More young workers are going into trades as disenchantment with the college track continues, and rising pay and new technologies shine up plumbing and electrical jobs
America needs more plumbers, and Gen Z is answering the call.
Long beset by a labor crunch, the skilled trades are newly appealing to the youngest cohort of American workers, many of whom are choosing to leave the college path. Rising pay and new technologies in fields from welding to machine tooling are giving trade professions a face-lift, helping them shed the image of being dirty, low-end work. Growing skepticism about the return on a college education, the cost of which has soared in recent decades, is adding to their shine.
Enrollment in vocational training programs is surging as overall enrollment in community colleges and four-year institutions has fallen. The number of students enrolled in vocational-focused community colleges rose 16% last year to its highest level since the National Student Clearinghouse began tracking such data in 2018. The ranks of students studying construction trades rose 23% during that time, while those in programs covering HVAC and vehicle maintenance and repair increased 7%.
“It’s a really smart route for kids who want to find something and aren’t gung ho on going to college,” says Tanner Burgess, 20, who graduated from a nine-month welding program last fall.
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I think it’s great that kids are finding ways to avoid debt traps but I worry when colleges become places only accessible to rich people. One of the best indicators for supporting Trump was lack of a college degree. I worry that the inability to be able to be educated just to become educated will lead to populations easier to seduce into facism
University attendance at these levels are also part of the Baby Boom. Prior to that, most people got by with a high school diploma. Bachelors were for the wealthy, a Masters put you at the highest levels of professionals, and a doctorate was something you did towards the end of your career in order to record all of the information and experience you gathered during your career. Now, some entry level positions REQUIRE a doctorate and the average person with a Bachelors earns what someone with a high school diploma earned in the 1970s.
The university was never intended to serve the masses.
You are confusing origins with utility. Fraternities are believed to have been started as a way to keep students from too much partying and drinking, that has no relationship whatsoever with what they are now for example.
Just because higher education wasn’t useful to most people in the freaken 1700s says nothing about today. If you want to decrease the wealth gap the best means is higher taxes and banning share buybacks not making everyone less educated in faith that the free market will correct.
Exactly! In a more technology driven world full of false narratives and lies we need MORE ppl in college. Trade jobs shouldn’t be considered lesser work but we should be more alarmed higher education is become unattainable for middle to lower class folks. Especially when k-12 schools are getting picked a part in general due to funding, burned out teachers, and bullshit “anti-woke” laws
MORE PPL IN TRADES ISNT A SOLUTION. ITS THE RICH FUCKING FUTURE GENERATIONS OUT OF HIGHER EDUCATION
This kind of thing is cyclical. When the trades get an excess of workers and wages are driven down, the narrative will switch back to “you must get a college degree” just like how it was decades ago.
I remember this with nursing degrees when I was in college in the late 2000s, there was a big deal made about a shortage of nurses around that time, and a bunch of kids were convinced they were going to make bank and have guaranteed jobs when they graduated, then they started graduating and flooded the market. A bunch of them ended up staying in school for grad degrees in other fields, since they couldn’t find nursing jobs.
These trades are the backbone of society and we should absolutely encourage this. Plus, many of these trades have well-established unions.
Union jobs
Here in the UK we have a shortage of builders electricans plumbers etc, mainly because my millennial generation couldn’t get trained, there was a focus on only taking on experienced people, with apprenticeships seen as old fashioned, so very few offered them. In fact apprenticeships have only come back in the last 15 years or so in a big way because the government subsidises them. The thing I remember vividly were a few newspaper articles talking how lazy my generation were, when we were literally cut off from decent employment opportunities.
Great, trade professions are the jobs of the future! AI can’t replace plumbers and electricians… Or at least I wouldn’t trust their work
