Education in trades builds momentum
Faltering belief in four-year degrees, high demand for skills leading more students to once-maligned programs
MEDIA, Pa. — Young men in jackets and ties walk along tidy walkways that connect the red brick buildings of the 220-acre campus of Williamson College of the Trades.
They wake up around 6 each morning, turn out for inspection, attend a morning assembly, then spend full days doing coursework and in shop, alternating at chores in the kitchen and tending the buildings and grounds. Lights out is strictly at 10:30 p.m.
The college was established in 1888 by a wealthy but frugal dry-goods merchant to train young men as blacksmiths, bricklayers, harness-makers, wheelwrights and other kinds of tradesmen “so they may be able to support themselves by the labor of their own hands.”
Now, its original endowment having grown to $128 million, it enrolls approximately 265 mostly low-income men who spend three years, at no cost to themselves, earning associate’s degrees in subjects including carpentry, masonry, machine tooling and power plant technology.
“It’s old-school,” said Michael Rounds, Williamson’s president, acknowledging it’s a throwback and vastly different from the community colleges and union apprenticeships in which many people today get training to enter these extremely high-demand fields.
But education for the skilled trades appears to be returning to fashion, according to enrollment trends, survey data and other signals.
“If you look at where the jobs are, the sweet spot is an associate’s degree with a focus on the trades,” said Rounds.
One trend reviving interest in education in the trades appears to be growing doubt among high school students and those changing careers about the value of a four-year college degree. The proportion of high-schoolers who are considering a four-year education has plummeted from 71 percent to 48 percent since the start of coronavirus pandemic, according to a survey by the ECMC Group, a nonprofit student loan guaranty agency that also operates career schools.
“That was something that was gaining momentum and traction even before the pandemic,” said ECMC Group president and CEO Jeremy Wheaton.
Meanwhile, Americans can see firsthand the labor shortages in fields such as construction, transportation and logistics, along with rising pay for those kinds of jobs and the lower debt and shorter training timetables.
“Especially with the younger generation, time matters. Money matters, but time matters, as well,” said Chad Wilson, superintendent at the East Valley Institute of Technology in Arizona, or EVIT.
Trades have also gotten higher levels of respect as labor shortages underscore their importance.
“These are deemed critical infrastructure,” said Mike Pressendo, chief marketing and strategy officer at the TechForce Foundation, which encourages students to become transportation technicians. And now, he said, “employers are sweetening the packages” for recruits, with higher pay, better benefits, tool allowances and signing bonuses.
At a job fair at Williamson in November, 114 employers attended, outnumbering the graduating seniors.
David McCann took college courses while in high school and went to a community college after that, paying out of pocket to avoid student loan debt. But “it would have taken such a long time to get a degree. It wasn’t worth it,” he said.
College “may be useful if you want to be a doctor, if you want to be a lawyer, if you want to be a nurse. But I wanted to work with my hands,” said McCann, who already runs his own landscaping company with a friend on weekends and in the summers and plans to do that full time when he graduates Williamson.
Parents encourage four-year college educations, too. In Aaron Tallman’s hometown in the coal-mining region of Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill County, “there was always a, ‘You should do better than we did’ mentality.” But “why would I take the four years and go into a field I don’t know anything about, spend the money, spend the time, to go into something where there’s not even any demand?”