BONUS ARTICLE: Expand Apprenticeship Degrees to transform higher education

Tom Bewick and Dr. Eric Dunker set out the case for a new international centre bringing together global leaders and practitioners in work-based learning

Traditional university and college education is at a fork in the road. Since 1945, mass participation in degree-level learning supported what the sociologist Daniel Bell (1973) famously called: “The coming of post-industrial society.”

Professional and higher technical roles expanded in public services. In many advanced economies, the private sector signalled a growing desire for more “knowledge workers,” which led to a golden age of four-year college in the United States and increased university participation in countries like Britain, where over half of under 30-year-olds acquired a bachelor’s degree.

The mainly youth-based, residential, full-time study-based program model appeared to provide a ready-made answer. Backed up by Becker’s Human Capital Theory, the idea was that more learning equalled more earning. All students had to do was borrow money to inves…