You’re Hired, Trump Tells Five Million Future Apprentices

Apprenticeships are part of the answer to the U.S. skills gap. But does the president’s math work?
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
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Wheatley Brown III had hit the wall. As an electronics installer, he wasn't going to make a lot of money.

Then, in 2009, the 37-year-old Mississippian took an electrician apprenticeship administered by the Tennessee Valley Authority, the New Deal agency envisioned in 1933 by then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as “a corporation clothed with the power of government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise.” Instead of paying for college, Brown got paid, all the while learning the trade over five years.