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Sans College

The travails of Gen Z joining the workforce makes for sad reading. The bar to make enough money to stay afloat and pay off student debts (if any) is becoming ever harder to reach. Education for the sake of learning and personal growth is a luxury that some can ill-afford. Young people need to have a vocational lens from early on which makes some wonder why they are even wasting time in college - all it leads to in the end is a very expensive piece of paper that they will now have to pay off in addition to their ongoing living expenses - there is no apparent sense in this. 

Parents of our generation and older do not know better and don't have a crystal ball to look into the future. Will employers twenty years out care at all if you have a college diploma and would it ensure that you increase your income potential? The truth is that we don't know. It would only take a few large employers to change the hiring climate drastically. If they started to say that they need a high school diploma and being able to get through their entrance exam to have a job. The new hire will be in training for the next two years at a very low pay to make them fit for any type of job in that company. If the person chooses to leave they will have to repeat the same process at another company. 

But once trained in one they will create mobility for themselves and not need to re-enter through that first door over and over. A plan like this could work for employers if there is a business value attached to it - say it provides the company with the exact skills and qualifications to be successful in growing their business, reduces attrition and company culture is built from the ground up. 

This process does not work if people who at the end of their training period simply leave. But there could be ways to mitigate such flight risk by making such candidates feel unwelcome in the larger marketplace. If the market placed a premium on stability - completing the training and having 2-3 years of steady employment at the same company, it would reduce the propensity to jump ship too soon for this process to make sense for the employer. In the tech business the skills to do the job are very different from what a person studied in college - they would be lucky if there was even a tangential connection. 

Accenture launched an apprenticeship program in 2016 and has since hired 1,200 people, 80% of whom joined the company without a four-year-degree. Earlier this year it expanded the program with the goal of filling 20% of its U.S. entry-level roles — everything from application development and cybersecurity to cloud and platform engineering — from apprenticeships.

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