At this year’s SXSW EDU conference, the startup Apprentos stole the show, winning the “Launch Competition” with a slick pitch promising to “de-risk” apprenticeships for employers. In a celebratory Instagram reel and press release that followed, it looked like a breakthrough: a tech solution poised to hack, er, solve one of the thorniest problems in American education. The reality is more complicated. Apprentos—and startups like it—can help individual firms and students, no question. But compared with the scale of apprenticeship programs in countries like Germany or Switzerland, this is merely a drop in the bucket, a reminder that system-level change in U.S. apprenticeships is a generational project—one that startups alone are ill-equipped to drive.
Apprentos’s win is best understood in context. SXSW EDU’s signature event is hardly a new experiment. This was its fifteenth year spotlighting early-stage education ventures. Surveying past finalists offers a telling glimpse into the landscape. Some names are familiar (e.g., Amira Learning), others obscure even to seasoned observers (Tilli, anyone?), and a surprising number of organizations now appear to have vanished entirely, their broken URLs an eerie reminder of how quickly startups come and go. The competition’s framing is equally revealing. Prizes go to “startups on the bleeding edge of innovation,” not to initiatives that have proven durable in schools and classrooms. That’s not a critique—it’s a design choice—but the showcase only hinted at what it might take to shift our country away from a college-or-bust mentality that, while softening, remains deeply entrenched.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, there are roughly 700,000 Americans in apprenticeships. It sounds impressive, but this represents less than half a percent of the U.S. workforce (the same figure is around 70 percent in Switzerland). By comparison, there are more than 19 million Americans in college. While there’s been no shortage of effort to close this gap—with recent ones led by Presidents Obama, Biden, and Trump—adoption remains stubbornly low. Despite high student satisfaction, solid wages, and strong employer and family support, the reality hasn’t caught up to the rhetoric.
That’s because the disconnect is largely structural and institutional. Much like efforts to persuade Americans to eat more caterpillars and crickets—the coverage of the next protein revolution is legion, yet startups have folded despite clear nutritional and environmental benefits—American families, schools, and employers run up against barriers that make apprenticeships hard to implement at scale. Vocational pathways remain widely viewed as second tier, early tracking is politically fraught, and U.S. employers worry that apprentices will walk out the door, along with firms’ investment in their human capital, at the end of their training.
Startups like Apprentos can help lower costs, reduce administrative friction, and make employer participation less risky. Those fixes are useful, but they address only the margins of a far bigger problem. Scaling apprenticeships requires system-level alignment: schools granting credit, postsecondary institutions recognizing credentials, employers investing in training, and a cultural shift that treats non-college pathways as first-class options. Even when students, parents, and employers are supportive in principle, rigid course credit requirements and packed schedules make it challenging for high schools to accommodate apprenticeships without displacing other essential coursework. Innovation matters, but without broader institutional buy-in, the most brilliant tools will remain novelties, just as the most compelling arguments for edible insects rarely translate into dinner plates.
Even if all the pieces align, the question of time, attention, and resources looms large. A recent NPR story documented something that should be obvious but is too often overlooked: Alongside employer investment, consensus among policymakers that public funding for apprenticeships—federal and state combined—is nowhere near the scale needed to make a dent. Targets like a million (or four million) apprenticeships sound bold, but the federal outlay—often measured in the low hundreds of millions—doesn’t match ambitions that would require billions. As with K–12 schooling, there are always more ideas than dollars, more policy goals than political bandwidth. So while it’s easy to say we should just “take a page from Switzerland,” that rhetoric ignores very real constraints and tradeoffs.
Switzerland’s apprenticeship system now generates considerable hype. Study tours abound, with visitors convinced they’ve seen the future, but its strength lies in inputs—deep cultural, societal, and labor market norms—that cannot easily be transplanted here. Poaching concerns are just one factor; the system’s durability rests on long-established expectations, close coordination among schools and firms, and a cultural acceptance of vocational pathways that the U.S. has yet to develop. The notion that we should (or could) copy it wholesale is wishful thinking.
Returning to the drumbeat encouraging Americans to eat insects, proponents often point to cultures where it’s routine, implying Americans just need to get over their mental block. But that block is a feature, not a bug (pun intended) of America’s values and habits. Norms are not arbitrary preferences; they are embedded systems of expectation and belief. What’s more, attempts to upend long-standing norms frequently yield unintended consequences.
Looking ahead, the lesson is not that apprenticeships aren’t worth pursuing, but that lasting change will be neither quick nor easy. Policymakers, employers, and educators must temper enthusiasm with patience, recognizing that cultural norms, institutional inertia, and finite resources limit what can realistically be achieved in the short term. A sustained, coordinated effort over decades may slowly broaden perceptions of vocational pathways, but it will require more than bold targets or splashy slogans. It will demand alignment across schools, employers, families, and communities, as well as the political will to invest for the long haul. The sizzle of innovative pitches is compelling, but the steak of meaningful, system-level transformation depends on time and steady effort—and calls for both ambition and humility.
