Could the U.S. become an “Apprentice Nation?”

Welcome to the Future of Education. And now here's your host, Michael Horne.

Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their human potential and live a life of purpose. Something we are clearly not living up to today. And to help us unpack some of that and perhaps present a brighter picture of what the future could be, is my longtime friend in the space, Ryan Craig. Ryan is the author of a new book, Apprentice Nation. How the Earn and Learn Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America. Ryan first. It's good to see you. Welcome.

Hey, good to see you.

Yeah, I love it because got your book right here on the shelf. It's not just collecting dust, it's actually prominently displayed. I'll leave it up there for folks as well, but so that they can see. But you wrote this great entertaining book, but I'd love you to actually take a step back because people who don't know, you know, you've obviously led private equity firm in education Achieve Partners, formerly University Ventures Fund, for years. You've. I want to sort of get a sense of the plot also because it's in your book career, which is your other part of your identity. You have three books. You've gone from sort of the Great unbundling of Higher Ed to faster and cheaper alternatives to higher ed. And now your latest book is the Earn and Learn alternative. So I'd love you to just to sort of step back and take us through your own journey and arc to this point. Like, you know, the problem that you're trying to solve for why the iterations and why landing at the moment with apprenticeships.

This is the last book in the trilogy. So this is the book where we defeat Sauron. Yes, very excited for that. So yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's been a journey for sure. I started my career 25 years ago working for a hard charging executive vice provost at Columbia University named Michael Crow. And the, the effort there was to try to do innovative things online with the most traditional universities and have gone from there to building large online universities and helping to build all sorts of innovative companies that partner with universities to help them do any number of things. But really sort of post great recession, looking at the employment numbers that we were seeing for new graduates, recent graduates, just surprisingly stubborn underemployment, unemployment and then obviously coupled with an affordability crisis that continues to this day to the point that the only major narrative in federal higher education policy over the last two and a half years has been loan forgiveness, which is a completely backwards looking policy, not, not, not forward looking. And so I and my firm began to focus more and more on the employment side, moving to alternative pathways to employment boot camps. And that was the sort of second book, a new you Faster and cheaper alternatives to College. And that book is kind of a guided tour of these new, new alternative pathways to getting a good first job. And in that book, you know, we, I talked a little bit about apprenticeship, but in that, in the, in the five years since, it's become clear to me that there are so many, there are hundreds of sectors in the economy where there are massive talent gaps, where employers cannot find talent and frankly aren't, aren't hiring talent. And you know, conversely, young people who are seeking to launch careers just cannot, cannot find a way in effectively. We don't have these pathways. And that's a result of a skills gap where colleges and universities just aren't training, aren't providing education or training on the specific skills that employers are seeking, primarily digital skills, platform skills and the sort of business knowledge that they're, they're expecting. You know, in the book I talk about how a college degree, you know, back, you know, 50 years ago was pretty much all you needed to get a good first job because employ, you know, think of Don Draper and Mad Men, that mavericks like what did you actually need to be hired there?

Well, that's a big problem.

Yeah, you needed the macro credential, you needed the ability to survive a three martini lunch with Don Draper. You needed to kind of go along this, get along this ability that, you know, you can kind of can get from college experience, but no specific skills. So college is still doing a good job preparing young people for jobs, but they're the jobs of the 20th century, not the 21st century. So you know, 21st century entry level jobs are asking for discrete combinations of technical skills, platform skills, business knowledge that, you know, makes it, makes it very difficult. And on top of that you have this experience gap which is growing, which I think is best illustrated in cybersecurity where, you know, entry level jobs now in cybersecurity ask for certifications that require three years experience. So how do you solve that riddle? That's, you know, and, and AI is going to make it worse because think about your first good job. I think back to mine easily half of the half, half of my time was spent doing menial grunt work as I was kind of learning what the heck I was supposed to be doing. And that was kind of the bargain that you made with your employers. But that bargain is going to be broken because employers are soon going to expect that all of that work is going to be done, all that medial grunt work is going to be done by AI and they're going to expect their entry level workers to be doing higher value work from the get go. And that higher value work is not going to be possible without having some real experience in the space. It's just, it's just not. So basically all jobs are going to go the way of cyber security jobs where you just, you know, there is an entry level job is kind of an oxymoron. And so the only answer therefore has to be that we, we need to be able to build experience, real relevant work experience into the educational pathway. So by the time you're trying to, you know, could get that good first job, you have, you have real relevant experience in the field you're trying to, to get. And you know, one way is internships, internship is, you know, real work experience, but you're, that you're doing for a limited period of time as part of a academic program or during your academic program. Another way is work integrated learning, which is you're, you're integrating real projects from real employers into coursework, probably as capstone projects over the course of your, of your degree program. But the gold standard, the best way to do it is an apprenticeship. Because an apprenticeship by definition is a job. It's a, it's a, it's a full time job with built in training and career pathways. And so I think that the way most people, most young people, whether they be out of high school, out of community colleges, out of bachelor degree programs, or out of graduate and professional programs, will launch their careers in a decade will be through some kind of apprenticeship program. You're going to need it. And then the question is, well, how do we build, first of all, do we have the apprenticeship infrastructure today to do that? And the answer, not surprisingly, is no, not even close. And then the question becomes, well, how do we build it? How do we do it? And that's really what the book is about. And then the book goes on to talk about, you know, what, what the country will look like when we do have that apprenticeship infrastructure.

Yeah. So let's go a little bit deeper first on the apprenticeship piece and what is an apprentice? Because there's sort of a back to the future element of it, which frankly this is me for a second. I think of that more broadly as like the history of or the journey of education reform that we're on. Right. We've gone to one to many classrooms from the one house schoolhouse and tutoring. We need to go back to that sort of personalization. Apprenticeships went out of vogue. They should come back into vogue. You can sort of tell this narrative around a lot. But what is an apprentice and what are some of the big misconceptions around in the book you list some of the fields that people stereotype as being apprenticeship heavy. But sort of broadly speaking, what are some of those misconceptions about what is an apprentice?

Yeah, sure. So you're absolutely right. It's back to the Future. You know, Paul Revere was an apprentice, George Washington was an apprentice, Ben Franklin was an apprentice. But it's been a while, right? It's been a minute. We've been sort of on this college for all journey really since World war, World War II. And really since the 60s, college has been the only socially acceptable pathway to economic mobility in this, in, in this country. So, but you know there, there are. And so, so we've spent that, that time investing in establishing this vast post secondary education infrastructure which I sometimes call a tuition based debt based infrastructure as opposed to an earn and learn infrastructure. And what's fascinating is you look at other countries, they have much more balanced approach. You can have a, there's a tuition based pathway and then there's an earn learn pathway. We really don't have that. One reason, as you say, are the misconceptions. One big one is that apprenticeship is for plumbers and welders and roofers. And that is true insofar as 70% of the current apprentices in the US are in the construction trades. So we are, we are. It's the one, it's the one sector of apprenticeship that's thriving and has been been thriving. So, so, so, so it's not, it's not wrong. But the point is that apprenticeship will work and work very well in tech and financial services and healthcare and logistics and other countries have proven that it, that it does. The other big misconception is that an apprenticeship is somehow just like any other training program or educational program. It is not. An apprenticeship is a job. It's a full time job, which means there's an employer that is hiring the apprentice. That's how an apprenticeship starts. An employer is willing to hire an apprentice, which is not as easy as it sounds because an apprentice by definition is someone who doesn't know how to do the job yet doesn't have the skills to do the job. Most employers today, that's anathema to them. They want someone who's going to be productive from day one. So that's the rub there. And the challenge is that most of the people who are focused on apprenticeship in these issues come out of the world of education and training and think of it like any other education or training program. There's an education, there's a training element of it. There's a, there's an on the job training element. There's a formal classroom or what's called related technical instruction element of it. But you know, you got to put the job horse before the training cart here. This is a job and the hard part and how you build the infrastructure is how is you have to figure out how you're going to incentivize employers to hire workers who are by definition going to be unproductive for 3, 6, 12, 18 months. Not easy to do. Other countries have figured it out.

I want to go to the what the incentives look like in a moment. But I want to stick with this point that you just made around other countries doing it well right now. And you made this really, I think, compelling point about how it's different from sort of an education first program. This starts with the job. It's not like a nine week internship or something like that. This is a, you know, it's a job. It's maybe it's a couple years, but it's, it's sort of undefined time often. Right. And then as you said, it's on the job training. So the education component fits into the job as opposed to the way internship or projects work, which is the learning by doing, fitting into the education. So it really flips that around. And then you, you talk in the book a lot about how the model for where the United States should be going should be much more like the United Kingdom or Australia rather than say Germany, which is everyone's, you know, apprenticeships. Germany. Right. Like comes to mind. Help us understand this and unpack it and, and why America is so far behind. Well, you can include Germany in that. All of those other countries.

Yeah. Look, if I had a nickel for every time I read an article about some, you know, state junket going over to Germany to eat the schnitzel and drink the Riesling, I'd be able to afford a few bottles of Riesling. That's they go over there and Germany is, you know, it's worth looking at because in terms of apprentices as a percentage of the workforce, we're at 0.3%. Germany is 15 times better than us. So they're at about 4.5% apprentices as a percentage of the workforce. So worth looking at, but impossible to emulate what they've done, and here's why. So the first lesson is that Germany is not successful because BMW and Adidas are more benevolent or farsighted than US employers. They're just as focused on the near term and the next quarter and on ensuring that they've got productive employees as US employers. And so nowhere is apprenticeship flourishing because employers by and large are creating apprenticeships or hiring apprentices themselves. Apprenticeships flourish because there are what we call intermediaries who do the heavy lifting of setting up and running these programs. And that's sort of a hard thing to fathom. But you know, they can be for profit companies, they can be non profit organizations, they can be public agencies, they can be unions. But what they do is intermediaries perform one or more of the functions that an employer would need to perform were they to set up and run their own apprenticeship program. So it's essentially doing the heavy lifting for the employer. The heaviest lift, of course, as I, as I said, is hiring and paying this unproductive worker for a period of time in the US in the construction trades, it's unions for the most part who were doing that heavy lifting of setting up and running these apprenticeship programs in plumbing and welding and roofing and so forth. In Germany, it's these powerful large chambers of commerce who do that in conjunction with unions. And in fact, their role, both of their roles in setting up and running apprenticeship programs for employers is actually written into law. So that's one thing that we're not going to replicate here. The other thing we're not going to replicate here is that we don't have that same sort of chamber of Commerce apparatus. So for example, in munich, there are 400,000 members of the Munich Chamber of Commerce. Why? Because if you're a sole proprietor in Munich, you are required by law to join the Munich Chamber of Commerce. And therefore you're subject to everything the Chamber of Commerce wants you to do, like, you know, participating in their apprenticeship program. So it's just, it's not, it's not replicable what, what, what, what they're doing. It's interesting, but the principle of it is who are the intermediaries that we can incentivize. It's not going to be chambers of commerce, we don't have them. It's not going to be unions in tech and financial services and health care. Who could it be? So 2030 years ago the UK and Australia were very similar to the US on apprenticeship. They had small apprenticeship sectors, almost all in construction. And today those countries are eight times better than we are on apprenticeship. So we're at 0.3, they're at 2.4. As a 2.4% of the workforce, how did they do it? Well, they recognized that they needed to incentivize intermediaries to do this work and they funded it. They did it in a couple of ways. One is they funded the training component of the apprenticeship, in some cases overfunded it. So they would incentivize training companies, staffing companies, to get into the business of setting up and running apprenticeship programs and most important, knocking on the doors of employers offering to set up and run these programs for them. In the UK today there are about 1200 intermediaries, which based on the US economy would translate into something like 8000 intermediaries in the US today. We have about 150 in the US today, so a fraction of what we need. The other thing the UK did was pay for performance or formula based funding for apprenticeship intermediaries. For every apprentice hired and trained and placed, these intermediaries would get paid. We don't have that kind of funding at all in the us so Australia is a very similar story and you know, the result is similar. So you know, two lessons from that. One is that we have not been funding nearly enough. If you actually compare the amount we spend year over year on the post secondary education or tuition based debt based infrastructure that we have to what we're spending on earn and learn apprenticeship infrastructure, it's 500 billion annually for tuition based and under 400 million for earn and learn. So over a thousand to one ratio. If you compare how much public support a given apprentice receives relative to a given college student. So total federal and state tax dollars, for every dollar that Apprentice receives, it's $50 for the college student. So I don't know whether the right ratio is 1 to 1, 2 to 1, 5 to 1 or 10 to 1, but it sure ain't 50 to 1 or 1000 to 1. So we haven't been funding it nearly enough. And then the other point is that we've been funding it wrong because to the extent we've been funding it, the Department of Labor in Washington has been giving out grants, trying to essentially pick winners among intermediaries, say, oh, we think this intermediary will develop a successful apprenticeship program. The problem is who's applying for those grants? Mostly community colleges and workforce boards who On a scale of intermediaries are really only doing a handful of things, what I call low intervention intermediaries as opposed to high intervention intermediaries, that would be turnkey, like the ones we see in the UK in Australia, including critically employing that apprentice and paying their wage until they become productive. So in the US, 90% of these grants have gone to community colleges and workforce boards who are doing a couple things. They're developing curriculum for the hypothetical apprenticeship program, they're registering the program and maybe they're buying some equipment that they can use in the college and they're kind of sitting on their hands waiting for an employer to come along and asking them to use their curriculum for their apprenticeship program. But that's not how apprenticeship programs scale. Employers aren't going to come knocking on the community college door. The intermediary needs to go knocking on the employer door, offering to set up and run the program and make it seamless or almost turnkey for the employer. That's what we've seen in the UK to the point that in the UK you won't find a larger mid sized company that hasn't been approached by half a dozen apprenticeship intermediaries. They know what this is. So if they haven't launched an apprenticeship program, they've at least considered it. At this point. In the US you'd be hard pressed to find any employer that's been approached by an apprenticeship intermediary.

Right. And I just want to stay on this high versus low intervention apprenticeship intermediary because it's a major point in your book. And it strikes me that I left the book feeling like the low intervention intermediaries, in effect, they're not outside of registering the apprenticeship, they're not really offering apprenticeships. What they're doing is giving the education program and hoping that they find an employer who will offer the apprenticeship in reality and then they'll sort of come alongside them and grease the wheels, if you will, to make it registered and so forth. But they're really just still providing education. Whereas it struck me that the high intervention intermediaries, they were the apprenticeship. Like they are hiring the people. They are, yes, they're also registering it, but they're, you know, essentially they're acting as a temp agency in a lot of cases in partnership with the employer. So I don't know, am I off on my.

Yeah, no, that's the, here's the scale you hit, hit the nail on the head and here's the scale of the problem. So for the, for, for the directory in the Back of the book, there's a directory of apprenticeship programs outside the construction trades. Not to diminish the apprenticeships in construction, they're great. But the whole point of the book is that apprenticeship is. Should be beneficial, needed outside construction across the economy. So we looked at all the apprenticeship programs listed in the Department of Labor, what's called the RAPIDS database, which is the database listing all registered apprenticeship programs. So there's 6,000 of them outside construction. How many of those 6,000 programs are actual real apprenticeship programs where you could get hired tomorrow as an apprentice, as opposed to what I call paper apprenticeship programs, which are apprenticeship programs that exist on paper. There's curriculum, they've been registered. There's no one actually hiring apprentices. So of the 6,000 listed, 200 are real, 5,800 are paper apprenticeships. Wow.

Yeah, that's a daunting ratio. Okay, so let's get into the policy piece of this because you just made the point that we've underfunded it, but not just that, that we actually have to. Rather than grant funding, which is sort of your classic input based subsidization, sort of.

I mean, imagine if we. Imagine if we grant funded college. Yeah, yeah, well. And then basically, you know, grants to, you know, 100 colleges and everyone else had to kind of make, make do as opposed to what we do in college and how we've built this massive post secondary education infrastructure, which is formula based funding. The funding flows with the student.

But you're saying something else additional here, which is it should be funding based on the outcome for the individual. Because you actually, you have a performance component. If you're like that, it results in a job, if I'm understanding correctly.

Well, again, but it has to be because an apprenticeship is a job.

Yep.

Yeah.

Okay.

The training doesn't start until you're hired. Right. That's not a. If you're in a training program and you're not being paid or receiving a W2, it's not an apprenticeship program. Might be a pre apprenticeship program, which is I guess, I guess a thing. It's a pathway leading to a job. But the moment you get hired is the moment that your apprenticeship will start.

So I want to unpack this payment piece a little bit more though, because you make the point in the book that employers, despite many people's beliefs, are not job agencies. That's not their job. Their job is to, you know, create something of a value for people that they buy and then that returns value to those who have put up the capital. Right. For the Business to begin with, presumably.

Yeah, I even in the book, I start talking about employers, then I correct myself saying, well, let's stop, let's stop talking about them as employers because that's not how they think.

Yeah, that's not how they think about themselves. Right. Like if they can reduce their human capital and deliver the same service, that's a win for them. So, so then you have this high intervention intermediary coming along and saying we'll take some of the risk off of you as the company. Right. And we'll hire and there's some reduction of risk there and, and creates this try before you buy scenario. Right. Because then the company, I'll change the language to your point, can hire the apprenticeship apprentices that were productive by the end of a couple year program into the company. So tell us more about what the government money would actually fund besides the fact that I guess, you know, these hive intervention intermediaries are not coming along and there's obviously like an inequality, right. In the amount of money that Title 4 accredited colleges get versus apprenticeships, which is basically none of. And I guess the question I'm asking is like, would the, would the problem be equally fixed if we just took money away from the colleges? And you're saying, well that's nice, but it's never going to happen. So that's why we need to fund apprenticeships or is there something more fundamental going on?

Look, I think, I think apprenticeship is about to have a moment in this country and we're seeing massive growth already in the absence of public support for it. I mean, my firm, as you know, Achievement Achieve Partners, our workforce fund, what we do is we buy business services companies in sectors where there's a massive talent gap, like cybersecurity, healthcare, it, salesforce, workday. And we build large apprenticeship programs in these companies so they become talent engines for their sectors. And in sort of high value sectors where the talent gap is already, is massive. You can do it without a subsidy. Absolutely. We've proven that. It's, you know, it's, it's, it's great. We're doing, we're doing very well with it. But the number of fields where there is a talent gap, where you, you know, you require a subsidy to make it work, is much larger. So there's only, only a fraction. We're kind of skimming the, the, the highest value opportunities here. But most fields would actually really benefit from having a program and the only way you can make it happen is by incentivizing a well positioned intermediary. Be it a staffing company, a non profit industry industry association, to actually build that infrastructure that's necessary to get these apprenticeship programs started. So that's how you do it. The subsidy is never going to pay for the whole thing. It's certainly not going to ever pay for the apprentices wages. That's not the intention. The companies obviously are going to have skin in the game whether the employer is the intermediary or the end employer. The point is you really incentivize, you begin to get the flywheel spinning on this apprenticeship infrastructure that's needed by bringing big staffing companies like Adecco and allegiance and manpower, getting them to launch apprenticeship service provider arms, serving their tens of thousands of clients. So knocking under, we can do this for you too. Oh really? What does that involve? Well here's we, here's what we do and you only have to do this. That's interesting. Let's talk about launching an apprenticeship program. That's what needs to happen.

Gotcha, gotcha. And so the funding is really helping provide some of the training underlying the job itself. It sounds like. And for places where the supply, demand, if you will, of qualified workers for needed jobs is a little less out of whack such that maybe companies are just poaching from each other this sort.

Of fly where, where, where it's a not as high a value task and you know, the end employer is not willing to pay more than you know, 35 or $40,000 a year for that entry level worker to start. You'd never be able to make that work and pay some a living wage someone a living wage as an apprentice without a subsidy.

That makes sense. Let me ask you another question because one of my, this, this is maybe my hobby horse but everyone talks about skills based hiring and, and as I look at it one of my big observations is outside of the technical skills and you've mentioned them, the digital skills, et cetera, employers don't really know what critical thinking and communication and all those buzzwords mean. And so when they're talking about this, I'm super skeptical we ever really get to skills based hiring of that taxonomy. The thing that sort of made me second guess that however was in your book. And I'm gonna, I don't have it quite right, but I think it was in the UK there was this job description where it was much more precise than like your average LinkedIn job description around what they were looking for. And my, my guess is that the reason that they can do that is because like they're looking at people in the apprenticeship and what they're actually doing and building skills for. And then they can just describe like the set of tasks as opposed to skills that they're, that they're doing. And then like, hey, this is the job. And so it's much more articulate. And then frankly, like the apprenticeship providers, the high, you know, the higher intervention intermediaries, they can come along and be like, oh, yeah, when you're, when you're facilitating that or whatever, that's called a, this skill and that's how we build it.

Well, that's right. You know, I mean, look, American companies, not employers, are really good at better.

I'll get better at that, I promise.

Yeah, they're really good at outsourcing and entry level hiring is a very specific skill. Maybe I shouldn't use the word skill capability that, you know, not, not every employer is going to be good at. Like, yeah, Google should probably have capabilities in terms of ascertaining, you know, what entry level, you know, programmers, coders should look like. But is Google going to have capability determining what an entry level HR admin looks like? Probably not. And so I think intermediaries are going to do a better job of, of that.

All right, last question as we wrap up, because I've kept you longer than I promised I would, but it's been an interesting conversation and I would just help everyone buy the book because there's like a lot more policy implications and regulations that need to be rethought that are biasing against some smart things and things of that nature in the book. But, but the last question on my side is like, I'd love you to think about or describe maybe what a fairer system ultimately would look like, because it occurs to me that on the individual side, you know, what we call students today, but would be employees, right. In an apprenticeship world, a lot of those individuals, like, they don't actually know what they want to do. And so the apprenticeship model seems to me works really well for those that have some clarity around what gives them energy, what their skills are, what they're good at, et cetera, et cetera. And so I'm just sort of curious, like, what you think the balance will be. Like, what do you envision? Or is this frankly, like, we need K12 education do a heck of a lot better job of helping people build senses of what their careers might be much earlier. And that's like, really where this needs to go to level science.

That's a great last question. Let me just start by saying the inequity is a product of what I call asymmetric information. Where today we have this high school to college to work orthodoxy. And we're expecting young people, prior to getting a good first job at the age of 18 or 20 or 22, to be making a decision as to what accredited post secondary institution they should apply to and what program and take on tens or in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loan debt. And we know what the completion rates are, we know what the underemployment rates are, so we see the outcomes there. And it's a result of asymmetric information. Because colleges, if they don't know that Michael Horn applying to this program is not going to achieve a positive outcome, outcome they ought to know because they've seen a hundred of you, right, come through over the, over the years with your scores and grades and profile and so forth. So, you know, it's kind of like the market for used cars, right? You're like, there's they there and there and there's. And we regulate that for a reason, right? So, you know, how do we solve that? Well, the Biden administration is taking one approach, which is just disclose more, right? Require them or even require students to, you know, sign a, you know, waiver, saying like, I've been apprised of this and I'm still enrolling in this program. That's one way to do it. A better way, I think, is to make sure, or at least give, give students the option rather than the sole option being pay tuition, take on debt. What if we had as many earn and learn pathways, as many apprenticeship programs as we had large colleges and universities? What if we had as many apprentice jobs as there are seats in freshman colleges and universities? What if, and this has just happened in the UK now this fall, for the first time, when you apply, the common app in the UK is called ucas. When you log into ucas, you see apprenticeship programs listed alongside all the university programs that are available. And so you can imagine in a world like that you'd have lots, lots of more, lots more students pursuing earn and learn pathways where they would be better informed about their interests, their capabilities before being asked to make perhaps the biggest investment they're going to make in their life, short of a, you know, a home. I think that's a good idea. And, you know, and what's the downside of that? The downside is maybe someone pursues an apprenticeship program, works for a couple years, you know, gets paid, learns their capability, decides they want to do something totally different. Are they, are they worse off than they were before? No. But you know, the same thing is probably not true of someone who enrolls in a degree program, takes on $50,000 of debt, doesn't complete the program, they are worse off than they were before or even graduates and doesn't figure out how to get a good job. So I think that's the equity issue that we're talking about. An apprentice nation is one that really provides choice to you and that's really what the book is really about, how we establish a more balanced approach to career launch in this country. We've had one approach. We are more imbalanced than any other developed country in the world in having this sort of maniacal sole focus on tuition based, debt based pathway to getting a good first job. An apprentice nation would be one where we have a real choice. And again, apprenticeships aren't just for high school grads. There will be some, but they're going to be for community college grads, college grads at a professional, graduate, professional schools. Because again, getting a good first job is going to get harder, not easier as technology and AI develop.

Well, this would pay off for students, taxpayers and society. Maybe not colleges, but that's okay.

Well, it's funny you say that. I've been giving talks around the country and the only challenges I've been getting have been from fact tenured faculty at colleges and universities. But I have to say, I mean politically this is something that I think Democrats and Republicans can get behind. Well, and then again, I'm not saying it should be, you know, we should be spending 500 billion a year on it. But if you look at what the UK has been spending, you know, they were at their peak, they were spending I think 4 billion a year. So 10 times what we're spending today for an economy which is one significantly smaller ourselves. Yeah, yeah.

Ryan, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for writing the book Apprentice Nation. Everyone. Check it out and keep, keep pushing, keep creating. Really appreciate it.

Thanks Michael.

And we'll be back next time on the future of education.