By Te-Ping Chen | Photographs by Philip Cheung for The Wall Street Journal 

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. 

Though he’d originally figured he’d go to college, the route began to feel less appealing during the pandemic, when he watched his parents—both tech workers—gaze at their computers all day and realized he didn’t like the idea of spending his life seated before a screen.

After reading up on the skilled trades, he settled on welding. “I thought it was cool because it had a lot of fire,” says Burgess, who’s now helping install pipes for a new hospital in San Diego.

A secure job track and the prospect of steadily growing earnings didn’t hurt either. After five years at the profession, he says he expects to be making a six-figure annual income, based on what he sees others around him making.

“It feels good at the end of the day, I’m physically doing something and there’s a sense of completion,” he says.

Burgess says he didn’t want to spend his life seated behind a computer screen. A detail of a pipe being worked on at the Universal Technical Institute.

Worker shortage

A shortage of skilled tradespeople, brought on as older electricians, plumbers and welders retire, is driving up the cost of labor, as many sticker-shocked homeowners embarking on repairs and renovations in recent years have found. The median pay for new construction hires rose 5.1% to $48,089 last year. By contrast, new hires in professional services earned an annual $39,520, up 2.7% from 2022, according to data from payroll-services provider ADP. That’s the fourth year that median annual pay for new construction hires has eclipsed earnings for new hires in both the professional services and information sectors—such as accountants or IT maintenance workers—ADP says.

Demand for trade apprenticeships, which let students combine work experience with a course of study often paid for by employers, has boomed lately. In a survey of high school and college-age people by software company Jobber last year, 75% said they would be interested in vocational schools offering paid, on-the-job training.

The rise of generative AI is changing the career calculus for some young people. The majority of respondents Jobber surveyed said they thought blue-collar jobs offered better job security than white-collar ones, given the growth of AI. 

Nearly 80% of respondents in Jobber’s survey said their parents wanted them to go to college. Professions dominated by college-educated workers generally earn more over time. Professional and business services workers, for example, make a median $78,500 compared with $69,200 in construction, according to ADP.  “I’ll be honest, it took me a little bit mentally to get on board,” says Burgess’s mother, Lisa Hopkins, who studied drama and art history before obtaining an MBA. She never had much exposure to the trades, but she says she’s thrilled her son has found something he loves with good prospects: “He’s already thinking, ‘I want to buy my first house by the time I’m 24. I don’t have any debt, I’m off to the races.’” 

Students practice hands-on skills during classes at the Universal Technical Institute. Pay for skilled trades has risen.

New robotic equipment

Steve Schneider, a counselor at a high school in Sheboygan, Wis., says that for years, students called the vocational education wing “greaser hall,” believing mostly ne’er-do-wells and troublemakers wound up there. The fact that it was home to outdated wood and metalworking equipment didn’t help its appeal. 

In recent years, though, businesses have raised funds and donated new equipment, including robotic arms, he says, adding that those classrooms now sit at the building’s main entrance. 

“There’s still a presumption that four-year college is the gold standard, but it doesn’t take as much work to get people to buy into the viability of other options,” says Schneider.

Students practice hands-on skills during classes at the Universal Technical Institute. Pay for skilled trades has risen.

Those in the industry are generally positive about their careers: A survey last year of skilled workers by home services site Thumbtack found that 94% would encourage their own kids or family members to pursue similar occupations.

While the skilled trades may be lucrative, they can take a harsh physical toll. In some markets, graduates have had trouble landing positions as new construction has slowed. Most employers prefer to hire those with experience, says Curt Nordal, a Riverside, Calif.-based recruiter specializing in commercial HVAC roles. 

Alezet Valerio, 18, started at a construction site in Phoenix nine months ago, right after graduating high school. She was surprised when, in addition to learning how to hang drywall, her supervisors also began training her to run a robot that assists with site layout. 

“It’s not at all what I was expecting,” says Valerio, who now spends a couple of days a week overseeing the robot’s work, making $24 an hour. The job can be exhausting—she rises at 4:30 a.m. every day to get on site before 6 a.m.—but she says she loves the feeling of getting to build something. She’s now planning to get a degree in construction management.

“I’m building skyscrapers and building a career out of it,” she says. 

In Pennsylvania, the trades have seen an influx of workers since the pandemic, says Michael McGraw, executive director of the Pennsylvania Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors Association. In the southeastern part of the state, where McGraw is based, someone graduating five years ago from the trade schools the association runs might have made $35,000 a year; these days it is closer to $60,000, he says. Enrollment in the association’s trade schools—where tuition costs around $3,000 a year—has risen across the board.

“After Covid, it seemed a lot of people realized the trades are a life-sustaining career path,” he says. As other businesses shut down then, more people realized that the skilled trades were reliable, well-paying paths that weren’t going away, he says. 

Michael Krupnicki, president of the American Welding Society, has toured two dozen trade schools in the past year, many of which he says are experiencing full enrollment in their welding programs, as is the case with the school he owns in upstate New York. Federal and state initiatives to encourage more training for students have helped spur interest, he says. So has the work of people like Mike Rowe, host of the Discovery Channel series “Dirty Jobs,” which put a spotlight on blue-collar work.

“It’s not a crisis story like it was a few years ago,” says Krupnicki, of the industry’s talent shortage. “The pendulum swing has happened hard and fast in the last five years.” 

A new study by labor analytics firm Burning Glass Institute and Strada Education Foundation shows that roughly half of college graduates end up in jobs where bachelor degrees aren’t needed, and many high-school graduates say they’re disinclined to take on college debt.

“Not everyone needs a degree, and it takes the value out of a degree if everyone has it,” says George Belcher, 18, a senior in Houston. Belcher long assumed he’d go to college, but as a junior, he grew curious about life in the oil industry, where his father works in government relations. This fall, he’ll enroll in trade school at a cost of $14,000 for a two-year degree, and plans to eventually work on an offshore oil rig. “I love the ocean,” he says. He also likes the idea of working for weeks, then resting for weeks, a schedule typical with such roles.

Tripled applications

At energy service company Lantern Energy, in Glastonbury, Conn., CEO Peter Callan says in the past year, he has seen more people applying for technician jobs who were on a college track and decided it wasn’t ultimately for them. The overall number of applications the company receives has roughly tripled in the past five years. 

These days, the recruitment challenge he faces isn’t a lack of workers, but finding quality ones. Current applicants tend to exhibit fewer soft skills, such as communication skills, and higher turnover than their predecessors, he says.

Ashley Brown, an Ohio-based lead executive recruiter with Rust Belt Recruiting, which specializes in skilled-trade recruitment, says that over the past year and a half, it has become easier to fill roles such as machinists, welders and certain maintenance technicians. 

“Supply is catching up with demand,” she says.

The number of carpenters in the U.S. grew over the past decade, while their median age fell from 42.2 to 40.9. The same was true for electricians, whose ranks grew by 229,000 workers, even as their median age fell by 2.9 years, according to federal data. Other skilled trade occupations, such as plumbing and HVAC workers, have also trended younger. 

At this point, Brown says, the hardest skilled-trade jobs to fill are those that require college degrees—controls engineers, for example, a role that requires production knowledge, as well as robotics programming skills—along with rich practical experience.  “There are college kids coming out with business degrees and wanting to go into plant management,” she says. “But the people we’re going to hire [in many cases] are the ones that have worked 20 years and already know everything about the business.” 

Some in Gen Z say they’re drawn to the skilled trades because of their entrepreneurial potential. Colby Dell, 19, is attending trade school for automotive repair, with plans to launch his own mobile detailing company, one he wants to eventually expand into custom body work. 

“I always thought it was a hobby,” he says of his love of cars. “Looking into these vocational schools, I realized it was a dream I could really pursue.”

His father Terry Dell, a Spokane, Wash.-based global technical sales director, says he’s thrilled by his son’s decision and is investing money he would have spent on college tuition into his son’s company. He plans to do the same with Colby’s younger brother, who has also lately expressed interest in attending trade school and opening his own welding business, and believes they both have significant potential.

“I expect them to outearn me someday,” he says.

THE REVIEW | OPINION

By Michael D. Smith

It’s common knowledge that Americans are losing confidence in higher education. Even so, the numbers that Gallup reported this summer were sobering. Only 36 percent of Americans, Gallup found, have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher ed. That’s down from 57 percent in 2015 — a drop of more than 20 percentage points in just eight years.

These findings are no anomaly. Last month The Chronicle released the results of a national survey in which fewer than a third of respondents reported believing that “colleges are doing an excellent or very good job of leveling the playing field for success in society.” An astounding 86 percent of respondents reported believing that trade school is “about the same” as or “better” than college.The journalist Paul Tough recently summed up some of the dispiriting trends in The New York Times Magazine. The percentage of young adults who believe a college degree is very important fell from 74 percent in 2013 to 41 percent in 2019. The number of students enrolled in college has fallen from more than 18 million in 2010 to less than 15.5 million as of 2021. And roughly half of American parents today, Tough noted, would prefer that their children not enroll in a traditional four-year college.

These should be terrifying data points for those of us who work in higher education — our compact with the public has been broken. But many of us have shrugged off the looming threat. Deep down, many of us think the numbers are skewed — whether by Republicans (they’re biased against us!), people without college degrees (they’re ignorant!), or an increasingly polarized population (the other side is nuts!). In short, it’s not our fault.

This is wishful thinking. Yes, the 2015-2023 drop in trust among Republicans in the Gallup poll was large (37 percent), but it was significant among Democrats too (9 percent). And yes, the drop in confidence among respondents without a college degree was large (25 percent), but it wasn’t much larger than the drop among those with postgraduate degrees (17 percent). As for the idea that political polarization is to blame, the data doesn’t bear this out. Gallup surveys trust in over a dozen different American institutions. While trust in higher education fell 21 percent, the others fell, on average, by around just 5 percent. As far as the public is concerned, there’s something uniquely wrong with higher education.

There’s a more reasonable, if less guilt-assuaging, interpretation of this polling: Americans are waking up to the fact that our system of higher education is broken. The evidence is there for all to see. Student-loan debt increased from $1.3 trillion in 2015 to over $1.7 trillion this year. Nearly a third of borrowers have debt but no degree. The “wealth premium” associated with earning a degree has collapsed. A major study led by the Harvard economist Raj Chetty recently found that highly selective private colleges are amplifying “the persistence of privilege across generations.” No wonder that David Brooks, in a New York Times opinion column, recently called admissions “one of the truly destructive institutions in American society.”

I fear that we in the academy are willfully ignoring this problem. Bring up student-loan debt and you’ll hear that it’s the government’s fault. Bring up online learning and you’ll hear that it is — and always will be — inferior to in-person education. Bring up exclusionary admissions practices and you’ll hear something close to, “Well, the poor can attend community colleges.”

On one hand, our defensiveness is natural. Change is hard, and technological change that risks making traditional parts of our sector obsolete is even harder. “A professor must have an incentive to adopt new technology,” a tenured colleague recently told me regarding online learning. “Innovation adoption will occur one funeral at a time.”

But while our defense of the status quo is understandable, maybe we should ask whether it’s ethical, given what we know about the injustice inherent in our current system. I believe a happier future for all involved — faculty, administrators, and students — is within reach, but requires we stop reflexively protecting our deeply flawed system. How can we do that? We could start by embracing three fundamental principles.

1. Digitization will change higher education.

I know, I know, you’ve heard it all before. MOOCs and other online-learning technologies were supposed to disrupt everything in higher ed — and yet here we are, 10 years later, and nothing much has changed. Experts said disruption would happen, it hasn’t, and therefore it never will. Quod erat demonstrandum.

I don’t buy the last step in that proof, and here’s why. Our model of higher education has traditionally depended on controlling three scarcities: of access (class size, selectivity), of instruction (faculty experts, educational support), and of outcome (university degrees, university reputations). MOOCs and other online technologies created abundance in access and instruction, which is why they seemed poised to disrupt everything — but they didn’t create abundance in outcomes. Today you can take as many online courses as you want, but they still don’t give you credentials that are anywhere near as valuable as a four-year degree. Hence, no major disruption.

But this is starting to change. A growing number of third-party companies and organizations, among them Google, Amazon, and LinkedIn, now offer online programs that allow students (at their own pace, on their own schedule, and at low cost) to earn microcredentials that certify their proficiency in specific skills. Some, like Kaggle, Topcoder, and CrowdAI are making a name for themselves as places where companies can find highly trained, top-quality data scientists and coders. 

Traditional higher education tends to overlook or dismiss these “inferior” programs. But it would be foolish to deny that they have enormous potential and are gathering steam as a real alternative. Consider the case of IBM, which for many years required college degrees for all of its jobs. Recently, to avoid introducing unintentional bias into its hiring practices, the company de-emphasized college credentials and now something like 50 percent of its job openings don’t require a four-year degree. IBM’s new, nondegreed hires have turned out to be every bit as qualified and productive as those with degrees, and many come from populations traditionally underrepresented in both higher education and the skilled work force. Google has de-emphasized job applicants’ college GPAs and now relies on a series of practical tests and behavioral interviews in its hiring, a shift that has led it to employ substantially more people without college degrees.

2. We should want to embrace this change.

You could look at those shifts in the job market and argue they’re no big deal, or at least that they won’t impact the market power of your institution. And that might be true for now. But there’s an even stronger argument for change: If we care even half as much about social justice as we say we do, we should desperately want to upend the system. 

Raj Chetty’s research tells us that children born into the top 1 percent of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to gain access to an elite college than students born into the bottom 20 percent of income. I’m trained as an economist, which means I believe in the efficient allocation of scarce resources, among them seats at selective universities. If we genuinely believe that rich kids just happen to be 77 times more likely to be capable of an elite education than poor kids are, then sure, the system is working just fine. But if we don’t believe that — and I don’t know anyone who does — then we have to admit that there’s something deeply wrong with higher education.

This is the point where many of my colleagues tell me that we have plenty of decent, affordable, nonselective universities, many of which are open access. But that’s only a fix if the degrees these nonselective institutions grant are as valuable as those from highly selective universities — and we know they aren’t.

Another point of resistance I hear frequently is that this is all the government’s fault. If we could just get more Democrats elected to public office, the theory goes, then we’d get all the money we need to create more opportunities for poor students to attend our pricey colleges. I just don’t buy this idea. These injustices are systemic, and we aren’t going to be able to solve them from within a broken system. What we need is a low-cost, high-quality alternative.

3. We have a way to embrace this change.

For many years my colleague Rahul Telang and I have studied technological change in the entertainment industry. We’ve been impressed by the degree to which major music labels and major studios, for example, have been able to respond successfully to the past couple of decades of disruptive technological change. They’ve proceeded in fits and starts, and it hasn’t always been easy, but they’ve managed to change their business models and organizational structures in the face of that change. Their success is something that we in higher education can learn from.

Why have the major labels and studios had so much success? I think it’s because they have such a strong sense of their mission. When digital disruption initially hit the music industry a couple of decades ago, leaders in the industry opposed it, because they (rightly) saw it as a threat to their model, which was selling shiny plastic discs at $20 a pop. But at some point they realized that their model was different from their mission, which was creating great entertainment and getting that entertainment in front of an audience. And that new perspective changed everything, because they realized that new technologies supported their mission, even if they threatened their old model.

Many of my colleagues oppose online learning because they see it as a threat to our model of education. And they’re right — it is. But they’re not thinking about our mission, which is creating opportunities for as many students as possible to discover and develop their unique talents, so that they can use those talents to make a difference in the world. If new technologies disrupt our old way of doing things but allow us to advance our mission, then I say so be it.

Online education today has the potential to do just that. Why? Because it’s just as easy for a professor to teach an hourlong class to a thousand students as it is for her to teach a class of 10. This translates to lower costs. A case in point: Between 2011 and 2021, when colleges on average raised tuition by 40 percent (measured in current dollars), Southern New Hampshire University kept the cost of its online-degree program exactly the same: $10,000 per year.

SNHU isn’t for everybody. But it’s a hugely valuable resource for students who traditionally haven’t been well-served by our system of higher education, or who have been walled out of it altogether. There are certainly a lot of students who are taking advantage of what SNHU offers. The institution currently has over 3,000 on-campus students and over 170,000 online students.

And SNHU isn’t alone. Similar programs include Arizona State’s online bachelor’s degrees, Georgia Tech’s online master’s in computer science, and Golden Gate University’s partnership with Outlier.org to deliver online associate degrees. You can sneer all you want at the “inferiority” of these programs, but together they’re educating tens of thousands of students each year, many of whom wouldn’t have been able to attend or afford a traditional college.

For a long time, society was willing to look past the financial expense and moral injustice of our traditional model of higher education because it didn’t have any good alternatives. Today’s online learning platforms change that. We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a more open, flexible, inclusive, and lower-priced system that can scale to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of capable students who are being left behind. If we embrace that opportunity, just think how much value we might create for those students — and how much value those students, in turn, might create for society.

A version of this article appeared in the October 27, 2023, issue.