College is not the only golden ticket to a successful future. It is not the one-size-fits-all approach it’s asserted as. The trades have been viewed as a path for those who are less intelligent than people who go to college. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as most trades like construction, automotive tech and being a lineman require a lot of complex math. It’s time for this lie to meet its long overdue grave.
Trade programs, on top of offering a vastly shorter time to complete, also offer better pay for people right after finishing schooling. Trades have an average starting salary of $40,000 – $60,000 right out of high school. It takes people pursuing college degrees four years to start making relatively the same amount of pay.
“I’ve had a sense that kids, when they graduate from high school, they don’t know what they want to do, their generic answer is college, but they don’t even know what they want to do in college. And so trying to cast a vision of getting a more specific reason, why am I going to college?” Ryan Beidler, the CTE Construction Technology teacher, said.
Going after a college degree would also leave you with much more debt. A trade program will usually leave you with only $5,000 to $20,000 of debt compared to the monstrous $40,000 to $150,000 accumulated due to college.
“(Beidler’s former students) found River City milling company… and then I had another young man go to lineman School … and he just got hired at Roseville electric, and he’s making something like $84,000 a year,” Beidler said.
Trades also better serve those who feel the monotony of going to school or work and just sitting there for hours. The trades allow those who are happier working with their hands to get up and use all their extra energy with a project that requires a great deal of exertion. Being able to see a finished project right in front of you gives an overwhelming feeling of accomplishment.
“There’s so many kids that are maybe not necessarily disconnected to the curriculums that are at school, but they need to make connections between the curriculum and other things that work with their hands,” Beidler said.
For years college has been referred to as a “golden ticket” to a successful future, however more and more people have begun to leave the 4 year colleges behind and go to trade schools instead. Since 2010 college enrollment has dropped by over 10% where it peaked at 21.02 million people. While overall in the pre- COVID years of 2017-2020 the number of enrolled students in trade programs had dropped by 2.3%, however after COVID, the enrollment rose by 4.9% from 2020 through 2023.
It’s important that with what people do in life they end up happy and not just a drone in the workforce. The ability to have another option that can be in some cases better for people is crucial because people are so vastly different from each other there is no one size fits all solution.
