Go to a Trade School Online or College Instead?

Sto­ries like this warm my cyn­i­cal heart, but I fear that Urban Prep Char­ter Acad­emy is based on a faulty premise and that more peo­ple should look into a trade-school online instead:

Chicago’s Urban Prep Char­ter Acad­emy has a mis­sion — for its stu­dents to grad­u­ate and suc­ceed in col­lege. Now, for the first grad­u­at­ing class at the high school, it’s mis­sion accomplished.

All 107 seniors were accepted to a four-year col­lege, a sig­nif­i­cant accom­plish­ment con­sid­er­ing they are from one of the tough­est neigh­bor­hoods on the South Side of Chicago…

Just four years ago, when King started the school, only 4 per­cent of the class was read­ing at grade level.

So how did they over­come the odds? King cre­ated a school that excused noth­ing — and expected everything.

It’s nice to see stu­dents suc­ceed­ing despite all odds. But I won­der whether their future degrees (assum­ing they grad­u­ate) will pro­vide them with ade­quate employ­ment in this econ­omy, espe­cially if they need to take out loans for those degrees.

The fact that the mea­sure of suc­cess at the Urban Prep Char­ter Acad­emy is the num­ber of stu­dents who were accepted into a four-year col­lege is impor­tant to note itself. My gen­er­a­tion — and likely the one before and after mine — were told one thing through­out our adult lives: You need to go to col­lege to become successful!

But as the Atlantic Monthly noted recently in an arti­cle on the long-term effects of reces­sion, a uni­ver­sity degree (or sev­eral) is no longer a guar­an­tee of suc­cess — or even stability:

In this reces­sion, the term funem­ploy­ment has gained some cur­rency among sin­gle 20-somethings, prompt­ing a small raft of youth-culture sto­ries in the Los Ange­les Times and San Fran­cisco Weekly, on Gawker, and in other venues.

Most of the peo­ple inter­viewed in these sto­ries seem merely to be try­ing to stay pos­i­tive and make the best of a bad sit­u­a­tion. They note that it’s a good time to reeval­u­ate career choices; that since job­less­ness is now so com­mon among their peers, it has lost much of its stigma; and that since they don’t have mort­gages or kids, they have flex­i­bil­ity, and in this respect, they are lucky. All of this sounds sen­si­ble enough—it is intu­itive to think that youth will be spared the worst of the recession’s scars.

But in fact a whole gen­er­a­tion of young adults is likely to see its life chances per­ma­nently dimin­ished by this recession…

Five, 10, 15 years after grad­u­a­tion, after untold pro­mo­tions and career changes span­ning booms and busts, the unlucky grad­u­ates [dur­ing past reces­sions] never closed the gap.

The United States has not been the vic­tim of high-tech and hous­ing bub­bles alone — the credit and uni­ver­sity ones are explod­ing as well. The last twenty to thirty years of pros­per­ity were largely based on eco­nomic smoke and mir­rors. More credit and debt was needed to con­tinue to fuel eco­nomic growth as the years increased, and now the house of cards is col­laps­ing. As the credit mar­kets con­tinue to con­tract over the long term as the Great Reces­sion con­tin­ues, more and more stu­dents will real­ize that pay­ing $160,000 in future debt for a degree in his­tory at a pri­vate uni­ver­sity is a fool’s errand.

But in the past — espe­cially before tuition sky­rock­eted in the 1990s — get­ting a four-year degree made sense. No mat­ter if a per­son stud­ied inter­pre­tive dance or eighteenth-century Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture, it was usu­ally easy to get that sign of sta­tus and suc­cess — sit­ting in middle-management cubicle-hell for forty hours a week at least with a retire­ment plan and health insur­ance included.

But not any more. As a result of glob­al­iza­tion, U.S. com­pa­nies no longer need peo­ple with pieces of paper to fill seats and shuf­fle paper. Indi­ans can do that for a lot cheaper. The ques­tion is no longer, “What did you study?” It is, “What value do you offer that an Indian does not?” Sud­denly, that his­tory degree does not look so valu­able. And our guid­ance coun­selors for­got to tell us that.

This real­ity is finally trick­ling down and increas­ing the demand for a trade-school edu­ca­tion through­out the United States:

One fast-growing Amer­i­can indus­try has become a con­spic­u­ous ben­e­fi­ciary of the reces­sion: for-profit col­leges and trade schools.

At insti­tu­tions that train stu­dents for careers in areas like health care, com­put­ers and food ser­vice, enroll­ments are soar­ing as peo­ple anx­ious about weak job prospects bor­row aggres­sively to pay tuition that can exceed $30,000 a year.

(Although, as the New York Times arti­cle notes, some for-profit schools may be act­ing fishy.) As more young peo­ple will undoubt­edly real­ize, the demand for skilled trades­men is increas­ing:

The U.S. Depart­ment of Labor is pre­dict­ing a labor short­age of more than 35 mil­lion work­ers over the next 30 years. It also pre­dicts that between 2010 and 2020, 70 mil­lion Amer­i­cans will retire and in 2018, 63 per­cent of our work­force will require some col­lege or addi­tional skilled training…

An appren­tice­ship pro­gram is often called the “Other Four-Year Degree” because of the length and rigor and knowl­edge needed to be an elec­tri­cian or tool maker. Appren­tice pro­grams include 8,000 to 10,000 on-the-job train­ing hours and are com­ple­mented by 576 to 1,100 class­room hours. The hard­est part for many is that in addi­tion to the on-the-job train­ing, an appren­tice will work 40 hours a week or more and attend class at least six to eight hours per week for four to five years. To earn while you learn and to become an appren­tice, one has to be com­mit­ted, moti­vated, have the mechan­i­cal apti­tude and have a strong work ethic.

Detroit’s pub­lic high schools, are also offer­ing job-training place­ments at Wal-Mart.

The labor par­a­digm has changed. The peo­ple at the top — the lead­ers, the inno­va­tors, the start-up founders, and the CEOs will con­tinue to do well. Blue-collar trades­man at the bot­tom will also suc­ceed because their jobs are needed, and they can­not be out­sourced. The giant part in the cen­ter — those college-educated peo­ple who thought they would have safe, middle-class, paper-pushing jobs — are suf­fer­ing the most because their posi­tions are less impor­tant and able to be sent off­shore. As I wrote in an essay on glob­al­iza­tion, the United States has filed to reori­ent its entire soci­ety, infra­struc­ture, and edu­ca­tional sys­tem to keep the coun­try competitive.

Rather than merely encour­age all stu­dents to attend col­lege out of ide­al­is­tic (and clas­sist) moti­va­tions, par­ents and guid­ance coun­selors should keep the future labor mar­ket in mind. After not every­one should go to col­lege — not every­one has an inter­est or abil­ity to read Plato’s “Repub­lic,” just as not every­one has the inter­est or abil­ity put together a car from all the parts.

Imag­ine that there is a city. In the city, there is a demand for two doc­tors, two wait­ers, and two plumbers. If the six teenagers in the city all go to med­ical school, the city will end up with two doc­tors — and two wait­ers and two plumbers with M.D.s. The four non-doctors will have fallen for an unre­al­is­tic lie — and be bur­dened with student-loan debts that they will likely never pay off.

So, what is the solu­tion? Here are some prac­ti­cal steps:

• Teach­ers, par­ents, and guid­ance coun­selors: Stop insist­ing that every­one go to col­lege. Eval­u­ate a teenager’s inter­ests and ability’s hon­estly and in light of the future labor market.
• Human-resources staffers: Stop reward­ing appli­cants for hav­ing an over­priced piece of paper stat­ing that the per­son knows a lot about some­thing that is irrel­e­vant to the job. If some­one is bet­ter qual­i­fied but only grad­u­ated from high school, hire him instead.
• Uni­ver­si­ties: Stop telling prospec­tive stu­dents that a col­lege degree always pays for itself many times over. It’s a lie, espe­cially when you raise prices each year by more than the rate of infla­tion. Stop lying that you must tuition and fees to match expenses when you’re sit­ting on enti­tle­ments of mil­lions or bil­lions of dol­lars that are just sit­ting there.
• Col­lege seniors: Uni­ver­si­ties, student-loan enti­ties, and credit-card com­pa­nies only see you as a dol­lar sign. If you’re unsure what you want to do, take a year off after high school. Vol­un­teer. Travel. Do a tour in the mil­i­tary. Work, and save money. Think before you make such an impor­tant — and expen­sive — decision.
• Every­one: Stop believ­ing that peo­ple who have col­lege degrees and white-collar jobs are inher­ently bet­ter than those who work blue-collar jobs. It’s a clas­sist lie.

To meet the chal­lenges ahead, the United States is going to need to think a lot differently.

Related: The Upcom­ing Gen­er­a­tional War and Why My Gen­er­a­tion is So Pissed Off.