Shut out: High school students learn about careers — but can't try one that pays

Patrick O’Donnell // The 74 Jubei Brown-Weaver knows he was lucky to land a rare apprenticeship with IT and consulting giant Accenture when he was a junior at McKinley Technology High School in Washington, D.C. He won one of 20 available slots in a new high school apprenticeship program–just one of three at Accenture–in a city of 20,000 public high school students.  Three years later, Brown-Weaver, now 19, has become a full-time employee, earning more than $20 an hour as a package app developer at Accenture. But a good friend who missed out on the apprenticeships is struggling, The 74 reports.  “Because of the luck of the draw that I had (I’m working) … in the field that I want to be in,” Brown-Weaver told a recent Brookings Institute panel on youth apprenticeships. His friend, he said, “works part time at Target, making minimum wage.” “It’s sad to see that I simply just got lucky that day,” Brown-Weaver said. Providing high school students like Brown-Weaver a chance to try out possible careers has become a growing focus for families, public officials, schools, and even businesses over the last several years.  But all work opportunities aren’t created equal.  There’s a hierarchy of experiences that rise in commitment, intensity, and benefit for students and providers–with career days and job fairs at the low end. At the top end are internships, where students work with adults, and apprenticeships, longer programs where students are paid to work and earn career credentials. Schools and communities routinely boast of making great efforts to better connect students with real work opportunities, but the reality is these efforts rarely go beyond career exposure events like career days or job shadows. “The ultimate internship…a paid experience…we still have a long way to go to provide more opportunity for young people to experience those,” said Julie Lammers, senior vice president of American Student Assistance, a non-profit connecting students to career training. The best estimates available suggest that 5% of students or less have the chance for the gold standard of work experiences–apprenticeships or internships.  At the request of The 74, the Department of Labor compiled data showing a little over 10,000 16- to 18-year-olds started apprenticeships nationally last year–less than a tenth of a percent of the more than 13 million students that age. That’s including 18-year-olds who started apprenticeships after graduating high school. It’s a dramatic difference from European countries such as Switzerland, where more than half of students use apprenticeships to start a career or as a stepping stone to university. Apprenticeships in Switzerland have the attention of Linda McMahon, the new appointee for U.S. secretary of education, who highlighted them in social media posts on the day her appointment was announced.  There are more internships than apprenticeships for high schoolers, but still not many. A 2018 survey of more than 800 students by American Student Assistance, a non-profit that works with students on career choices, showed while 79% were interested in trying a work experience, only 2% completed an internship in high school. Though the percentage of employers offering high school internships has grown from 30 percent in 2018 to 38% today, ASA estimates only four to five percent of students actually are participating in internships. ‘That’s still a very small number of young people,” Lammers said. “Those organizations may only be offering one or two opportunities, so the volume is still not there.” Lammers said schools are instead adding “things that expose young people to work, but are not necessarily training them in specific skills.” ASA’s recent survey found that close to half of employers offer mentorships, job shadowing, open houses, and field trip visits–all valuable experiences for students but that barely scratch the surface of providing the skills and training needed for the world of work. Noel Ginsburg, co-chairman of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Advisory Committee on Apprenticeship said schools and businesses can’t stop at just exposing students to careers. “It’s not a bad thing,” he said. “It’s just not enough.” “It’s a lack of understanding what quality actually means when a school says, ‘We have these partnerships with XYZ company, and they come in, they’re helping us in class, and sometimes they’ll donate old whatever (equipment to train with),” Ginsburg said. “That’s not what apprenticeship is … but that’s historically what it has been for them.” Experts have agreed on a rough hierarchy of work experiences for several years, often distinguishing between those where students “learn about work” and those where they “learn how to work.” As a report this year co-written by Advance CTE, the national association of state directors of career technical education, notes, “Work-based learning includes a continuum of experiences ranging from less intensive opportunities such as career awareness and career exploration to more intensive opportunities such as career preparation and career training.” The Advance CTE hierarchy below is similar to those created in 2009 like this one by New Ways to Work, a Bay Area non-profit that has worked on career efforts in California and New York. It’s also similar to those used by nonprofits like Brookings, ExcelInED, ASA, or adopted by states such as Maryland, North Dakota, North Carolina, New Hampshire, or Delaware, sometimes labeling the top level as career immersion, development or participation. Some take that hierarchy even farther. As officials in Indiana started developing plans for a statewide expansion of high school apprenticeships, they ranked student work experiences with full registered apprenticeships at the top, pre-apprenticeships and other apprenticeships a level below, internships below those, and work opportunities that teach students general employability skills a step lower. The trouble is that while low-level career experiences like job fairs take just a few hours of time for students and businesses, apprenticeships and internships require much more effort from both sides.  CityWorks DC, the program that organized Brown-Weaver’s apprenticeship, would like to expand to many more students, but is growing slowly. “We definitely need more opportunities and hope to offer more, but one reason there are so few are the systemic barriers that make what we do very resource intensive and challenging,” said Lateefah Durant, CityWorks’ vice president of innovation. She said it can be hard to find students who can commit to working several hours a week and fit that within their high school class schedules. It’s also hard to find companies willing to take on high school students and train them. In 2019, the program’s first year, one of nine companies that took on apprentices backed out. And one of the other Accenture apprentices alongside Brown-Weaver had trouble meeting standards and was dropped. ASA’s 2023 survey highlighted several common challenges businesses see as they start high school internships, including finding appropriate work for them, devoting staff to training them, scheduling around class schedules and whether students have transportation to work. Companies are less likely to view high school apprenticeships as a key part of building a workforce than just as a way to give back to the community. Using apprenticeships and internships as a real talent strategy, as they are in Europe, is key to them ever becoming widely available, experts say. Those findings are in keeping with challenges experts have pointed to as holding growth of internships and apprenticeships back. Transportation is a big problem for lower-income students, who often need to improve their career chances the most but rarely have their own car. And class schedules, along with extracurricular activities, can be a big hurdle too since they can limit the time a student can spend in a workplace each day. Indiana is among states trying to overcome these issues. Transportation costs could be covered by new Career Savings Accounts–state grants to students for training expenses. And the state is considering more flexible class schedules, so students can work at an apprenticeship a few days each week. In many cases, with few companies stepping up to take on interns or apprenticeships, students are placed instead in government offices or with nonprofits that advocate for work opportunities. The D.C. program has apprentices with the Department of Labor and with New America, a left-leaning think tank that is part of the national Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship. Indiana also placed early apprentices with Ascend Indiana, a non-profit that helped create them. Schools and communities also lean on experiences that partly simulate or mirror work experience. These can include students doing exploratory summer internships with industry associations or schools that partner with companies so students earn money by doing a project, such as a small coding or marketing task, through school for the company. Though there’s no consensus on where these fall on the continuum of work experiences, ASA’s Lammers said they can be worthwhile, if students are working on real-world problems for employers that intend to use the work product. “If it is high-intensity project based learning, where young people are still exposed to a career…and are able to understand that it’s not just sort of an academic exercise … there is huge value in that,” she said. “It might not just be the nine-to-five paid experience that we sort of see in an internship, and that might be okay.” Others look to third parties that the field is calling “intermediaries” to navigate some of the complex legal, liability and training issues, as well as to recruit, select and train students, along with training company staff in how to work with teenagers. In Boston, the city’s Public Industry Council helps run paid summer internships for high schoolers, while also running staff training sessions to make sure students and companies benefit. CareerWise acts as an intermediary on some levels. Genesys Works, a non-profit, fills that role in eight regions–Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Tulsa and Washington, D.C., with Jacksonville coming next year. Genesys gives students eight weeks of unpaid training in the summer after 11th grade before placing them in paid internships for 20 hours a week as seniors. Students are paid employees of Genesys, not the companies, but they work in the offices of companies like Accenture, Medtronic or Target, the latter in corporate offices, not stocking shelves or working a register like Brown-Weaver’s friend. “We’re going to our corporate partners saying, like, what are the roles, entry level roles in your corporate offices that you are filling over and over again?” said Mandy Hildenbrand, chief services officer of Genesys. “Let’s talk about how we can be a pipeline for that.” For many apprenticeship advocates, some of the barriers are more about attitudes than real problems.  “Culturally, U.S. companies haven’t traditionally viewed themselves as a training ground or an extension of the classroom,” said Ginsburg, founder of CareerWise, the nation’s largest youth apprenticeship program. “There’s a big difference between having an intern look over your shoulder and actually expecting real work from an apprentice.” He said businesses should recognize that while they won’t see immediate returns, they will if they are patient and take the time to train students well. “It’s hard,” he said, “before it gets easy.” This story was produced by The 74 and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.