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How do you convince a shrinking pool of college grads in the age of TikTok to become insurance underwriters? This was the dilemma that got Pinnacol’s CEO, Phil Kalin, interested in apprenticeships in 2015. The State of Colorado was forming CareerWise, the first nonprofit to bring the success of the youth apprenticeship model from Switzerland to the US.

Phil went on a field trip with other business leaders to learn about the Swiss program and came back a convert. Swiss educators and researchers have created a kind of policy tourism boom by attracting apprenticeship designers from around the world. Switzerland’s Vocational and Professional Education and Training system is renowned for enrolling two-thirds of all Swiss teens, upon finishing their equivalent of high school, in apprenticeships well beyond the trades.

Today, Pinnacol has nine apprenticeship programs registered with the Department of Labor, four of which are in business operations, underwriting, claims, and human resources. On the tech side, there are choices in cybersecurity, user experience design, data science, and software development. Twenty-three apprentices have started, and nineteen have been all the way through the three-year program.

Pinnacol’s is what’s known as a youth apprenticeship program. The students begin as juniors in high school. They start out working sixteen hours a week at $18.29 per hour, Colorado’s minimum wage, and increase their salary and hours over time. The third year includes time and tuition support to take college classes. After high school graduation, some apprentices have opted to go straight to the workforce in other roles; some go on to college. But they leave having crossed the job experience chasm. Thirty percent of the apprentices finish that third year and get hired by Pinnacol. (Throughout the Denver area, 57 percent of apprentices who finish get job offers from their companies.)36

I interviewed one Pinnacol apprentice, Naarai, who made it all the way through and has already been promoted to a role as an underwriter at age twenty-one. She apprenticed as a business development representative, which meant she worked relationships on behalf of the company and wrote up contracts. Now, she manages two thousand workers’ comp business accounts.

“I knew that going to college, I wouldn’t gain the experience of actual work,” Naarai said. Her third year of apprenticeship allowed time for college courses, and she took some at first, but she also kept getting promotions at work.

At first, her own parents were split over her choice. She and her siblings were the first in their family to have the opportunity to go to college, and her mom was pushing college hard. In fact, Naarai laughs now as she recalls when she first brought her parents to see her workplace: “Mom thought it was sketchy that the company was hiring high school students.”37

One sister chose college, but Naarai and her brother, who apprenticed at a Denver bank, felt they didn’t need it, at least not now. In fact, they recently purchased a house together.

“I don’t need it [college] at this point, but I do have it as a personal goal. And Pinnacol will help me pay tuition,” Naarai said. “Debt is very scary to me. I think that’s my biggest fear is being old and having a lot of debt. Working at Pinnacol offers me a lot of benefits that mean I’m set. A lot of my peers in my age group are not.”

For a registered apprenticeship, the US Department of Labor authorizes the employer’s training plan, making sure that it includes a significant education component, on-the- job training, and a fair wage.

Julie Wilmes runs the apprenticeship program at Pinnacol. She believes it takes buy-in from the senior team and dedicated resources to pull this sort of program off, particularly to go the registered apprenticeship route with the required structures, approvals, paid education component, and reporting rules.

“So at first, it was a little squirrely,” Wilmes reflected. “Now, six years later, it’s much more solidified and the registered apprenticeship model gives us a blueprint of what we need to teach, what we need to train, and what we need to aspire to with our apprentices and it also gives our apprentices that guarantee that they’re going to get a high-quality experience.”38

Extracted from WHO NEEDS COLLEGE ANYMORE? by Kathleen deLaski (Harvard Education Press, 2025)