Apprenticeships?

Having earned a couple of college diplomas now, I am increasingly struck by the oddity of the current university system. Now you might ask, "what other systems are there," but we will leave that question alone for now. The current question on my mind, is what has happened to apprenticeships? Practical skills are best learned from one who has been working on the skill for many years. The practice of apprenticeships still remains for some occupations but often under different names. Recent law school graduates generally begin their careers as legal clerks. In this position, they work under established layers and judges providing research and helping to craft arguments for cases that the established lawyers are litigating. In this way, the new lawyer moves beyond speculative knowledge of jurisprudence to the more practical role of being a lawyer (which was probably also addressed at length in law school).

Some more practical fields have also retained apprenticeships. I have spent several months in a couple of temporary jobs working with meat cutters. At least in the stores that I worked, the meat cutters retained the three ranks of apprentice, journeyman, and master. The term master was replaced by manager, while the positions of apprentice and journeyman appear to have been retained even in name.

So...where does this leave us? There has been a push to turn many professions that were once developed in the apprenticeship model into college degrees. I am not really sure why this has been happening, although this trend seems to have a correlation to another interesting trend. According to the US Census bureau, between 1950 and 2000 the percentage of the U.S. population that has achieved at least a bachelor's degree has increased from approximately 5% to approximately 25%. While 25% is still a fairly small percentage of the population, it remains interesting that in this period of time a five fold increase (percentage wise) has occurred in the U.S. Additionally, the modern university system greatly predates 1950. I am not quite sure what has happened in the past 60 years to precipitate such an increase.

Along with the increasing role of college education in the lives of Americans has come an increase in the diversity of degrees offered. Diversity is good, right? Haven't we all been taught that since we entered the school system? In this case, I have to wonder. Many jobs that have functioned well without being connected to university degrees are now heading away from apprenticeship models and into mass educational systems. A few degrees or programs that catch my attention are a master's degree in landscape studies, a master's degree in activism, and an entire college within a well known university dedicated to agriculture. Now, I don't want to belittle these occupations (well...I might be interested in belittling activism, it is from a college in San Francisco after all), but college just doesn't seem like the place to study these pursuits. Before I get a bunch of angry farmers and landscape artists after me saying that I want to deny them the opportunity to get an education, we need to look at this issue a bit more closely. I am not saying that I don't think that any of you shouldn't go to college, or wouldn't do perfectly well there. What I am saying is that I don't think that anyone should think that you need a degree to be qualified to do your job. It wouldn't surprise me at all if many of the people with these degrees are rather unqualified farmers and landscape artists. Degrees don't equate to knowledge and education. Apparently, even dogs are getting degrees these days. There is certainly a role for people dedicated to studying the empirical sciences that underlie farming and landscape work, but a lot can be learned from those who have been farming and landscaping for many years. Maybe good apprenticeships are still out there for these jobs, but this is still an alarming trend.