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.
More people in trades isn’t a solution, it’s a critical need. It was getting to the point there for a while where you couldn’t find a qualified tradesperson to do HVAC/Plumbing/Electrical work who didn’t have a 6 month backlog for love or money, and there were more specialized trades which very quietly were in danger of not having enough people to apprentice up the next generation. There’s a correction there that needed to happen, and it’s a good thing for everyone that it did.
We absolutely need more people with trade education, but we also need more people with well rounded liberal arts educations who are able to understand and interpret things like literature, history, statistics, and philosophical/logical arguments, people who are able to engage with sets of information outside of their professional expertise and separate cogent arguments from bullshit. Both of these things are essential to having a society of truly free citizens, but only the former has a tangible economic consequence under our system that will kick in with a clear enough cause and effect relationship to prompt policy changes like this. Without the latter we’ll end up with a dumber and dumber society than can’t talk to each other and ends up wasting all their energy yelling at each other on social media instead of organizing effectively for the world we deserve.
The solution to this is to bring back paid apprenticeships, like what existed up until the early 1980s.