Fixing America’s Broken Workplace Bargain with the Young

Center-left leaders in Britain and the United States are asking the same question: What should we do about young people falling into the gap between school and work?  

Almost one million Britons aged 16 to 24, roughly one in eight members of this age group, are not in education, employment, or training—“NEET.” The situation is similar across the pond. Almost 4.2 million young people aged 18 to 24, roughly one in seven in that age group, are opportunity youth, disconnected from school and work. But in the U.S., efforts to reconnect them are scattered across states, programs, and organizations rather than led from the top. 

The latest contribution to Great Britain’s discourse is a paper called The Opportunity Bargain from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, founded by the former British prime minister. It argues that Britain’s bargain with young people is breaking down. The bargain is simple: Those who can work, learn, or train should be expected and supported to do so. In return, the country should make sure a real first opportunity is waiting. Instead, most young NEET Britons aren’t looking for work, and most have never held a job. 

The paper rests on a government review of the NEET problem led by Alan Milburn, a former Labour minister. His May interim report warned that Britain risks a “lost generation.” Calling the situation a whole-system failure, he puts the annual cost of fixing it at £125 billion, or nearly $166 billion. His final report is due within weeks.  

UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham has made the issue a political priority. His goal: Ensure that “Britain will value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap.” In his first Labour Party Conference speech, he said the fault lies with government, not the young. He promised parity between academic and technical education, pathways from age 14, and an apprenticeship at 18. He also said young people must take up the help offered. Opportunity and responsibility, in other words. Readers of a certain age will recognize the language of Bill Clinton’s New Democrats and of Tony Blair’s New Labour. 

America is not Britain. Our youth disconnection rate has returned roughly to its pre-pandemic level, while Britain’s has risen from around the European average to one of Europe’s worst rates. Britain’s crisis increasingly runs through health-related inactivity and a national benefits system that can make returning to work more difficult. The Milburn review reports that health has become a central driver of youth disconnection and that 44 percent of NEET young people reported a work-limiting health condition in 2025. 

Ours looks different. A recent St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank analysis found that the U.S. youth disconnection rate remained essentially unchanged through the end of 2025, even in a generally healthy labor market. It also found that disconnected young adults were more likely to spend time caring for family, doing housework, or earning money informally. RAND’s county mapping adds that disconnection is also concentrated in places where access to opportunity is weak and ties across class lines are limited. The problem, in other words, is not simply a shortage of jobs. Britain can act through one national government. America must work through fifty states. 

But the driver of disconnection is the same in America and the UK. RAND finds that three-quarters of disconnected young Americans have a diploma or some college. In both countries, a credential no longer guarantees a start, a strong economy doesn’t reach everyone, and a first job depends too much on family networks. The Blair paper turns that diagnosis into a political argument. Young people have obligations, but so do the institutions meant to give them a first opportunity. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) makes the transition from school to work even harder. Routine tasks that once taught beginners how a workplace runs are now tasks machines absorb. Employers want experience, and fewer entry-level jobs supply it. The experience gap is a central problem of early adulthood. 

The employer side of the equation matters as much as the student side, and America has instructive examples, starting with paid internships. In Colorado, a state grant program, Opportunity Now, gave $1.3 million to Innosphere, a startup accelerator and nonprofit. It used part of the money to subsidize 158 internships at some 25 companies, many of them tiny firms that could not otherwise have hired anyone. The program pays the first ten dollars an hour, and the employer pays the rest. It also presses employers to drop degree requirements their jobs do not need.  

Kelsey Baun, who manages the program, calls this “training the employer, not the employee.” Metropolitan State University of Denver runs a version with Innosphere on a sliding scale, with larger subsidies for smaller firms. We don’t yet know how many of those internships became lasting jobs. But the design is sound. Public money lowers the cost of taking a chance on a young worker without removing the employer’s stake in the outcome.  

Internships aren’t apprenticeships. They are typically shorter and less structured. But both tackle the same problem. They give young people real work experience and give employers a stake in their development. Internships are a first step. The most complete answer joins work and learning from the start. Apprenticeship does this by design. The apprentice earns a wage, learns on the job, and builds relationships with people who can open the next door. 

U.S. apprenticeships now come in different forms. Pre-apprenticeships help individuals build the basic skills and job exposure to qualify for apprenticeships. Youth apprenticeships let high school students, often starting at 16, combine classes with paid work and often earn college credit. Registered apprenticeships meet standards set by the Department of Labor or a state agency. They pair paid on-the-job training under a mentor with classroom instruction and lead to a nationally recognized credential.  

The number of registered apprentices has nearly doubled in a decade to about 700,000, according to Jobs for the Future, and the federal goal is now one million. The department separately reported that more than 415,000 young people ages 16 to 24 took part in registered apprenticeships in 2025, “a dramatic increase over the past 10 years.” The figures measure different things, one a snapshot and the other a full year, but they show that apprenticeships are no longer marginal. 

These are real gains. Yet the same analysis finds that relatively few young people start as youth apprentices, and even fewer are connected to a college degree. That’s the remaining gap. Too many young people are still asked to choose between work and a degree, even as the labor market increasingly rewards both. 

One promising way to close that gap is with an Apprenticeship Degree: An academic program that provides hands-on vocational training alongside a college degree. In August, I spent a week at New College of Oxford University at a convening organized by the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree. NCAD is an initiative of Reach University, a nonprofit institution accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission, an agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education 

One goal of the conference was to develop a clear definition of an Apprenticeship Degree. Joe E. Ross, co-founder, president, and CEO of Reach, has summarized it in what he calls the ABCs. An Apprenticeship Degree must be ”affordable” without debt. It must be “Based” in the workplace. And the work itself must earn “Credit” toward an accredited degree. The point is not simply to attach work experience to a conventional degree. Work and academic learning are designed as one program, with the workplace serving as a site of learning.  

This is no longer just a Reach University phenomenon. New America’s first national landscape study identified 579 degree-apprenticeship opportunities at 346 colleges and universities in 49 states and the District of Columbia, spanning 91 occupations. New America uses a broader definition than Reach. For its study, a degree apprenticeship is a Department of Labor-recognized “registered apprenticeship” that includes an associate, bachelor’s, or master’s degree. That can include programs that do not satisfy all three of Reach’s ABCs. The terminology is still unsettled, but combining apprenticeship and college degrees is no longer an isolated experiment. 

Teaching has become the most visible American proof point. Tennessee registered the first teacher apprenticeship in January 2022. Today 44 states and the District of Columbia have teacher degree apprenticeship programs, according to recent reporting. Few education reforms have spread that far that fast. 

Reach University shows what the model can do. Its students are school employees, such as classroom aides, who earn a bachelor’s degree while they work. Their job becomes part of the degree. The pathway has grown from 67 candidates to more than 3,400.  

As the country’s only nonprofit accredited university dedicated to apprenticeship degrees, Reach University is now moving into health care and behavioral health. Health care apprenticeships have grown by 43 percent in five years, making the sector a natural test of whether the model can travel beyond teaching.  

These are promising early results, not a settled verdict. The American evidence base remains uneven, particularly on long-term completion, earnings, mobility, and employer returns. The case for Apprenticeship Degrees is therefore that they are promising enough to test, scale carefully, and measure.  

The idea is not new, and it’s not only American. Germany has long joined university study to paid work through its dual study programs. France does something similar through its apprentissage system, part of the country’s broader alternance model that combines paid work with formal study. The International Labour Organization lists Australia, India, and Switzerland among the countries that have also developed or expanded apprenticeships at the college or degree level. Together, these systems show that combining higher education with paid work isn’t an exotic idea.  

England’s degree apprenticeships program stands out for its scale. Launched in 2015, it’s funded by a national levy and guided by employer-set standards. Apprentices earn a wage and finish without tuition debt. Government figures show more than 60,350 starts at the bachelor’s and master’s levels in the 2024 to 2025 academic year, roughly 17 percent of all apprenticeship starts. That’s substantial scale.  

But the same numbers carry a warning: Much of the recent growth came at the master’s level, while the overall system increasingly served older apprentices. The Blair paper reports that England’s apprenticeship system has tilted toward older workers and higher-level training even as starts among young people have fallen sharply. A good model can drift away from the people who need it most.  

There is reason for optimism about the politics of apprenticeships in the U.S. Last month, a commission of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 30 leaders from education, business, service, and philanthropy, published the results of two years of work. They reached agreement across sectors and ideologies that young Americans need multiple pathways after high school and real support along the way. I wrote in these pages that the report is a foundation to build on. Across both countries, a broader consensus is emerging around opportunity pluralism. Young people need more than one good route into adulthood.  

Here are four suggestions for what that consensus should produce in the U.S. 

States should define the Apprenticeship Degree and build a clear pathway into it. Treat the ABCs as a floor, not a settled template. States should connect the stages of work-based learning so that pre-apprenticeship leads to youth apprenticeship and youth apprenticeship can lead to a degree. They should also make it easier for on-the-job learning to count toward the degree, rather than requiring apprentices to duplicate in classrooms what they have already demonstrated at work.  Policymakers should keep most earn-and-learn programs focused on young people and fund intermediaries. Britain’s drift toward older workers is a cautionary example. Governors and state legislatures should fund the intermediary organizations that connect employers, colleges, and schools. Small and mid-size firms often cannot build apprenticeship programs on their own. Intermediaries can lower those transaction costs, while cost sharing like Colorado’s keeps employers invested and lowers the barrier to participation.  High schools and community colleges should make paid work experience and strong relationships part of the basic model. Young people need a first rung before they enter the labor market, and they need more than a credential once they do. Mentors, supervisors, and employer contacts build the social wealth that helps turn education and training into a career.   Federal and state leaders should measure outcomes and pair support with expectations. Agencies should track where young people are a year after leaving school and publish the results so families, educators, employers, and policymakers can see which pathways lead somewhere. Leaders in both parties should also say plainly that public support for these programs should come with clear expectations for completion, employment, earnings, and advancement. That is especially important for Apprenticeship Degrees, where the early evidence is promising but long-term outcome data on completion, earnings, mobility, and employer returns remain limited.  

Britain has named the problem and priced it. Its prime minister has taken ownership. America has neither a Milburn review nor a single government capable of acting alone. What we have is growing agreement on what needs to be built and a set of models, from pre-apprenticeship to the Apprenticeship Degree, moving from promising experiments to a broader system.  

The British and American center left helped write the language of opportunity and responsibility a generation ago. The youth-disconnection problem gives them a reason to revive that language now. The bargain is the same on both sides of the Atlantic. Young people owe effort. Government, educators, and employers owe them a real first rung. 

The post Fixing America’s Broken Workplace Bargain with the Young appeared first on Washington Monthly.