Sound like you? Well, there's an initiative to expand your options, and we are learning from the Europeans: apprenticeships.

This program, to summarize, involves a student attending school (either high school or college) while being trained by a company that they can work for in the future. The cost of school is covered by the company and typically there is a position offered at the end for the student. This is not only beneficial for individual students, but also for employers. Currently, 9.3 million Americans are unemployed, but 4.8 million jobs are empty because companies cannot find employees right for the job. With new technology arising, employers don't want workers to be pushing buttons; a robot could do that. They need highly-skilled and specifically trained employees, and what better way to find them than to pick from the large pool of high school students (who must apply for these programs) and train them to the company's liking?

But I know what you may be thinking: "But everyone goes to college after high school!" This is indicative of a culture shift, not a reason about practicality. Apprenticeship makes sense logically, but us Americans want the flashy college experience, with greek life and dorming and so on. And this cultural difference is not a marginal one: only 5% of young Americans train as apprentices, mostly for construction work. In Germany, that number is 60%, and it spans fields such as IT, advanced manufacturing, hospitality, and even banking. On top of that, there isn't a social stigma. Often referred to as "dual training," the career path of attending school while being trained in a specific field is highly respected. In Switzerland, participation is even higher, coming to 70% enrolling in apprenticeships instead of college. If this is the barrier holding us back from choosing apprenticeships, we should rethink our life model: to be socially accepted and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, or to be well-trained?

This is not the only barrier, of course. European companies want to train workers. That drive to seek high-quality employees squashes most concerns about cost of investing in their workers. And in the United States, the government doesn't pay for the cost of higher education, which would fall into the hands of the employers. One program in Georgia, with 20 participating manufacturers, has to put forward $25,000 to fund student salaries. But with the number of jobs left empty, this may make a practical investment for these companies. And Georgia is not the first: "starting with Tennessee in 2011, the German American Chamber of Commerce helped set up German-style apprenticeship programs in ten states: Georgia, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee" states a Marketplace article.

So, a necessary shift needs to come from our politicians for these programs to allocate funding. And a push for this is in the works, with some states establishing their own programs as listed above, but also on a national scale. Recently, Congress recently took action to increase federal funding for apprenticeships from $90 million to $95 million per year. Although this pales in comparison to the billions of dollars invested by countries like Germany and Switzerland, this is a step in the right direction and could gain even more momentum if voters (that's you reading this) contact their representatives.

We also need to make a conscious cultural shift. Our current model of educating our population is clearly not working. We continue to push students through the one-size-fits-all college-is-necessary route, but with $1.3 trillion in student loan debt, this might be worth a shot.