I guess I’m gonna say “maybe not a bad idea.” I teach more than a few students who are in college, accumulating debt, because “my parents and my high school said I should go.” But they have no interest in being there, and would have been more happy and satisfied (and in less debt) had they gotten some technical training in high school and then gone on to the workforce. The Youngest Pane’s high school offers welding, plumbing, IT, data, med tech, and all sorts of “career jump-start” programs, and it’s been pretty damn successful. Especially for lower-income students for whom college is an incredible hurdle for all kinds of reasons.
For a depressing couple of data points (from the perspective of those of us not makign this much, despite a lot of education). My neighbor across the street owns his own plumbing company. A HS graduate starting with him as an apprentice will earn around $80k in the first year. He pays a salary, plus a bonus (maybe $30?) for each job, plus some percentage of the bill for each job. Within two years that bonus and percentage goes up. He’s got 22-25 year olds making over $100k. Plus it’s a well-defined apprenticeship that will lead to the kid being able to own his own business. And he’s not the biggest or most successful plumbing company in the area.
I used to do a lot of work with Vendome, a premier maker of gorgeous stills. Ten years ago they were hiring on new welders who could weld copper at $120k per year.
I get that we want a better-educated citizenry. But some people simply do not have any interest in college, and we have to be able to provide them with alternate paths. As long as higher education is going to be underfunded and rely on students going into massive debt, I think we owe it to people to have good, solid options.
But again, much like the problems we’re having in higher ed, what this means in practice is that pretty much all working class people will be pushed into blule collar work, while upper class, mostly white people, will get the advantages of a college education, and wll continue to shape our intellectual landscape. That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be support for the trades, but how about instead of these things clearly intended to keep the working classes in their “place”, we make all k-12, public education wide-reaching and engaged in all kinds of fields from as early as possible. A more montessori approach to education would be helpful, I’d argue. You teach both hands on, practical skills, as well as intellectual skills. There isn’t any reason why someone can’t learn plumbing AND learn philosophy. Despite what our society seems to think, the two are not incompatible, and in fact, people benefit from exposure to both, whatever their class.
If people have no interest in higher ed, maybe that’s because they’ve had the joy of learning beaten out of them by an abusive, authoritarian, racist, misogynistic, classist system that does not value the whole person that they are…
I guess I never found the supposed distincition between intellectual and physical labor to have made sense in the first place. It’s never made sense that people can do one or the other, or that we should value one over the other. Or that people aren’t capable of both…
Absolutely. The “high school workforce training” has to be right next to clear and affordable pathways to college so that people have true options. But I don’t know that I’d stop workforce training programs simply because college funding is such a shitshow. I mean, Young Pane’s high school has the workforce training, but also produced 3 of 5 college valedictorians at my university last year. And it’s a lower-income high school. All 3 were first-gen college students.
But from a superficial read of the article, it seems like the funding model for this is simiilar - giving people savings accounts (like whatever the college one is called, I forget) to pay for that training. While it’s often not as expensive to get certfication and training in the trades (and there seems to be enough demand, that can still be a hurdle…
Sounds great! What are they doing right, would you say?
My neighbor is a plumber who makes more than I do, and is struggling to find help due to lack of kids with the necessary training. I would count the trades as education, just to be clear. And no, college is not for everybody, but it is, and should be, for anyone who has the desire and drive to do it. Offering more opportunities and options is always a good idea.
Indeed, and I’d argue that all of this should be fully embedded in education at a young age… There are plenty of people who might not want to make the trades their career, but would benefit from understanding how to build a shelf, or fix their leaky faucet. As I said, I think the distinction is really articfial is has historical helped drive class divisions.
I like the observation that education of the masses was a key ingredient for modern economic productivity. We now seem to be at a happy point in the West (barring systemic collapse and while pretending our veggies pick themselves): we can tolerate large amounts of economically unproductive “happiness”, even turning happiness generation itself into an industry, but not too much or the plumbing doesn’t get fixed.
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I suppose my point is that I’m not sure you really can pick the education question apart from the economic system it supports.
Edit: speaking of overbaked, OT, missed the point…
Heh, I wish I knew the formula. They seem to have a guidance counselor situation that presents lots of options as available, attainable, and equally important. They’re really good at telling students “great, you want to go to college? Awesome. Let’s talk about affordability. Yes, this school is prestigious, but here’s what it’ll cost. Have you thought about this other school. Good financial aid, good school, good post-grad opportunities.” And then not shaming people who want to go another route, as if they’re idiots if they don’t wan to go to college. It helps that because of some past positive situations and agreements, the school is better-funded than others around.
The college should be for everyone idea got developed when people realized that a college degree led to higher earnings over a lifetime. Thus, it played well into several American ideals: more money is better, education will improve your life, all you need is hard work, each generation should obtain a higher social status, every child is equally capable, it’s just society that has kept them down.
Soon high schools were being ranked solely on how many kids went to college after they graduated. Colleges were eager for the expanded income. Businesses began requiring a degree for jobs that did not really require one. Tradesman as a sign of social inferiority came out of Victorian England, and was snapped up by the new rich of America as an easy way to seem bona fide. Only people who couldn’t be born rich or be a lawyer or doctor (not always seen as respectable) would end up in the trades.
We need plumbers and philosophers. At the moment neither is held in very high regard-that is reserved for celebrities and athletes.
I’ve seen plenty of arguments that high school should teach kids how to do adult things, like balance a bank account or interview for a job or cook or clean laundry. I’ve seen plenty of kids get jobs and discover that no one cares about their personal happiness if they can’t do the work ( like show up on time when scheduled). If schools decide to help kids get and keep a job, that’s ok by me.
And just because you came from a white middle class background you aren’t guaranteed to want or need or be interested in going to college. Getting into the trades can be a fine choice, just as going to pursue a PhD in Sumerian literature is fine for a Black kid from the projects.
When I was 55 I thought about becoming a union electrician-a paid for apprenticeship and much better earnings than I made as a baker. Alas, the union campus was a 1.5 hour commute and I am my elderly mothers’ caregiver. If I could have moved closer to the campus for the 18 months I would have done so.
The trades are also a great place for women to be earning as much as men, since the majority of the jobs are union jobs.
I’ll add to that, if I may, the myth of scientific innovation as a primary economic engine. It is important, for sure, but day to day we need maintainers more than we need innovators.
When he was in what must have been his 70s, one of my professors at Vanderbilt, Paul Conkin, tested and became a Master Electrician. All because he didn’t want to pay someone to re-wire his house. He also used to have animated arguments with various university libraries to stop having his books in their catalogs when those books had been superseded by newer scholarship. And he had no books in his office except those of his students, but could quote page and verse of any book we were discussing in seminar. He was fairly intimidating.
He’d say: “College should be for anyone who wants it. I truly don’t understand why this isn’t obvious.” And he’d say that in a really, genuinely puzzled voice. “Of course, so should being an arborist or a plumber.” He grew up dirt-poor on a rural farm in Chuckey, Tennessee.
I do hear you. In fact, my high school was like that: only about 10% of us were college-bound, and there were phenomenal training programs for auto mechanics, construction, landscaping, even plumbing/electrical/etc.
But this is different. In my school, everyone still had to take 4 years of English and math, 2 years of science and history, 1 year of a foreign language, etc. No, this is about cutting away at fundamental education so that the next generation is even less able to reason intelligently and do research (due diligence, to use a business term) to make decisions about their own lives. For example, one can’t be a contractor if one doesn’t know how to create a bid, manage subcontractors, and communicate with clients. And one can’t change paths easily if the only training one has gotten – since early teens! – is in a specific job classification.
Case in point: I desperately wanted to take the basic auto mechanics class, reasoning that I would likely be dealing with cars most of my life so it would be good to understand the basics, but I wasn’t allowed to because I was in the college-bound track. That still burns me, all these decades later.
Unfortunately, in the US we are still struggling with inequality baked into educational and economic institutions. There is rising intolerance against increasing numbers of students from marginalized groups who have achieved some measure of academic and financial success, despite all of the machinations intended to prevent that. In an effort to ensure happiness is achievable for the privileged at the expense of “others,” our system supports connections and mediocrity over merit.
That’s good. My family still talks about the one who tried to talk my older brother out of college, despite his excellent grades and test scores. Fortunately, we were able to bypass that a**hole completely when it was my turn to get his “advice.” My brother went to Lehigh, and I went to Wellesley. We both made sure to drop by the school to encourage other kids as an FU to Mr. G.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have vocational education and encourage kids who are talented to pursue a trade. My other brother did just that. What concerns me is steering or forcing kids into following that path, regardless of their aptitude. That is what I saw far too often - students whose potential to learn was squandered by placing them in classes far below their ability. Once placed in those “tracks,” it was difficult or impossible for them get out.
Also, we have a system in trades involving unions. Barriers to membership for people from marginalized groups limits their ability to get those sweet, high-paying plumber gigs. So, a career of working harder for less pay awaits folks, too. If that leaves them unable to afford the cost of living or otherwise run afoul of the law, they’ll find themselves part of another industry that thrives on unhappiness for all except those getting the profits - the prison industry.
Absolutely. And, as you note, there are a whole lot of absolutely poisonous guidance counselors who decide for themselves that this kid is too dumb, too smart, too Black, too White, too other, to follow their dream, and has to be dissuaded at all costs. Fsck those people. Guidance Counselor, not Bully Counselor.
Right! This! And right now we have a system that pushed people into one or the other based not on their interests or talents, but on the class status.
A lot of this is driven by the right wing attack on the supposedly “radical” academy that is “undermining traditional values”… they just want less working class, Black people, and women to get college educations and make it a bastion of white men once again, because that’s how you replicate a racial ruling caste.
Which is crazy to me! Everyone would benefit from basic auto-mechanics class, but the idea that if you’re into reading or whatever, you couldn’t possible also be good with your hands!
And we know that’s precisely what is going to happen. Just look at the meltdown over CRT just because there were more Black americans going into history, law, and philosophy, and talking about issues of structural racism since the 70s, who ended up in the academy, teaching people that racism was a real thing that exists, and we should do something about it! Or women (of any race) talking about how women have been oppressed. They find it intolerable that we’re not just focusing on Great white men anymore (who, often were honestly not that great).
question apart from the economic 
system it supports.
