Structural Change, Apprenticeships in the UK

The article describes a surge in the number of British students embracing apprenticeships post school. They are motivated to by the direct linking of apprenticeships to jobs and the labour market as well as the high cost of attending university. The article also suggests that there is a wider cultural change in the young generation in the way they interact with education. Previously university was seen as the only way and everything else a failure. In contemporary times students are attracted to apprenticeships and see it as a rewarding career. In particular many of them feared the stigma of blue collar work and were pleased to work in new IT and service based apprentice industries¹. Thus the article touches on the interchange between the labour force and education as well as perceptions of education by young people, class perceptions and the ways in which youth use changing education culture to advance themselves in a post-industrial setting.
That debt scares students off from higher education and that students are motivated into less academically oriented job rich study paths touches on working class fears, financial motivation and inability to access inequitable higher education. No doubt Willis would nod his head sagely at this and refer you to his book, ‘Learning to Labour’, which deals with social reproduction². Willis may also have noted the old stigma surrounding blue collar apprenticeships and how students who would otherwise have gone to university avoid these apprenticeships on the condition they can work in the post-industrial not blue collar sector. This ties in with credentialism, in which someone doing IT, on the minimum wage can still feel middle class and superior to someone on a blue collar award, because their grunt work is credentialed. See Pudsey, Boyd and Wadham for a further explanation of credentialism³.
My own opinion on this matter is that the change is being followed wrought due to a changing economic culture. As de-industrialism, post-industrialism and post-modernity seep in people who would otherwise be doing blue collar are now engaged in white collar grunt work. This allows oppression through stratification and letting people look down on each other when really no privilege barriers exist between them. Culture and perception of the value of education and different paths changes to reflect these changing realities and gives people the chance to try and socially stratify themselves upwards. That higher education is a status symbol becomes patently obvious in that only the wealthy can afford it and practical people motivated by economic need are turning to apprenticeships to get ‘middle class’ white collar jobs. Thus the privilege of wealth is maintained and education a symbol rather than a practical tool reinforces the class hierarchy. This is in line with Veblen’s conspicuous consumption⁴ view on privilege and display and may even have a touch of the Schumpeter’s+5 about it (on a very micro level), inasmuch as the wealthy segments engage in creative destruction⁵ (economically useless degrees) to cement themselves through display at the top of the economic pyramid and expropriate the value of ill paid apprentices later on.

1.       Helen Lock, “Apprenticeship: the Debt-Free Route to a Creative and Satisfying Job,” The Guardian, October 8, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/oct/08/apprenticeship-route-to-creative-job.

2.       Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Hampshire: Gower, 1980).

3.       Pudsey, Boyd and Wadham, “Boys Will be Boys and Girls Will be Girls: Gender and Sexuality in School,” in Culture and Education, ed Wadham, Pudsey, Boyd (Frenchs Forest: Pearson, 2007). 47, 59.

4.       Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, (New York: Macmillan, 1899).

5.       Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, (1942 orig, London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1952).