Some Thoughts On The Trades

I have worked in the field of higher education for the past twelve years. Like most people in the admissions and enrollment management field, I fell into it, transitioning out of social services and starting part time as a transcript processor and transfer credit evaluator at a community college, moving onto being a road warrior for undergraduate admissions, and for the past eight years have worked at the graduate level at a public institution. When I give admissions presentations, I talk about the "graduate wage premium"--that is, the ROI on investment when aggregated over the course of one's career earning potential. The institution where I work is reputable and competitive in terms of tuition rates. I don't feel like a used car salesman because the "product" I "sell" has value, which is nice. 

That being said, I fully believe not everyone should go to college. And that's perfectly okay. The skilled trades are a field I don't have much experience with personally, though my trajectory was set when I was 17 and I lost the battle with my father (I wanted to become a carpenter, he said I was going to the local state university). My parents are both college educated.

My neighbor across the street is a union carpenter in his mid-fifties. He hasn't been working much lately because of injuries, though he has been doing some side gigs after multiple surgeries and physical therapy. I also have a buddy who is a (non-union) electrician, who I was chatting with tonight. When I asked him, "what would you tell a kid who asked whether he should go to college or learn a trade?"

He said they should get some college, but that you can also make a good living in the trades. "It will be just that, though...a living." Meaning, you're going to work. "There's also a salary cap, unless you work for yourself." His father was a union electrician his whole life. "The pay is better, better wages, better retirement and benefits, but...you don't always work. A lot of times it's six (months) on, six off. You may be making much better wages, but there's always that possibility you're only working half the year. I do better than most electricians." But he's also had his shares of injury and joint replacements. He's 41, with 22 years in the field. "It takes its toll"

My kids can go to university for free if they choose to, so we have to take that into account when it comes to what they want to do and where their aptitudes lie. Community college in our area (if we didn't have that benefit) is also very affordable. It is an investment, of time and money. I've always told friends and people who ask that if you can, do the two years at cc and get your core and electives done, transfer to a four year and max out at 18 credits (you pay the same at the undergraduate level whether you are taking 12 or 18 credits). I graduated in three and a half years, taking a few summer classes at cc (my mom taught at a community college, so I could take them for free), and also maxing out my load during the academic year. The "college experience" today is overrated. If you can, commute and live at home. You have to be careful about student loans, but even if you do have to take them out, work your ass off to pay them off quickly. 

The joke of majoring in "Underwater Basket Weaving" or "Gender Studies" is a predictable joke, and not without merit. There are a lot of majors which are more indoctrination than education. But fields like accounting, engineering, statistics, computer science--these ain't that. But majors like English and Philosophy are not "useless." If you can learn to write, to reason, to think critically....these are transferrable skills. But again, this isn't everyone's cup of tea. If it is, and you can afford it or make it work, higher education may likely pay off for you in the long run.

Anyway, I digress. I found some interesting comments from various reddit threads that I thought were worth sharing. I don't share them to dissuade anyone from going into the trades. God knows we need them. But there are things you need to consider as well, that don't always get talked about: when your body gives out in your mid-forties, what are you going to do until you reach retirement age? Can you have a back up plan? What if you get injured, which is always a possibility?  What is the whole-picture of your total compensation? What if your industry gets outsourced? Can you retrain easily? Among other things. 

Here are the comments I found interesting, often coming from those in the trades themselves. I have nothing but respect for those in the skilled trades, but it's worth getting the whole picture. I share them without judgement, for consideration:

"Trades are notably evangelized by online "experts" who notably went to college and would never go into the trades themselves. The high wages promised are only obtained by the small subset who are able to start or acquire highly successful businesses (as opposed to the majority, who are employees or journeymen), continued employability is constantly threatened by minor changes in prevalent materials or equipment making skills obsolete, and retirement has to come early due to the strain trade work puts on one's body.

In short, people decide against going into the trades for the same reason they don't go into sports or entertainment, a knowledge that not everyone gets to be Clayton Kershaw or Beyonce and that even those two are on borrowed time.

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Maybe this is a good idea, but as someone who's dad was a plumber (who probably gave himself heart failure from having to work so damn hard to keep our house from being foreclosed on)* and who has himself worked with his hands until they bled, the blue collar LARPing so many Catholic intellectuals engage in really irritates me. They have no idea how privileged they are to be able to engage in manual labor (and pontificate about it) as a sort of hobby and they give no indication that they have any idea how hard life as a tradesman can be.**

*I think the best example of this was when he had a pacemaker put in on a Thursday and then was crawling around under people's houses on Monday, even though the doctors had told him he couldn't lift his arms above his chest because he might pull the leads out of his dying heart. He had to though, otherwise we wouldn't have eaten.

**Yes, I know being a tradesman is an important vocation and that college isn't for everyone. My complaint is only about the way certain Catholic intellectuals talk about manual labor.

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It's because reddit skews young.

It's very, very common for people between the age of 20 and 30 to question their career choices, to ask whether adulthood is what they expected (it usually isn't) and then whether adulthood could be different somehow. They're used to coming off of their adolescent and teen years where everything changed every few years, on a track, and when they first go into the open world without a track they question whether the track was the right on in the first place. It's a common quarter life crisis, and everyone deals with it in their own way.

Trades work allows for people to make money earlier with less up front commitment. Comparing a 25 year old with 5 years of work experience and no debt, versus a 25 year old with 2 years of work experience and six figures of debt, it's very easy to say "man college made that guy worse off."

But if you look at a longer time frame, people with college degrees tend to do better over time, because the income trajectory of college educated workers plateaus later and higher. Their credentials are also generally more marketable for switching industries mid-career, which gives them resilience against recessions and localized crashes, and allows them to jump onto the hot new industry. So somewhere around 30, most white-collar college degree holders pass up their blue-collar trades counterparts.

And then when health issues start kicking in, not necessarily from the job, but just growing old, blue collar workers find that they're not able to do the job as well. A car accident, a sports injury, or an ordinary slip and fall can take a blue collar worker out of work and put on disability coverage for a few weeks or months, whereas a white collar worker might just need an accommodation in the office. Throw in actual on-the-job injuries, or repetitive stress injuries, and you'll see that a lot of the older workers have to leave long before retirement age. And most of the time, disability insurance for blue collar workers comes through union CBAs, so non-union blue collar jobs actually bear a lot more risk of interrupted income. Through in the fact that a lot of the industries served by the trades are cyclical, and you might see that the typical tradesman spends more time unemployed between the ages of 20 and 40 than the typical office worker.

And so you might have former tradesmen who are making less at the age of 50 than they did at 30. That's less common among college educated office workers. And for those who line up cushy jobs and choose not to retire at 65, but instead keep extending it to 70 or 75 or even 80, those are usually very high paying jobs that can still be done by 60-somethings. The trades don't produce those types of jobs.

Blue collar work is great. There are actually a ton of blue collar jobs that require college degrees (stuff out in the field), and combine the idea of working with your hands with working with your brain. And union representation can get strong contractual protections and income and retirement for workers. But the actual trades versus college debate is a little bit different from that, and asking a 25-year-old which is better will often get a very different answer from a 35-year-old, a 45-year-old, or a 55-year-old."

 What do you think? Feel free to comment. This is a "safe space" lol.