Just before President Trump took office, Ammar Campa-Najjar wrote him a memo urging him to support apprenticeship. Apprenticeship is “a program that sounds like your show,” Campa-Najjar half-jokingly explained to Trump in the letter in a nod to the president’s reality-TV series. “You should just put your name on it, like everything else, and take credit for it.”

Campa-Najjar—who served in the Labor Department’s Office of Public Affairs for the Employment and Training Administration under President Obama—never got a response from Trump. Congress, however, has taken action on the model, recently increasing federal funding for apprenticeships from $90 million to $95 million per year. “I’m not going to take credit for that,” Campa-Najjar told me, “but that is something that happened.”

What’s promising about apprenticeship is that participants don’t have to go into debt while getting trained for the workforce. Unlike college, apprentices learn while they earn. What’s more, 87 percent of participants finish their programs having already secured a job. Apprenticeships are, in turn, being touted as a simple fix to the country’s $1.3 trillion student-debt crisis and the high percentage of unemployed college graduates.

Read the full article about apprentice-like education programs by Lolade Fadulu at The Atlantic.