Kavitha Cardoza, The Hechinger Report
ELKHART — Ever since Ty Zartman was little, people told him he had to go to college to be successful.
But despite earning straight A’s, qualifying for the National Honor Society and playing on the high school football and baseball teams, the teen never relished the idea of another four years in school. So in fall 2023, he signed up through his Elkhart, Indiana, high school for an apprenticeship at Hoosier Crane Service Co., eager to explore other paths. There, he met co-workers who didn’t have four-year degrees but earned good money and were happy in their careers.
Through the apprenticeship, Ty started his day at the crane manufacturing and repair business at 6:30 a.m., working in customer service and taking safety and training courses while earning $13 an hour. Then, he spent the afternoon at his school, Jimtown High, in Advanced Placement English and U.S. Government classes.
In June, the 18-year-old started full time at Hoosier Crane as a field technician.
“College is important, and I’m not dissing on that,” Ty said. “But it’s not necessarily something that you need.”
Elkhart County is at the forefront of a movement slowly spreading across Indiana and the nation to make apprenticeships a common offering in high school.
In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for the creation of 1 million new apprentices, the latest step in a bipartisan push for apprenticeships that began during the Obama administration. The “earn and learn” model is taking hold in more than 30 states alongside growing disillusionment with the concept of the four-year college and the fact that well-paying jobs that don’t require bachelor’s degrees are going unfilled nationally.
But in the United States, the number of apprenticeships for high-schoolers is still tiny, just over one-tenth of a percent of students, according to an estimate by the think tank New America. By contrast, in Switzerland — which has been praised widely for its apprenticeship model, including by U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon — 70 percent of high-schoolers participate. Indiana is among several states, including Colorado, South Carolina and Washington, that have embraced the model and sent delegations to Switzerland to learn more.
Trump’s executive order calls for education, labor and commerce secretaries to develop a plan for expanding apprenticeships by late August. The order does not set a date for reaching the 1 million milestone, and it applies to apprentices of all ages, not just high-schoolers.
Vinz Koller, a vice president at the nonprofit Jobs for the Future, said the goal is relatively modest and achievable; the number of high school apprenticeships has doubled just in the past few years, and a number of states, most notably California, are already ramping up apprenticeships.
Still, states are on their own to reach the goal. Trump’s order did not include additional funding for the programs, and the administration’s proposed budget includes major cuts to workforce development training. In an email, a White House spokesperson said the administration had promoted apprenticeships through outreach programs but did not say whether that outreach included a focus on youth apprenticeships.
The Departments of Labor and Education did not return requests for comment.
Koller said expanding apprenticeships won’t ultimately cost schools more, as most of the costs for training and wages for apprentices would fall on businesses, but it would require some start-up investment.
Education and labor experts note that making high school apprenticeships commonplace won’t be simple. Most businesses aren’t accustomed to employing apprentices, parents can be resistant to their students trading four-year college aspirations for work, and public transportation to take students to apprenticeships is limited, especially in rural areas.
But Elkhart officials are hoping apprenticeships can help boost the region’s workforce and economic prospects. In 2019, nonprofits, local government officials and other leaders from Elkhart County visited Switzerland and Germany to learn more about the model. Later that year, they began rolling out high school apprenticeships.
Katie Jenner, the new secretary of education for Indiana, took notice, and in December, the state adopted a new diploma system that includes an emphasis on work-based learning.
In April, as Trump was touting apprenticeships, the state set a goal of 50,000 high school apprentices by 2034 as part of a broader push to revamp high school education and add more work-based learning.
Becca Roberts, a former English teacher who now oversees the college and career programs at Elkhart’s Concord High School, said apprenticeships help convince students of the importance of habits such as punctuality, clear communication and regular attendance. “It’s not from a book,” she said. “They’re dealing with real life.”
On a weekday last winter, 17 sophomores at Concord High sat at computers, creating résumés they planned to use to apply for apprenticeships. The students were among some 50 sophomores who’d expressed interest in apprenticing and met the school’s attendance and minimum 2.5 GPA requirements, out of a class of roughly 400. They would receive coaching and participate in mock interviews before meeting with employers.
One student, Ava Cripe, said she hoped for an apprenticeship in the health care field. She’d only been a pet sitter and was nervous at the thought of having a professional job. “You're actually going out and working for someone else, like not for your parents or your grandma, so it's a little scary,” she said.
Tim Pletcher, the principal of Jimtown High, said students are often drawn first to the chance to spend less time in class. But his students quickly realize apprenticeships give them work-based learning credits and industry connections that help them after graduation. They also earn a paycheck. “It’s really causing us to have a paradigm shift in how we look at getting kids ready for the next step,” he said.
In Elkhart and across the state, the embrace of work-based learning has worried some parents who fear it will limit, not expand, their children’s opportunities. In previous generations, career and technical programs (also known as vocational education) were often used to route low-income and Black and Hispanic students away from college and into relatively low-paying career paths.
Anitra Zartman, Ty’s mother, said she and her husband were initially worried when their son said he wanted to go straight to a full-time job after high school. They both graduated from college, and her husband holds a master’s degree. “We were like, ‘Don’t waste your talent. You’re smart, go to college.’”
But they came around after seeing how the work experience influenced him. “His maturity has definitely changed. I think it's because he has a responsibility that he takes very seriously,” she said.
Her eldest daughter, Senica Zartman, also apprenticed during her final two years of high school, as a teacher’s assistant. She is now in college studying education. “The apprenticeship solidified her choice,” Anitra Zartman said, and helped her decide to work with elementary students.
Sarah Metzler, CEO of the local nonprofit Horizon Education Alliance, said apprenticeships differ from the vocational education of the past that tended to prepare students only for relatively low-paid, entry-level jobs. With apprenticeships, she said, students must continually learn new skills and earn new licenses and industry certifications as part of the program.
Most companies in Elkhart pay for their apprentices to attend Ivy Tech, a statewide community college system, if they continue in the roles, said Sarah Koontz, director of CareerWise Elkhart County, a nonprofit that works to expand youth apprenticeships.
Attracting employers has proven to be the biggest challenge to expanding youth apprenticeships — in Elkhart and beyond. In total, 20 companies worked with the Elkhart school districts last year, and 28 have signed on for this coming school year — enough to employ only about a third of interested students.
The obstacles include the expense of apprentices’ salaries, training and other costs.
Metzler and others, though, point to studies showing benefits for employers including cost savings over time and improved employee loyalty. And Indiana is working on ways to reduce employer costs, including by developing a standard curriculum for apprenticeships in industries such as health care and banking so individual companies don’t bear the costs alone.
Transportation has been a limiting factor, too. There’s no public transit system, and students who can’t rely on their parents for rides are often out of luck. “We’d love to offer a bus to every kid, to every location, but we don’t have people to run those extra bus routes,” Pletcher said.
Todd Cook, the CEO of Hoosier Crane Service Co., employs 10 high-schoolers, including Ty Zartman, as engineering and industrial maintenance technician apprentices, approximately 10 percent of his staff. He said the pipeline created by the apprenticeship program has helped reduce recruiting costs.
“We’re starting to build our own farm system of talent,” he said. Students initially earn $13 an hour and finish their apprenticeship earning $18. If they continue with the company, he said, they can earn up to $50 an hour after about five years.
Hoosier Crane hired Ty full time at $19 an hour after he graduated from high school in June. He is also taking a class at the local community college on electrical work and recently received a certificate of completion from the Department of Labor for finishing 2,000 hours at his apprenticeship.
Anitra Zartman, his mom, said she wishes he’d attended more school events like pep rallies instead of working part time when he was in school. Sometimes she worries he isn’t “being a kid.” But Ty said that his supervisor is “super flexible” and that he was able to go to the winter formal dance and prom. “I think I still live a kid life,” he said. “I do a lot of fun things.”
Of his job, he said, “I love it so much.”