The German system (What SKorea and Japan took as blueprint to design theirs) goes like this. After High School you do 1 of 2 things (doing none is not accepted from society, well it happens, but is seen as fail): you either do prolonged High, which means you qualify for studying at University (wich is dirt cheap) or you take the route of learning what we call a profession (It's different word usage from US). What this means is, you work 3 years in an industry as apprentice (almost full-time). That's how the talk goes: "What do you do?" "I am making an apprenticeship". In parallel you go to "professional school" to learn some theoretical stuff. That is the basic qualification everyone has over here. You can upgrade by going to college or making a "Master", again different meaning from US usage. Or you can just stay that way. But basically everyone has a basic qualification and a home industry. This has produced a quality workforce (so far).

One of the weirder things I saw in Germany (and I'm not using this to refute your argument, just an aside) was the apprentice carpenters going around asking for handouts.

There's an article here about them:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,416564,00.html

I found it to be just plain weird.

It's basically the historical version of the internship. Craftsman would work together with collegues from other regions of the country, they learn the tricks of the trade of each other.

I think the word in the US is "trade", as in learning a trade.