and they make (some laughably huge amount) right off the bat!”
Funny thing is, when I press people who say that to tell me exactly what companies have such a shortage, where they are, and what positions they’re hiring for…they either aren’t sure or wave me off with “go out and look!”
MelonCollie on October 4, 2012 at 9:55 PM
I feel dirty now
faraway on October 4, 2012 at 9:56 PM
Once again, the Swiss showing why it is so cool to be Swiss…
JohnGalt23 on October 4, 2012 at 10:01 PM
I heard Stossel is coming out with a report where ‘his girl’ goes out and looks for a job, finds 40 of them, then goes to a Fed job-training program location and is offered food stamps and unemployment. Sounds like something Stossel would do…and sounds really believable.
Jackalope on October 4, 2012 at 10:03 PM
I really wish there would have been a computer programming apprenticeship before I went to college. I mean it’s a PITA to have to go to school for 4 years extra and spend $100,000 and then essentially have to learn new stuff right after school anyway. The whole thing about programming is that if you understand logic you can program. The rest is just learning syntax and different languages which you may have to do anyway because there are so many in use. Heck, in my current job I’m a Software Engineer and we use C# however we are in the process of moving to Java.
MobileVideoEngineer on October 4, 2012 at 10:04 PM
These people all have Swiss bank accounts!!!!!!
faraway on October 4, 2012 at 10:09 PM
Super, and 20 years from now when Switzerland is critically short of Womyn’s Studies professionals, and can’t find enough people who are qualified to be Transgender Empowerment instructors…then what? Create them out of thin air?
Bishop on October 4, 2012 at 10:10 PM
Heh!
roy_batty on October 4, 2012 at 10:15 PM
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303936704576399563008284024.html
It takes less time to become a doctor.
NeoKong on October 4, 2012 at 10:17 PM
MobileVideoEngineer on October 4, 2012 at 10:04 PM
Word.
wccawa on October 4, 2012 at 10:20 PM
The “20%male” in the link shoulda told you something.
davidk on October 4, 2012 at 10:28 PM
Sorry. Suggesting vocational school over college was deemed racist in the 60s, so, you know, it’s a non-starter.
Ben Hur on October 4, 2012 at 10:32 PM
Huh? America has vocational schools all across the fruited plain. Wake up, Shraggy.
J.E. Dyer on October 4, 2012 at 10:34 PM
Someone alert JetBoy.
BuckeyeSam on October 4, 2012 at 11:24 PM
Can’t offshore a plumber. Or a carpenter.
JohnBrown on October 4, 2012 at 11:28 PM
No, but you can hire an illegal one under the table.
Fortunately people are (usually) smart enough not to do this with electricians.
MelonCollie on October 4, 2012 at 11:31 PM
There is a severe shortage of skilled tradesmen in this country after years of kids being told the only way to make a decent living is to go to college, and that working with your hands is demeaning and for dumb people.
I work in the commercial and industrial construction industry and I’ve seen the shortage of skilled labor firsthand. I’ve also seen some of the most brilliant people you can imagine, most of whom went to the school of hard knocks and if they ever set foot on a college campus it was to build something. A fitter I worked with a long time ago told me how in WWII they would repair holes in ship’s hulls by cutting a piece of steel from the hull and using it to patch both holes-and then showed me how it’s done.
My trade is plumbing/pipefitting which is very math intensive (algebra, trigonometry, and geometry). We find x so we can use it to build the facilities other people need to do their jobs.
We hear a lot about our infrastructure falling apart but we aren’t training the tradesmen to fix it. To paraphrase Mike Rowe, Obama talked about shovel ready jobs to people who aren’t willing to pick up a shovel.
Skilled trades do pay well. I know pipefitters who sometimes make over $100,000 a year. I’ve made $75,000 in a year myself. They work their butts off for it in a physically demanding and dangerous environment.
You don’t start out making that kind of money. In fact when you start in a trade the money is usually pretty crappy because you don’t know anything and can’t do anything except help someone who does know what he’s doing.
The trades are a meritocracy and you have to prove yourself over and over again. When you can demonstrate your ability you start making good money. It takes years to get to the top but the whole time you’re earning a living.
There’s nothing as satisfying as the earned pride of seeing a hospital, factory, or office where people earn their living helping other people and making the products we all use to make our lives better and saying “I built that”. It’s high time we stopped discouraging young people from pursuing skilled trades.
single stack on October 4, 2012 at 11:42 PM
To heck with trade schools, just convince a contractor you are an illegal alien and he can teach you to be a master carpenter, brick-mason, electrician, plumber – you name it – in next to no time, even if you actually have lived your whole life in a tin shack with no power or running water.
Knott Buyinit on October 5, 2012 at 12:25 AM
Yup.
Jaibones on October 5, 2012 at 12:32 AM
If you can drive a tractor-trailer, you are in high demand, right now. And if you’re willing to work up in Fracking Country, in the Dakotas, you can almost write your own ticket. Instapundit featured an email from a girl not yet out of what most people think of as “college-age,” who mentioned that she not only made a lucrative wage driving a truck, but her own peers whom she’d suggested the career to, considered it something beneath them (“Too much like work” was the phrase she used, and that really tells the whole sorry story now, doesn’t it?).
The other side of the coin is that just because you’re trained to do “x” doesn’t mean you’re stuck doing that for the rest of your days, especially if you don’t like doing it. And in doing the dirty job you hate now, you may pick up a technique or an idea that can have a big impact in your “real” career later. I work in a tech field, and I’m amazed by some of the stuff that my more-seasoned co-workers come up with on the job. These are little techniques that they learned decades ago in blue-collar jobs they held (or while in uniform) before they took a single class in their “real” field. No professor would ever know of these little tricks (let alone to pass them on), unless they too had personal experience doing that work for a living. Sad to say, not many profs these days do.
A broadened skillset is something that a wise person never turns down. That more people coming out of the diploma-mills don’t recognize that pretty-basic fact saddens me, but it doesn’t surprise me. Our kids aren’t getting an education, they’re getting (at best) a credential. And until that changes, we’re going to stay on our current path, regardless of how deep the hole goes.
Blacksmith on October 5, 2012 at 12:56 AM
I will vouch for the Swiss model. I just lived there as an expat for 18 months in Zug Switzerland (the evil city profiled by 60 minutes last year as the dirty haven for international corporations) and the Swiss do stuff RIGHT in a lot of respects (not so right in others) far more so than their socialist neighbors around Europe. My older boys attended an local integration high school designed to get us “foreigners” acclimated to the swiss-german language and work paths, and those indeed were the options laid out for them. We didn’t do the voc school for them since I was only there a short time, but the kids learned German, and we saw the Swiss way up close.
I could write a book on what I love about the country. We saw through our extended social circle from church that the state welfare safety net is strong for those who need it, but they make those people jump through hoops, and every meeting (which I think is monthly for the welfare cases) with the caseworker is designed to get them off ASAP–they actually had very strict requirements to keep getting a check, and I liked how there is a minor element of shame attached to it. Folks didn’t want to stay on it. Its one reason why unemployment is so low over there.
Health care is another thing to behold. Yes they had the dreaded “mandate”– we were informed in no uncertain terms after we arrived that we had 4 weeks to get our health insurance in order–and then that was it from the government. Total free market care over there–thousands of plans designed for whatever coverage we wanted, small deductibles to huge, HSA type options–MIND BOGGLING. And dirt cheap compared to the US (thanks to the free market aspects of it). Government stayed out of that side entirely, allowing for HUGE choice, which drove down prices and gave tons of options. I paid 600 bucks a month for full coverage for a family of 6–similar plan in the US including employer contribution would have been over 2K. I paid 600, and it was mine 100%.
We could learn from Switzerland.
AttilaTheHun on October 5, 2012 at 2:10 AM
Apprenticeships are useful in the professions too. Having endured law school, I’d suggest cutting the three years of classes to 1 1/2 – 2 years, with the balance applied to an apprenticeship.
This.
petefrt on October 5, 2012 at 6:05 AM
I am so glad you posted this. It would be nice if as a society we lauded tradesmen as integral to a solid infrastructure–surely the message that there is as much dignity in working with one’s hands as with one’s head would encourage more young people to enter trades. My husband and I just bought a 90-year-old stone house, and continue to marvel at the skill it took to build it. It needs a good bit of work (nothing structural–thank you, skilled tradesmen), and what is sad is that we plan to do most of the work ourselves because it is the only way we are assured that the person doing it wants to do it right. Some work we can’t do, and it almost seems like a game of roulette trying to find an electrician or plumber who takes the kind of pride in his work that you describe.
DrMagnolias on October 5, 2012 at 7:19 AM
Shhhhhh! Dude, I get paid well because people don’t know that. Keep it under your hat.
Odysseus on October 5, 2012 at 7:21 AM
Up here in Maine, there is always a shortage of plumbers, electricians, and especially boiler techs, furnace repairmen and plumbers. The socialists running the schools have brainwashed the kids that manual labor is beneath them and that if they truly want to be someone they need to go to college.
Myself and others have worked hard to change that mindset, but the infection runs deep and it will take a very long time to change things around.
By comparison, my doctor, who is an excellent doctor, drives an older Ford Taurus. My plumber drives a new Lexus. The Lexus was paid for in cash. too. He starts at $60/hour and goes to $90/hour after 4pm and on weekends. Triple time on holidays, and he has a 3-month waiting list for clients because kids just don’t want to learn the trades.
TKindred on October 5, 2012 at 7:30 AM
Trade schools can be a good gateway to a profession as well. After a year majoring in Aerospace Engineering, I realized it wasn’t for me, so I went to a VoTech to become a motorcycle mechanic. I worked a in that area for a number of years and then got a job as a quality inspection technician because I had enough smarts to be able to read a micrometer. I’ve now been an engineer for over 20 years working in the super computer and avionics fields. I’d never have been happy in my collegiate choice, but learning real world skills has led to a good life.
banjohack on October 5, 2012 at 7:52 AM
When I was in high school back in the 70s, we had the option to attend vocational classes and work half a day in our junior and senior year. I was in ICT, Industrial Cooperative Training and I learned life skills that I still use.
In class we were taught things like how to manage a checkbook, the different kinds of insurance and how to chose, we had practice interviews for jobs, tips on how to make your resume standout. On Fridays we were required to read a news story of state, national or international importance in front of the class and explain it’s relevance. This not only taught us confidence in speaking before a group but encouraged us to keep abreast of events. Being a good citizen was always emphasized, voting was a right NEVER to be ignored.I could go on at further length but you get the idea. Unfortunately when our school super.of many years retired in the mid 80s, he was replaced by a man who believed that attending college was the only way one could be successful in life. His first move was to end all vocational courses ICT, DECA, wood shop, automotive, Home Economics, And so everyone was forced fitted into the same mold regardless of their interests or skills.
sanjuro on October 5, 2012 at 8:34 AM
Melon, look into welding, and move to a ship-building town (though it is in demand almost everywhere). Come on out to Hampton Roads and put down stakes.
I’m going to pass this on to my son. Would give him a chance to use his German.
There’s also a shortage of potato pickers in the fall, nowadays. At least there was when I was there (Loring AFB). It’s beneath the kids to do it nowadays, and labor regulations make it harder than it has to be.
GWB on October 5, 2012 at 9:41 AM