[jboynyc]

It may be worth recalling that Americans have been interested in the apprenticeship system for a very long time. For instance, Booker T. Washington's strategy for racial uplift at the Tuskegee Institute was based on the apprenticeship/vocational training model -- that's more than 100 years ago!

His critic, the famous sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, had the following reaction after a trip to Germany in the 1930s:

   The Siemens AG factory, in Berlin-Siemensstadt,
   particularly excited him, with a training-and-
   apprenticeship system that he believed could 
   provide the model for American Negro industrial 
   education.[1]

(Yes, that's the same Siemens that Tobias refers to in his post.)

More recently scholars like Katherine Newman and others have looked at such programs as a model policy not for racial uplift but to boost the US's shrinking middle class.[2][3]

With college debt now at $1 trillion and rising, it definitely is not a bad idea to explore alternatives to the way education works in the US.

   [1]: http://chronicle.com/article/WEB-Du-Bois-in-Nazi/1896/
   [2]: http://books.google.com/books?id=1jfAhghdH7MC
   [3]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2272-9_10