The American urge to push most high school students into college when many of them didn’t really want or need advanced study turned out to be a great blunder. As Charles Murray correctly observed in his 2007 book Real Education, we were trying to make the bachelor’s degree into something it was never meant for.

Now that we seem to be recovering from the college-for-everyone notion, apprenticeship programs are getting lots of attention. In today’s Martin Center article, Sophia Damian looks at what state policymakers can do to spur them along. “The authors of the Apprenticeships for America report conclude that states with the highest apprenticeship growth rates have set up ‘governance and administrative approaches’ that ease processes . . . and identify four types of activities that successful states employ to increase apprenticeship rates.”

Officials who aren’t afraid of upsetting the higher-ed lobbies in their states — apprenticeships will undercut their already weakened condition still more — ought to take that report to heart.