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When I picked up my youngest son Zev from summer camp in Michigan, we decided to go the long way to visit my mother on Georgian Bay and the rest of my family in Toronto. That meant Mackinac Island, which I’d never visited. Located where Lake Michigan squeezes into Lake Huron, Mackinac is a unique summer destination. With no cars allowed, tourists get around on horse-drawn carriages, and supplies on horse-drawn carts. If you squint on Lake Shore Drive, you’d swear it was the 1880s.
Mackinac is home to The Grand Hotel, America’s largest summer-only resort where we walked on the world’s longest porch and where Zev tore through his first post-camp dinner. As we learned, The Grand has been featured in many movies. The most prominent exhibit in the hotel’s Hall of History was for a film where The Grand was central to the plot. Released in 1980, Somewhere in Time starred Christopher Reeve as a traveler who visits The Grand and is enchanted by a photograph of Jane Seymour from 60 years earlier. Naturally, he figures out how to time-travel back to 1912 so he can meet her, fall in love, get her to agree to abandon her promising acting career and marry him, and then lose his ability to remain in 1912.
Zev and I were intrigued. What happens then? So we looked up the plot summary on Wikipedia. Here’s what it says:
He awakens in 1980, physically weakened by the time travel. His attempts to return to 1912 are unsuccessful. He despondently wanders the hotel grounds and finally stops eating. The hotel manager finds him catatonic in his hotel room, but he dies before he can be taken to a hospital. [He] is reunited with [her] in the afterlife.
A few reactions. First, from Zev’s experience at The Grand, ceasing food intake is a tall order. Second, this ending is bananas. While I suppose some might find it romantic… sure, but only in the most morose way. Our takeaway: somewhere in time Hollywood made movies like this.
Disoriented, Zev and I sought refuge in fudge. The only thing more Mackinac than horse-drawn carriages and The Grand is fudge. Mackinac became a fudge destination in the 1880s and remains the home of 13 fudge shops which sell 10,000 lbs. of fudge every day of the summer to “fudgies,” the local term for tourists.
There’s only one word to describe selling 10,000 lbs. of fudge to fudgies every day: abundance. Which may be the Democratic Party’s best bet for returning to relevance in Michigan and beyond. In Abundance: How a Revolutionary American Idea Is Losing Ground, and How We Can Fix It, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that well-meaning policies and regulations have slowed or stopped us from building the things we need. They offer a slew of examples from clean energy infrastructure to public transit to – most obviously – housing, and advocate a “liberalism that builds.”
We’ve all been impacted by America’s failure to build. Tens of millions of lives have been upended from derelict disaster response, power outages, inhumane commute times, and the housing shortage. (As Rahm Emanuel pointed out last week in the Washington Post, a generation ago “the median age of first-time home buyers was 28. Today, it’s 38. In 2000, the typical price of a single-family home was three times a family’s annual income — today, it’s six times.”) Meanwhile hundreds of millions are periodically perturbed, like my recent Amtrak trip on the Northeast Regional: 90 minutes late, no seats, spotty wi-fi, and crawling along at 10 mph for tedious stretches.
Abundance is the liberal response to Marc Andreessen’s Time to Build Covid-era manifesto decrying shortages of masks and vaccines. But while Andreessen’s argument extended to attacking Harvard for failing to educate 100,000 or 1 million students a year, his non-physical infrastructure argument stopped at the classroom door.
Abundance goes further. We need to peel back anti-growth rules. But we also need an energetic government to define and help build the infrastructure we lack. This includes abundant energy, transportation, and housing, but also career launch infrastructure. Klein and Thompson contend an abundant society wouldn’t limit pathways to opportunity to teacher-led classrooms. The answer is faster + cheaper pathways to good jobs and work-based learning like apprenticeships. It’s so obvious, some college leaders have begun thumping the abundant pathways drum.
Perhaps Andreessen’s Time to Build didn’t progress beyond the classroom because he was skeptical of government long before he made a deal with the Donald, but also because no country has scaled apprenticeships without government leading the way. Without government prompting or incentives, few employers will hire (or waste time engaging with) workers who’ll be unproductive for an extended period of time i.e., until they are trained and experienced. If we want lower risk career pathways for millions – if we want as many apprentice jobs as seats in college classrooms – government has to lead. If we want alternatives, there’s no alternative.
Andreessen would agree with Abundance acolytes that the first step is to eliminate unnecessary regulation. Shockingly, registered apprenticeships still operate under the aegis of the National Apprenticeship Act of 1937 when apprenticeships were synonymous with the building trades and safety was the alpha and omega. As a result, registering an apprenticeship program is a cumbersome process requiring companies to document compliance with a litany of labor laws. For example, a new cybersecurity apprenticeship program needs to implement an apprentice safety and health training program, among dozens of other new policies and procedures. There are also defined ratios of experienced workers to apprentices. As I’ve noted, outside of jobs with material physical risks, applying a consumer protection ethos to apprenticeship is misguided because pretty much any work-based learning opportunity that pays a living wage and provides career progression is economically safer (i.e., lower financial risk, lower employment risk) than a tuition-based pathway. And we don’t make tuition-grubbing schools promulgate purposeless policies or maintain archaic teacher-student ratios.
But eliminating unnecessary regulation is the easy part. It’s a harder task to build the apprenticeship infrastructure we lack. So in response to President Trump’s April executive order setting a federal goal of “1 million active apprentices, including avenues for expansion to new industries and occupations” – about a 40% increase – Apprenticeships for America (AFA) has released a series of reports providing a blueprint for what’s needed. At the center of AFA’s recommendations are the apprenticeship intermediaries that do the heavy lifting of selling, setting up, and operating apprenticeship programs for the benefit of companies, apprentices, and educational institutions. While countries that are way ahead of us on apprenticeship have robust ecosystems of intermediaries, America doesn’t. Therein lies the source of our lagging performance in the apprenticeship league tables.
AFA’s recommendations to get to 1 million apprentices and beyond (AFA’s stated goal is 4 million to put the U.S. on par with other developed countries) boil down to the following:
1) Dramatically streamline the registration process.
2) Rather than trying to pick winners –
which hasn’t worked well – do what other countries have done and
shift funding to a predictable, formula-based, pay-per-apprentice model (i.e., defined support for every apprentice hired and trained).
3) Position states as drivers of expansion by
funding through states for apprenticeship programs that are within a single state while launching a similar
federal program for apprenticeships that cross state lines. States can provide additional support via tax credits.
4) Build data infrastructure so we can track outcomes and know what works best for employers and apprentices.
5) Build an earn-and-learn culture, starting by
increasing awareness of apprenticeships among employers and prospective apprentices.
While the lot may sound daunting, unlike high-speed rail or high-density housing, no one is objecting in principle. Scaling apprenticeship is popular among Democrats like Klein and Thompson, as well as an Republican Administration that has already set an historic apprenticeship goal. Even the new Undersecretary in the Department of Education, which plays no formal role in the apprenticeship ecosystem, seems to be prioritizing apprenticeship growth.
But none of this will happen without funding. On a per capita basis, American investment in apprenticeship is one- or two-orders of magnitude lower than other developed countries. We have dramatically over-invested in classroom-based, tuition-based, debt-based career launch infrastructure and correspondingly underinvested in work-based, earn-and-learn career launch infrastructure. And new infrastructure requires investment.
The good news is that the Trump Administration’s apprenticeship executive order had a kernel of an idea for increasing investment at a time of unprecedented cuts to discretionary spending: directing departments to “consolidate and streamline fragmented Federal workforce development programs that are too disconnected from propelling workers into secure, well-paying, and high-need American jobs” and to identify “workforce development and education programs… that are ineffective or otherwise fail to achieve their desired outcomes.” In its new workforce development strategy released this week, the White House doubled down on “reforming or eliminating ineffective programs and redirecting funding to programs that demonstrate success in connecting Americans with high-wage jobs.”
This is lightly veiled code for Job Corps, the $1.8 billion DOL program that has been producing dismal employment outcomes for decades. A residential program for low-income youth ages 16-24 with built-in job training, Job Corps spends more than $80K per trainee per year and over $150K per graduate. Despite all this spending, researchers have found that teenagers see no long-term benefits in earnings or employment while 20-24 year-olds see minimal employment benefits and income growth that is not statistically significant. A 2018 audit by the DOL’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) found Job Corps “could not demonstrate beneficial job training outcomes.” OIG tracked Job Corps graduates and found more than half returned to the same jobs they were doing before Job Corps with most of the rest taking minimum wage entry-level jobs unrelated to their training. Job Corps counts these as successful “placements.” According to DOL, average post-Job-Corps annual income is $16,695. It’s an ineffective and highly inefficient train-and-pray program.
So the Trump Administration has proposed cutting Job Corps and attempted to close centers (as with other cuts, Job Corps centers remain open due to a court order). Nevertheless, the same week we learned the job market is much weaker than previously reported, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted down the cuts, restored full funding to Job Corps, and kept apprenticeship support at the same $285-million-level as last year.
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The Senate’s bipartisan (26-3) vote to preserve Job Corps – a program the Administration singled out again in the newly released workforce development strategy – suggests an additional hurdle to achieving abundance. While dismantling growth-inhibiting rules is a food fight specific to the Democratic Party, increasing investment in an era of record deficits is a problem for both parties because it involves shifting funding away from ineffective legacy programs.
Once we start down a path, once we begin funding something, entrenched interests make it hard to stop. It’s been true from time in memorial in defense, agriculture, and energy; welcome to the club, workforce development. As Anne Kim noted in Washington Monthly, Job Corps’ entrenched interests include Utah’s Management & Training Corporation and Nevada’s Adams and Associates which have been awarded large contracts to operate centers. Plus in some rural areas, Job Corps programs are the principal economic engine, so it’s not a heavy lift to get elected officials onboard. Senate Minority Leader Schumer has leaped to the defense of Job Corps, prattling on about how many people New York Job Corps centers employ and how important they are to local economies. But none of these interests have much to do with the program’s purpose: career launch and socioeconomic mobility. (Senator Schumer has been silent on Job Corps' train-and-pray outcomes.)
It seems that unless the ruling party can make political hay out of attacking an entrenched interest – as selective universities have learned over the past six months – abundance requires elected representatives who can step back and reallocate resources to programs and infrastructure that will do the greatest good. This isn’t a partisan issue. How could it be? We don’t make progress regardless of which party is calling the shots.
It also requires elected representatives who vote on more than anecdote. Some trainees have clearly benefited from Job Corps; the New York Times and other outlets have recently reported inspiring, heartwarming stories with a clear subtext: it would be tragic if Job Corps closed. Naturally, the primary beneficiaries of Job Corps funding are intent on making those voices heard. (Note that not long ago, the New York Times espoused a very different view. In 2018, the Times reported that Job Corps was failing: “Job Corps doesn’t work… The adults are making money, the politicians are getting photo ops. But we are all failing the students.” It’s unclear whether the journalist who wrote the 2025 article read the 2018 article.) So it’s not surprising that in announcing that the Appropriations Committee had voted to preserve Job Corps, Chair Senator Collins referenced “Adais Viruet-Torres, a graduate of Loring [Maine] Job Corps Center and Husson University who overcame homelessness and now works as a nurse practitioner.”
But there’s still hope. While the Senate has weighed in, we’re waiting on the House to return in September. If the White House signals to House Republicans that Job Corps for increased investment in apprenticeship is an acceptable trade, it could change the calculus on the Republican side.
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Just as there are some beneficiaries from growth-killing regulations, some benefit from Job Corps. But our collective inability to look at the bigger picture of whether it’s a good investment, whether we should be spending six times as much on Job Corps as we do on apprenticeship, or whether we’d better off going down a different path entirely, may be the biggest barrier to abundance and an Apprentice Nation.
Abundance isn’t only about undoing decades of rules and regulations. It’s about honestly reevaluating programs that are past their sell-by dates. It’s also about being prepared to deal with interests that will attack changes as a heartless assault on the needy. The fact is that any education or training program – no matter how ill-formed – is going to have successes, often that have more to do with the student or trainee than the program itself. But policymaking-by-anecdote is no way to run a country. That is unless you’re against abundance and apprenticeship.
In 2018, Jane Seymour revealed in an interview that she and Christopher Reeve fell in love in real life on the set of Somewhere in Time. It would have lasted, said Seymour, had Reeve’s girlfriend not shown up pregnant on the last day of shooting. What might have been had the former Bond girl ( Live and Let Die) and the future Superman continued their relationship?
In November 2028, Democrats, liberals, and progressives won’t want to be staring down another four years of MAGA wondering what might have been. In a world where the Democratic Party has no discernable educational policy, building abundant career pathways could be their best bet. It combines muscular government leadership with economic mobility and social justice. So if the White House is successful in moving House Republicans – or successfully blackmails Harvard to spend hundreds of millions on apprenticeships – Democrats won't want to be on the wrong side of this issue. Because we need apprenticeship now as AI transforms the labor market, not somewhere in time.
If our leaders can make smart investments and disinvestments over the next few years, we can get the job done. It would be grand if we didn’t have to wait for the afterlife, like Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour.