The results presented here are too undifferentiated to conclude that apprenticeships have generally become unattractive. I am even convinced that apprenticeships today are on average better than they were 45 years ago when I did my apprenticeship. And it was and still is true that apprenticeship years are no picnic, which I experienced myself and witnessed with all my colleagues who also did apprenticeships. Did we have psychological problems too? Yes, indeed, ALL of us. Problems at home, with parents (separation issues), problems at school (performance pressure) and problems at work (integration issues), problems with myself (orientation issues? Who am I, what should I do? What's the point of it all?). And was it any better for the colleagues who did their A-levels? No, not at all. So, nothing has changed, you have to live with it. Persevere, fight through it, somehow it works that way, at least for me and most of my colleagues.

If there is an argument to be made for learning, it is the notion of learning to work. Be careful with the definition of work; it is not about claiming that the student is twiddling their thumbs, but rather about completing a task quickly with real-life constraints that are difficult to practice, unlike those posed by an equation with multiple unknowns or the outline of an essay.

The reality is that several colleagues and business leaders whose opinion I share believe that, in the universities of applied sciences (UAS), students who have gone through the apprenticeship route make better engineers than those who have gone through an academic path.

In this notion of work, there is a profession, a know-how. In a phase of evolution that sees humans confronting artificial intelligence, it may be time to remember that, before having a brain, one is endowed with two hands.