It's possible if you change societal expectations- university was traditionally seen as a step up from the working class (and their high school degrees), nowadays everyone and their mother literally has a degree which means that the majority of degrees out there are worth little more than the paper they're printed on.
Sure. Sure. But those same people still think it should be them going to university and somebody else going to trade school. So they recognize the problem. They just don't think the solution applies to them.
Definitely think the internship program is quite good- even in universities with co-op systems like Waterloo, it makes a huge different in the experience of the graduates.
Problem is that there's only so much of a market for interns. And it's largely limited to certain fields. That makes the Waterloo model very difficult to scale across the post-secondary sector.
Would it be possible to shift the system? Difficult (especially against those who benefit from the current system), but possible if carefully planned and advertised as a "German" concept.
I have Austrian relatives. Going to their system would require a paradigm shift that I am not sure Canadians are capable of.
1) We would have to accept early streaming. The Germans stream pre-teens.
2) They accept a lower percentage of their population having university education.
3) Until the Bologna process, there was no concept of a Bachelors degree. University was 6-7 years and everyone earned a Masters in their field. That meant, that you truly were knowledgeable about your field when you graduated. None of this half-pregnant nonsense with a Bachelors degree. Unfortunately the Bologna process has imposed Bachelors degrees on them.
4) They have a very strong mentoring culture. Every professional or tradesman sees mentoring as part of his/her job responsibility. They are even evaluated on how they mentor for job performance. This is particularly true in the trades. Their apprentice system is even stronger than ours.
5) They have a very strong internship system for those who don't want to pursue traditional post-secondary. Both my cousins did that. Basically, the company hires you. You start out as basically a low level mail clerk intern. Every year for 4-5 years, you go to the local community college for 6-10 weeks and learn a relevant skill. As you lean skills, you climb up the internship ladder and gain pay and more responsibilities. For them, in year 1 they learned the MS Office Suite completely. Year 2, they learned basic bookkeeping. Year 3, they learned basic HR administration. Year 4, they learned basic management concepts. This made them more useful to the company each year. To have such a system here, you have to have companies willing to hire 18 year olds in their offices and mentor them for years.
The broader issue to me is that in the rush for "free college" we are getting caught in the quantity trap, when it takes quality to win in the 21st century. Case in point: California. The University of California system churns out some of the best grads in the US. They feed Silicon Valley. But only 20% of high school graduates get admission to a UC. They have a second tier: California State Universities. The next 25-30% of grads get admission to CSUs. Everybody else? You are guaranteed admission to a Community College in California. And their community colleges are actually quite high in quality because faculty float across the system to CSUs and UCs. And that's all aside from private universities like Stanford, which is almost entirely a feeder school for the Valley now. That system produces quality graduates, who've kept California on top of the innovation food change for decades. So do we want the economy that California has? Or do we want "free college"? You can't have both.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_University#Differences_between_the_CSU_and_UC_systems