Andrea Messing-Mathie, a director at Jobs for the Future’s Center for Apprenticeship & Work-Based Learning, was quoted in a recent Money Under 30 article touting apprenticeship as a valuable postsecondary alternative or complement to college.

The article says that apprenticeships are more common in other parts of the world than they are in the United States, and Messing-Mathie notes that more than 50 percent of students in Europe are enrolled in an apprenticeship program.

“It’s just standard,” she says. “It’s a very normal way of doing it because the theory is that you learn better by doing, and studying, and not just by studying, and then working.”