LONDON-Rumaysah Khan was offered a place to study at the University of Oxford. She turned it down and went to work as an apprentice at a law firm instead.

The college route would have given her a prestigious degree, but also mounds of student debt and little to no practical experience-a dangerous position in a legal industry rushing to adopt AI productivity tools.

"I knew from an early age I wanted to do law and that this route would fast track me into the career," said London-based Khan.

College grads on both sides of the Atlantic are facing a challenging start to their careers, with job candidates finding themselves competing with AI for entry-level positions. For a large cohort of British high-school graduates, college no longer feels like a good deal.

Now, a growing number of white-collar apprenticeship programs are offering high-school leavers another route into industries such as consulting, finance and law-fields typically reserved for college graduates.

The British experience offers lessons for the U.S., where students and families have also come to question the value of a four-year college degree. The growth of AI is likely to boost demand in apprenticeships as young people lose confidence in their career prospects.

While the number of high-school graduates in the U.S. who choose apprenticeships instead of college is rising, programs are mostly focused on blue-collar roles. The U.S. government has invested $150 million over the past decade to expand apprenticeships, of which $100 million is put toward cybersecurity, AI and healthcare.

Apprenticeships in the U.K. were historically confined to blue-collar sectors too, but have expanded into more office-based roles in recent years, partly because of concerns from young people about the high cost of earning a degree.

Businesses including PricewaterhouseCoopers and law firm Freshfields are bringing in more apprentices, saying it helps them tap a wider pool of candidates who can develop skills over a longer period. U.K. companies hired 8% more apprentices in 2025, while hiring of college graduates contracted by 8%, according to a survey in 2025 by the Institute of Student Employers.

Choosing an apprenticeship is a short circuit around an increasingly crowded university-educated job market. The higher education entry rate among 18-year-olds increased from roughly 25% in 2006 to 36% in 2025, according to government data.

And for British students, the payoff isn't there. The U.K.'s graduate earnings premium-the extra income graduates earn compared with nongraduates-is lower than in the U.S. and some other European countries, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

"Nowadays you need a specific skill to be valuable because of AI," said Ben Rowland, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, which represents workforce training organizations in the U.K. He said that apprentices are also beneficial to employers, since their salaries are low and they tend to be better learners.

Khan's law firm, Eversheds Sutherland, funded her law-school training as part of the apprenticeship. The 23-year-old received her degree this April.

"The impact of AI has really rattled the playing field," she said.

Khan works with senior lawyers in her firm and directly with clients, which she wouldn't be able to do at such an early age had she gone to college. Her employer paid for exams and training, as well as a wage. She declined to disclose her salary, but trainees in her field are reported to make $70,000 to $80,000.

Earning money means she can go out and socialize, but she said she did miss out on the fun of the college campus lifestyle as an apprentice-and the long school breaks.

Samuel Rankin was offered places at four U.K. universities, but instead settled on an apprenticeship at a bank.

His rationale: A traditional degree felt like a gamble and he wanted technical skills that would make him indispensable.

Rankin, 23, sees how his college-educated peers are still struggling to find work. "Apprenticeships are almost AI proof," said Rankin, who lives near Manchester. "Companies want to help mold you into the employees they're looking for."

During his apprenticeship as a people transformation analyst at Barclays, Rankin skipped the entry-level grunt work and got to be involved in complex projects with senior figures. As part of his apprenticeship, he completed a technology degree with a private training provider, Multiverse. Now he works full time as a project manager at the bank and earns just under $50,000, around the U.K.'s median salary.

When Rankin, Khan and others applied for their white-collar apprenticeships, it was still a fairly new concept. Khan said she was strongly encouraged by her high school to apply to top colleges like Oxford and Cambridge, and wasn't given any support with apprenticeship applications.

But more recently, both parent and student attitudes toward apprenticeships in Britain have changed.

At accounting firm Grant Thornton, just 10% of U.K. trainee intakes were apprentices in 2010. Today, there are as many apprenticeship positions as graduate ones. The firm said the prospects and progression of its apprentices has been no different from others coming in through different routes, including graduate programs.

PwC has over 1,000 apprenticeship positions each year in consulting, tax, technology and accounting.

"We want to be agile as a workforce, and so our view of talent has changed," said Carly Pike, head of workforce strategy at PwC.

Mary Amanuel, 25, turned down places at five top-rated U.K. colleges, including Durham and Manchester. Instead, she chose to train as a data analyst with the National Health Service, where she helped build machine-learning models for early cancer detection.

"The scale of impact I've had is much greater than if I had gone to university," she said.