The Trump administration is on a mission to fight the stigma that comes with pursuing jobs that do not require four-year degrees.
On Tuesday, the president, along with Labor Secretary Acosta and his daughter Ivanka, visited southeastern Wisconsin as part of the White House’s Workforce Development Week. The group toured Waukesha County Technical College, highlighting the administration’s new efforts to funnel young workers into industries like trade and manufacturing.
In Wisconsin, there’s an opportunity to illustrate a key element of the so-called skills gap plaguing the workforce.
In 2015, I reported on numbers released by the University of Wisconsin- Madison, the state’s flagship institute of higher education, in an editorial for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Here’s what I wrote at the time:
According to an Oct. 7 article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “65% of recent graduates who are working full time have jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree.” Read another way, that means over a third of recent graduates of the College of Letters and Sciences (the liberal arts school) at Wisconsin’s premier public university are not working in jobs that require their degrees.
Even by midcareer, nearly one in four UW liberal arts graduates were in jobs that did not require a degree.
Nearly 36% of graduates working full time responded that their degrees were not required for their positions, with nearly 10% acknowledging their degrees were “irrelevant.”
That more than one-third of liberal arts graduates from the state’s top public school reported working in positions not requiring their costly degrees is absurd. Those numbers should strengthen calls for parents and educators to consider rerouting a portion of high school graduates to pursue different options.
Many of those graduates’ degrees will benefit them down the line. But at least a portion of that group may have been better off saving their tuition money.
At WCTC, where the president is set to tour facilities on Tuesday, 83 percent of employed 2015-2016 graduates are working in a job related to their training. Only one of the 11 respondents to the school’s survey of the 42 graduates from its apprenticeship program was employed outside the trade in which they apprenticed.
Four-year degrees are obviously the best post-high school option for many American students. But for some, especially in particular regions of the country, steady work that generates a good paycheck is better pursued with two-year degrees, apprenticeships, or other training.
Our secondary education system needs to acknowledge that reality and work harder to direct students appropriately. Taking steps to encourage more students to enroll in apprenticeship programs and blue collar training, as the White House appears to be doing, is a solution that’s more practical than partisan.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
