“Being an UpSkill youth apprentice has taught me more than I ever imagined. It led me to study business in college. It gave me responsibility and a clearer sense of direction.”
That’s what college student Owen Snyder said during a recent webinar about his high school senior year apprenticeship at German American Bank in Bloomington, Indiana. It shaped his pathway to Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, where he’s a sophomore and continuing his apprenticeship.
His story captures what many young people want and many schools struggle to provide: not just information about possible future jobs, but practical ways to prepare for and get them.
For Hampton University freshman Maegan Godoy, the skills she learned as a high school apprentice at New America’s Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship, or PAYA, have already proven their worth in her coursework as a political science major, she said during the same webinar.
Far from being just a pathway to an occupation, youth apprenticeships deepen academic learning, helping students connect classroom study to the habits, judgment and responsibility that adult work requires.
This National Apprenticeship Week is the right time to focus on these types of youth-focused programs, because they are a promising way to strengthen the bridge from school to work and adulthood. But there are barriers to their expansion.
