That's not really how apprenticeships work in France or anywhere else. It's actually the French government that directly subsidizes the apprentice and all firms

That's not really how apprenticeships work in France or anywhere else. It's actually the French government that directly subsidizes the apprentice and all firms pay a tax into a general apprenticeship fund. Suffice to say it would never fly in America. It doesn't make any sense for any company to pay to train an employee if it can be avoided. The problem though is that when companies don't directly guide the training you get people who are trained... to do the wrong thing. This leads to the perverse situation where American workers are actually over-educated (lots of fancy college degrees, certifications, etc) but still lack the necessary skills. Overall the American system is obscenely inefficient, what with people buying $100K lottery tickets in the hope of landing a decent middle class job, but it's also very hard to disrupt because virtually all of the risk and downside is borne by less fortunate Americans whose lives don't matter anyways. For everybody else -- corporations, investors, and the government -- the system works great. It's a classic serfdom strategy where during good times the nobility takes takes a big cut and during bad times the nobility takes a big cut. Unfortunately, unlike serfs, these terminally indebted Americans don't kill themselves or run away and so there is a kind of macro-inefficiency that builds up slowly overtime. There may be an opportunity for individual companies to take a risk and train up employees but this is a very risky strategy and it isn't necessarily a good thing for workers. It can work only if you pay these untrained employees very little money and this is the other side of the hammer, wage suppression of highly indebted workers. The more you can trap young workers with enormous debt loads the less you actually need to pay them so even companies that "take a chance" on workers can still force the worker to bear most of the risk.