Enstitute, a new alternative to college, may be bringing higher education back to the Middle Ages. Rather than college degrees, Enstitute offers a two-year program that aims to give college students real-world job experience, akin to the venerable apprenticeship model. The New York Times reports:
[Enstitute] teaches skills in fields like information technology, computer programming and app building via on-the-job experience. Enstitute seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom that top professional jobs always require a bachelor’s degree — at least for a small group of the young, digital elite.
“Our long-term vision is that this becomes an acceptable alternative to college,” says Kane Sarhan, one of Enstitute’s founders. “Our big recruitment effort is at high schools and universities. We are targeting people who are not interested in going to school, school is not the right fit for them, or they can’t afford school.”
As part of the program, students “train with a master” for two years, while companies receive the benefit of cheap long-term labor. Essentially, they play the same role that interns do in the normal job market. Interns, however, generally stay in their roles for only a few months, giving employers little incentive to invest in their training. The two-year length of the Ensitute program, by contrast, makes it worthwhile for companies to take the time and energy to train students. In turn, these roles may eventually turn into permanent paid positions.
Vocational programs like these seem like a worthy experiment to us. Employers constantly complain that college grads lack even a basic understanding of the professional world. There should be no reason why students who want to learn specific skills or trades should be prevented from or stigmatized for doing so; a liberal arts education is a good and valuable thing, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good fit for every young student.
[Mortar boards image courtesy of Shutterstock]
