[topkai22]

That $100k figure really isn't true at all. To pick a school, Washington State University is $13k/year in all academic fees. Even if you take 5 years to graduate, that's still about $65k in fees.

Yes, if you include room and board into the equation it gets around $100k, but you don't get to not pay room and board by not going to university.

$65k is easily worth it if it increases your payback $10k/year over a 40 year career.

I agree that an apprentice system would be nice but having participated in an "apprentice like" training system for technical consultants it is MUCH harder to create such programs than you think.

In our case we are training people who already have college degrees and some programming experience. The rule of thumb is that we can't get them consistently billable for at least 4 months after hiring, they'll add overhead to projects for a year, and they won't pay back the cost of training them for at least 2 years. And that is with a well-structured and experienced program. How many businesses are willing to to deal with unproductive employees that long, even if they are potentially subsidized?