Thing is there is a huge amount of money invested in helping make higher education affordable, from tax dollars to state schools, to student aid and loans, to tax exemptions on institutional investments. Relatively a very small fraction is invested in the trades training.
As a society we do press one choice over the other dramatically. I’ve been a believer in doing that up to now. But I don’t know if it makes sense going forward?
We don’t know what the jobs of the future are, or how long they will even exist.
People act like the trades are some pathway to the middle class, but the core trades (plumber, HVAC tech, electrician, carpenter, construction, welder, etc etc) only have about 6-8 million jobs in the US as a whole. If you expand that and look at skilled work in things like power plants, manufacturing, etc the number goes up to maybe 12-15 million.
In a nation of 340 million, those jobs play a role but if too many people get trained in them then you just have wage suppression and unemployment. The trades shortage that is expected is something like 1-2 million too few people in the trades in the next decade. It would be very easy to overshoot that and train 3 million people, which means you end up with mass unemployment and wage deflation in the trades.
The idea that we can just throw tens of millions of laborers at 2 million jobs isn’t a solution to what’s happening in the economy.
This is no different than in the 90s when people thought a degree in computer science was their lifelong meal ticket. Things change.
The trades are also hard as hell on your body. Chronic pain and disability are common as you get older. Also they pay decent but not that well, most pay about $20-30/hr. The ones that make 6 figures either have senior positions in union jobs, or they work a ton of overtime.
AI is rapidly growing, but so is robotics. Eventually we will have bipedal robots that can do a lot of the work in the trades.
Not only that, but augmented reality can make an inexperienced tradesperson far more competent. So you end up in a situation where people with 1-2 years of experience in a trade are able to function on a level not seen until you have 10-20 years of experience. So this also lowers the barriers to entry. That will also drive down wages and drive up unemployment.
We don’t have a solution. As time passes, more and more labor that used to require a human will not require a human. That includes not just cognitive work, but physical work too. And people will say ‘the economy has been like that since the industrial revolution’, which is true. The % of Americans who work in agriculture was about 80% during the revolutionary war, now its about 2%.
But by mid/late century, there will be almost no jobs a human can do better and cheaper than a machine. The only jobs mostly left will be those that are not automated due to legal regulations, and jobs involving meaningful social connection with a biological human (daycare worker, hospice worker, therapist, teacher, various medical professions, etc).
There aren’t going to be enough jobs for 340 million people. A temporary shortages of 1-2 million jobs in the trades won’t fix that.
Theres also the fact that you have to look at this issue through a sociopolitical lens. white men without a college education have been massively moving to the GOP in the last few decades because they used to be the default americans, and now they aren’t. They are just another group in the US, not the default. The GOP promises to make them the center of the system again (in exchange for their vote). Emanuel is probably trying to win their votes by pandering to them, but they moved to the GOP for cultural reasons, not economic ones. They don’t like living in a nation full of POC, feminists and secularists where they have to compete on merit. Trade school won’t change the existential dread they feel from knowing that white christian non-college men are a minority group who don’t deserve special privilege, so attempts to win them over with talk of trade school won’t work.
Either way, the real benefit of higher education is that it makes better functioning adults. However I don’t know how much of that is cause vs effect (did college make them better functioning adults, or do people predisposed to being higher functioning adults pursue a college degree).
A better solution would be mass unionization of service sector work.
Indeed. The real “hot take” isn’t “The world needs ditch diggers, too!” - it’s “The ditch-digging industry needs brainy, bookish types, too!”
We are producing two million college graduates per year, at a large public investment, personal costs, and along with huge personal educational debt to then service, for jobs that are not necessarily paying enough to service the debt. If they find jobs at all.
Meanwhile for trained tradespeople
The supply-demand imbalance has reached crisis proportions. Last year alone, nearly 600,000 jobs were posted for major skilled trades positions in the United States, while only about 150,000 new workers entered the labor pool through apprenticeship programs. According to U.S. Department of Education estimates, for every five workers who retire from construction, manufacturing and other skilled trades sectors, only two replacements enter the workforce.
The trades are no more for everyone than college should be, but the more I read the more I become convinced that looking from a societal and individual ROI perspective we are underinvested on the trades education side relative to higher education.
I think you’re looking at this too narrowly. You’re only looking at the students’ post-graduation income vs the cost of education / training. Education isn’t just about jobs: it never was and never should be. There is no reason you can’t have a university education and then go into the trades, or do the trades for a while when you’re young and your body can take it, and then shift to a degree and a white-collar job. It’s not a caste system: people can do one and then the other, or both, or neither.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of reasons (dollars spent to get that university education) to not.
There’s one reason that’s missing here. Higher education is also somewhat of virtue signal that gains you entry into the corporate overclass. Maybe I’m being a bit cynical, but most days for the past 20+ years I take a bus, train, or ferry in Manhattan to work at some consultancy, insurance company, or investment bank and I see all these people working these corporate jobs. Quite frequently (and actually, often formally as part of my job) ask “what does this person do?” “what actual skills do they have?” Quite often the pathways into these careers is you’re a super-eager, conventionally attractive young person from the right college.
The article also says this
JLL identifies encouraging trends that may help address the talent shortage. Soaring college tuition costs, $1.8 trillion in student loan debt and growing AI disruption of white-collar professions are all reshaping career decisions. Enrollment in community colleges has risen 12% over the past five years, with trades-related majors among the fastest-growing disciplines. Construction trades, engineering technologies and mechanical and repair technologies all significantly outgrew nearly all other majors from 2024 to 2025.
So it sounds like supply is starting to go up to meet demand. But even so, my understanding is the projections show we probably will have a shortage of maybe ~2 million tradespeople. So yeah we can and should expand community college and apprenticeship scholarships to train a couple million more, but after those jobs are filled, more people in the trades will just drive down wages and job security, and the trades will eventually be replaced by robotics anyway in a couple decades.
According to this, apprenticeships actually make money for employers since they get low wage labor while training someone new.
The empirical estimates of the employer ROI to Registered Apprenticeships ranged widely, but the most comprehensive and rigorous estimates range from 40 to 90 percent; for each $1.00 invested, employers can expect to reap a benefit of $1.40 to $1.90. This substantial ROI for employers suggests that there is an underinvestment in this area. Increased awareness of the substantial positive returns that employers can expect from Registered Apprenticeships may result in an increase in their take-up.
We really need some kind of affordable voluntary higher education that is designed to teach useful life skills (which can be a broad topic). Something that can function as a third space for people, that works around people’s schedules and is designed to make them more competent and autonomous adults (rather than just training them for a job). Something like that would be a good investment in the country. Most people just learn these things as hobbies or ad hoc from places like youtube.
This can be an issue even with tried-and-true professions. I recall about 25 years ago, there was reportedly a shortage of nurses. A local private college partnered with a local health system to train new nurses. By the time those new nurses graduated, there was a glut of trained nurses and few of them could find a job.
Well I believe that the “substantial ROI for employers suggests that there is an underinvestment in this area”, but it doesn’t seem like the employers do, as few are investing in the training programs?
Which doubles back to who pays? If there is bucket of X dollars to invest in promoting education after High School should college education continue to be be the recipient of almost all of that investment?
There is no glut now. Major shortage as a large number of nurses hit retirement ages, and same pipeline limit of not having the adequate training infrastructure. Not sure when there was a glut?
When was this? My sisters are both nurses and my Niece teaches nursing. I’m don’t recall any gluts.
Supposedly in mid-1980’s when I was starting college. The scuttlebut was degree’d RNs in my area had to settle for taking jobs in sketchy nursing homes that used to be (and in the future were) filled by LVNs. I don’t think it lasted all that long though. By some point in the 1990’s I was hearing about nursing shortages again.
My sister-in-law is an OR RN who did it the hard way, starting as an LVN and working her way up. But though she hopped around a little she never had to struggle to find a hospital job that I can recall and quickly came out of retirement to work part-time both because she missed it and because they were desperate to pay her.
This is the rub about the trades. They already are not particularly well compensated in comparison to collegiate track employment, and proponents of these jobs want to dilute that workforce further by encouraging more and more people to take that path.
The bigger issue is that college costs have soared due to the “easy” availability of money to pay for it. Students are paying for colleges to expand their offerings in a bid to attract more students who can borrow to afford the expanded cost of education.
Nothing is wrong with it, and indeed a college-educated plumber might even provide better services than one without such education (perhaps better problem solving skills, better business acumen, etc.). But a college education is not needed to be a perfectly adept plumber, and because providing a college education is expensive, it can be considered a profligate exercise and not the best use of resources.
Agreed, though I’d call it more of a “signaling mechanism” than a “virtue signal,” unless it’s also signaling to the corporate overlords that your moral code meets their approval.
Notably the article cited by DSied about the massive shortage of tradespeople is written by JLL, a massive commercial real estate management firm. I wouldn’t say it’s bad advice, but their goal is less “help kids make good decisions about their education” and more “lower the price of an input to their operations”.
Do a little digging. There is currently a major shortage of HVAC mechanics, thanks mainly to the Heat Pump revolution. It is more dire in the UK and EU where demand for first time AC and efficient heating is way up thanks to Climate Change.
There has been a shortage of Plumbers in the US for a long time.
I haven’t looked at any other trades, so no idea on them.
Nursing shortage won’t be going away for a while Boomers and Gen X are ensuring that.
Bots will not be replacing these fields for decades at the soonest, so solid bets. I’m sure there are other professions where the long term prospects are good.
We are so, so far from “best use of resources” in this country that I’m not terribly concerned about this one. As long as we’re allowing the oligarchs to compete in the “who wants to be a trillionaire” games, we’re not engaging in “best use of resources” in any meaningful way.
A college education might not help someone lay pipe. But a good college education will help anyone be a better neighbor. We need a body politic that can reason and communicate effectively, that can evaluate information sources critically, that can evince curiosity and explore issues in a methodical, analytical fashion.
Historically, there’s been a pretty big divide between liberal arts educations and trades educations. If I ran the world, I’d break this divide down a bit. A friend of mine once told me, “Major in a career, minor in a passion,” and I’d like to have something like this be standard. College should marry a gimlet-eyed curriculum geared toward useful career/life skills with a starry-eyed curriculum geared toward thoughtfulness, analysis, passion, ethics, and beauty. Every engineer should graduate with a working knowledge of philosophy, and every Lit major should know the basics of house-building.
This would, in my opinion, be a freaking fantastic use of our resources.
What an unrealistic dream. College education is completely out of control as far as prices. Something went really wrong a while back.
There is not enough time for every engineer to have a working knowledge of philosophy. Those philosophy classes come at the expense of core classes and at full cost. Engineers have almost no electives in their course load. Also philosophy, really? Why that over art appreciation or history or lit?
College is stupidly expensive now.
Yes. I’m preparing them to be successful in life, and having a good job that maintains a good standard of living is a vital part of that. I guess one could sit on the porch of his wooden shack and read Shakespeare or philosophy, but I think we can all agree that, in terms of a happy and meaningful life, that simply isn’t going to cut it.