What Happened to Vocational School in America
Why did Vocational Education go out of vogue?
When people ask me what I did with my quarantine break, sure I tell them about the movies I watched and the bread I didn’t bake, but what actually took up a lot of my time was my obsession with what happened to vocational schools. A concept that used to be very favorable in America all but vanished from popular opinion in the 1980s, and I’ve spent many nights down the internet rabbit hole trying to figure out why.
What is vocational education? Well, vocational schools teach practical, job-related subjects, and prepare students with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions they need to be skilled workers in areas that require manual operations. Vocational education can take place at the post-secondary or higher education level, and commonly it feeds into an apprenticeship program. Those apprenticeships are a mixture of work-based training and further education, with the guarantee you get a job when it’s all over.
Vocation education is still popular in places like Europe and the UK to this day. However, this type of training went from being prestigious in America, with larger cities having selective/ hard-to get into vocational high schools, to a type of education reserved for low-income students. Why?
What appears to have happened:
Back in the day (think the 1950s) high schools used to have skills-based classes in the common curriculum. Students went to classes like shop class and learned trades such as mechanics. And these classes weren’t frowned upon, rather they were the types of classes you would be revered for being accomplished in. Remember that scene in the movie Grease when Danny and his friends are dancing around in class? That’s in shop class. And they were the cool kids.
For many students at this time that meant getting exposure to a possible career right out of high school, and students who graduated from prestigious vocational high schools were virtually assured good jobs when they graduated. Then something changed. In the 1980s there was a shift that coincided with the rise of liberal arts education, and trade classes were no longer encouraged in the common core. Instead, they were reserved for “problem” students who had disciplinary problems. I remember this in my own high school - kids who were habitually tardy or got disciplinary “yellow cards” were moved into the trades classes. The education system thus told students: vocational classes are for bad students, changing public opinion about the value of those future career tracks. How wrong they were to have thought this way.
Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) expects HVAC/R jobs to be added at a rate of 15 percent through 2026; this is more than twice as fast as the national average for all occupations. There are literally too many jobs in this trade and not enough qualified workers to fill them. According to RSI, a trade school in the space, “one of the biggest reasons for the shortage of skilled trades workers, including HVAC/R technicians, is that many young men and women choose 4-year colleges instead of trade schools because that’s been the path highlighted by parents and guidance counselors.” The average starting salary for an HVAC/R technician in NYC is $46,840, a solar power technician is over $50,000, with most of the other trade professionals falling in a similar range. The general average salary for traditional college graduates comes to about $50,000 according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) 2021 salary survey. Doesn’t seem so much like one educational track is better than the other, does it?
In a post-pandemic world where families are struggling more than ever to afford traditional college education, and as demand grows for skilled US workers in fields like HVAC, aviation mechanics, computer technology, solar (I could go on), shouldn’t vocational schools be the hottest thing in town? These jobs come with stellar starting salaries, learning-on-the job apprenticeships, room for upward mobility, and yet, they still have a public relations problem.
The demise of the vocational school in America was one of the worst social trends to date. And it’s impact on society can be to blame for why so many students ended up in student debt when they didn’t need to go to college in the first place. If we want to change unemployment, underemployment, and accelerate the path for all citizens to get into quality jobs, it’s time to change hearts and mind on the vocational education track and instead praise it for what it is: a damn good idea. If I had a venture fund I would be making a lot of bets in this space.
For those interested, below is some follow up reading from my late-night internet research, and here is a podcast of me talking vocational schools and more with Erik Torenberg on Venture Stories.
The Death of Vocational Education and the Demise of the American Middle Class, January 2012 https://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2012/01/the_death_of_vocational_education_and_the_demise_of_the_american_middle_class.html
The troubled history of vocational education, SEPTEMBER 09, 2014 http://www.americanradioworks.org/segments/the-troubled-history-of-vocational-education/
Vocational Education in the United States: The Early 1990s https://nces.ed.gov/pubs/web/95024-2.asp
Comparing International Vocational Education and Training Programs, 2018 http://ncee.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/RenoldVETReport032018.pdf
Why We Desperately Need To Bring Back Vocational Training In Schools Sept, 2015 https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholaswyman/2015/09/01/why-we-desperately-need-to-bring-back-vocational-training-in-schools/#23218f0c87ad
The Trouble With Trade School July, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/opinion/vocational-education-jobs.html
The Stigma of Choosing Trade School Over College MARCH 6, 2019 https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/choosing-trade-school-over-college/584275/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMItJG_ge2s7AIVJPC1Ch1qVARUEAMYASAAEgJp-PD_BwE
Why Germany Is So Much Better at Training Its Workers OCTOBER 16, 2014 https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/why-germany-is-so-much-better-at-training-its-workers/381550/
The Academic Impacts of Career and Technical Schools: A Case Study of a Large Urban School District January, 2013 http://new.every1graduates.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/The-Academic-Impacts-of-Career-and-Technical-Schools.pdf
Why Aren’t There More Apprentices in America? JAN 12, 2018 https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2018/01/arent-apprentices-america/