Many of us grew up hearing about the need to go to college. Parents, teachers, and neighbors tended to reinforce that a bachelor’s degree would open the doors to career and personal success. Lack of a college degree, by contrast, would limit our ability to make a good wage, live in a good neighborhood, and experience the upward mobility that has become an important element of the American dream.
Yet an increasing number of young persons reject this paradigm. Recent reports show a massive increase in men and women forgoing college to enter vocational training programs. They are training to become welders, electricians, plumbers, and other like trades.
These young men and women give various reasons for eschewing the old post-high school path. They cite the massive increase in the price to go to college, which often saddles people with serious, even debilitating, debt. They also speak of the desire to avoid the doldrums of work tied to office cubicles or computer screens. These men and women desire to work with their hands and to build or repair tangible things.
Our political actors should take notice. These trends include much good. We certainly need these trades to maintain a functioning, healthy society. More persons moving into them might begin to ease serious shortages that have persisted in these jobs and thus have caused problems for homeowners, business owners, and others.
But this change also should force us to rethink our values. Those flooding the vocational programs recognize that the consensus about college and its resulting career and life paths was too constrictive. They did not include the full swath of human ability and interest. They wrongly distinguished between “dignified” white-collar jobs and blue-collar work. We need to regain respect for working with one’s hands. We should see and value the skill, both intellectual and physical, that such work manifests.
Doing so could have a beneficial political impact. The growing class divide between those with and without college degrees involves the diverging perspectives that come with different life experiences. However, the partisanship also comes from a mutual animosity that results in good part from arrogance on the part of the college-educated and blue-collar workers feeling disrespected. A fuller view of human work should ease those disconnects.
This move away from college education certainly poses a serious challenge for our universities. They are seeing declining enrollment at a time when they already face other, significant financial challenges. A drop in the number of college-aged students is also coming, which will only magnify those trials for post-secondary education.
But colleges should take this opportunity to refind their mission and purpose. They should be less focused on providing ever more extravagant amenities for on-campus life. They should stop chasing social and political trends to appear relevant.
Instead, they should get back to basics. Colleges should ask anew what it means to be human, to possess not just a mind but a body and a soul. They should renew the commitment, anciently made and lately discarded, to preserve and perpetuate human goods and civic virtue. These good are best found in conversation with the great thinkers and events of the past, whether they be Euclid, Plato, Jane Austen, Abraham Lincoln, or Martin Luther King Jr. Colleges should equip students to resource this heritage of thought, word, and action for our own times.
Pursuing this new path in this evolving world will not be easy. It will take wisdom and courage. It also will not be the path for all as many will better be served by educations other than a college one. But the opportunity exists to make our society a better one that recognizes excellence in all of its forms and establishes healthy institutions to train the coming generations in accordance with that excellence. Let us hope our leaders in the political and educational realms have the fortitude and the insight to help make that happen.
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Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.