The issue is teaching them in the first place, a real apprenticeship program should be able to take someone with no knowledge of programming and convert them in

The issue is teaching them in the first place, a real apprenticeship program should be able to take someone with no knowledge of programming and convert them into a competent developer without taking up too much of the time of a senior dev who is billing $50/hr+. The best way to do this is to outsource at least some of the learning to a classroom setting and ideally have the government subsidise this, but the government can't possibly subsidise courses in every single type of software development,