College-Career Connections
In recent years, the public opinion pendulum has swung hard against the “College for All” mindset the country embraced in the Bush-Obama era (see “Career and Technical Education for All,” What Next, Winter 2025). Young people are getting the message that the college wage premium mainly flows to the two-thirds of students who actually graduate, and that certain majors and schools aren’t worth all that much more than a high school diploma. As a new paper by Joshua Goodman and Joseph Winkelmann illustrates, students who likely would have struggled academically in college are increasingly, and wisely, choosing to work instead.
Our populist era has produced a lot of nonsense, but one positive aspect is a newfound respect for people who work in the skilled trades and other fields that don’t require four-year degrees. While that shift should certainly make higher education administrators nervous, it need not be an existential threat—if leaders are willing to think creatively.
Specifically, how about creating residential colleges that focus on the trades? Or why not expand the offerings of four-year colleges and universities to include career and technical training, with programs that result in two-year degrees or even certificates as part of their offerings?
The conventional wisdom is that few students would choose such programs because they would be more expensive than training locally and living at home. That might be true. But cost is only one factor for young people making decisions about what they want to do with their lives after high school. And there are plenty of families with the means to pay for room and board.
America is an extraordinarily rich country, with a third of families making $150,000 or more, and most in this upper-middle-class category aspire to send their sons and daughters off to college. But some of those children are either not interested in traditional academic programs or not particularly well suited for them. Those who go to college anyway often end up dropping out for lack of academic preparation or motivation—which means starting their life feeling like a failure, back home in their childhood bedrooms or parents’ basements.
What if these kids had another option—namely, a traditional college experience, with football games and all the rest, but to study a trade instead of history, business, or anthropology? In some places, these programs already exist—and they’re growing.
