How Many High-Paying Jobs Don't Need a College Degree?
Thousands of jobs sit empty.
Ironworkers for example are in high demand and it still is: the sector is growing 4% annually, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Ironworkers earn, on average, $27.48 per hour, or $57,160 per year, plus benefits.
Raising alarms
While a shortage of workers pushes wages higher in the skilled trades, the financial return from a bachelor's degree is softening, even as the price, and the average debt into which it plunges students, remain high.
But high school graduates have been so effectively encouraged to get a bachelor's that high-paid jobs requiring shorter and less expensive training are going unfilled. This affects those students and also poses a real threat to the economy.
The Washington State Auditor found in 2017 that good jobs in the skilled trades were going begging because students are being almost universally steered to bachelor's degrees. Recent labor statistics suggest that's still the case – in Washington State and around the country.
Yet, nationwide, nearly three out of 10 high school grads who go to four-year public universities haven't earned degrees within six years, the most recent figures from the National Student Clearinghouse show. At four-year private colleges, that number is nearly one in five.
Today, nearly 90% of construction companies nationwide are having trouble finding qualified workers, according to the Associated General Contractors of America; in Washington, the proportion is 88%. Ironworkers remain in particularly short supply, along with drywall installers and sheet metal workers. Median wages for construction jobs are higher than the median pay for all jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
In all, some 30 million jobs in the United States that pay an average of $55,000 per year don't require bachelor's degrees, according to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce.
Yet the march to bachelor's degrees continues. And while people who get them are more likely to be employed and make more money than those who don't, that premium appears to be softening; their inflation-adjusted median earnings were lower in 2018, the most recent year for which the figure is available, than in 2010.
It's not that finding a job in the trades, or even manufacturing, means needing no education after high school. Most regulators and employers require certificates, certifications or associate degrees. But those cost less and take less time than earning a bachelor's degree.
Tuition and fees for in-state students to attend a community or technical college in Washington State, for example, came to less than half the cost last year of a four-year public university, and less than a fifth of the price of attending the cheapest private four-year college.
Washington is not the only state nudging students into education for the trades. At least 39 states have taken steps to encourage career and technical education, and many have increased funding for it, a 2017 Brookings Institution review found.
At the federal level, legislation introduced in Congress in January would make some short-term workforce programs eligible for federal Pell Grants. "For too long, the college-for-all mentality drove Americans toward expensive and often ineffective education pathways," its sponsors said. "As our country stares down a historic worker shortage, fewer Americans are getting the skills they need to be successful."
The branding issue
Money isn't the only issue, advocates for career and technical education say. An even bigger challenge is convincing parents that it leads to good jobs.
"They remember 'voc-ed' from when they were in high school, which is not necessarily what they aspire to for their own kids," Kreamer said. Added Kairie Pierce, apprenticeship and college director for the Washington State Labor Council of the AFL-CIO: "It sort of has this connotation of being a dirty job. 'It's hard work — I want something better for my son or daughter.' "
Matthew Dickinson, 21, asks a classmate for help as they rebuild an automatic transmission back in 2018 in a class at the Lake Washington Institute of Technology.
The Lake Washington Institute of Technology, about 20 miles from Seattle, changed its name from Lake Washington Technical College, to avoid being stereotyped as a vocational school.
These perceptions fuel the worry that, if students are urged as early as the seventh grade to consider the trades, then low-income, first-generation students, and students of color will be channeled into blue-collar jobs while wealthier and white classmates are pushed by their parents to get bachelor's degrees.
In a quest for prestige and rankings, and to bolster real-estate values, high schools also like to emphasize the number of their graduates who go on to four-year colleges and universities.
It’s time for people to start listening to what Mike Rowe has been saying for years.
