Observations by a Citizen: College or Trades?

By Hal Rounds

Recently, a speaker at a local Chamber of Commerce dinner discussed the “Blue Oval City” plant that is being built nearby by Ford to produce electric trucks. He focused on how the massive project would affect local job opportunities, and the kind of education that would best position students to meet these opportunities – and others. He offered counsel regarding the long view students should consider in choosing their career paths given the opportunities offered by the Blue Oval City project.

He noted that construction and operations of the Ford plant will open many jobs that involve a variety of trades and skills that do not require a college education. These jobs, that young people can fill fresh out of high school, come with very attractive pay scales – earnings that are significantly higher than most beginning pay plans for college graduates.

The catch, he stated, was that trades involve skills that may be necessary today – but which will be made obsolete by the progress of technology. The tasks that reward trades workers today are quickly being replaced or performed by automated machines and processes that can do the work of tradesmen, and do the work quicker, cheaper and better. These technologies will be designed and managed by employees who have more sophisticated understanding of the processes and technologies that will displace the traditional tasks – and the workers who do them.  

A college education will, according to his argument, prepare a student for the more sophisticated technologies that will replace today’s workplace. College will give the keys to success as the practical workers are left behind. Those who have planned careers in the trades, his thesis holds, will find their skills obsolete and their high school educations inadequate.

Many career paths, such as science, law, and the like, do require college-type curricula. But real-life work experience actually does provide insight, understanding and capabilities that a college degree does not. Practical experience with machines, customers, and the other exposures of daily work is actually an education, and in many respects inflicts broader and deeper understanding. And, like the college graduates who want to keep up with developments, people who have chosen non-college careers do invest much time in seminars and extension courses to keep up with the advances in the sciences, technology, and business requirements of their chosen specialties.

College sometimes actually isolates their students from the real world, and breeds a conceit that impedes understanding. The comments of former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to an audience in 2016 illustrate such a flawed view. He told them: “I could teach anybody, even the people in this room” to be a farmer. He described agriculture as a simple “process.” “You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn,” He also saw factory jobs as mechanical repetition requiring no brain power.

Anyone who has actually done such work knows better. And isn’t so arrogant. Those who think their new advances will make earlier practices disappear might get a better understanding by looking at what their once-arrogant predecessors had to learn.

I think of the 1960s, when our new, F-4 Phantom fighter planes were armed with guided missiles that were sure to hit enemy targets nearly every time. The experts agreed this new technology made it wasteful to equip the F-4’s with traditional guns. It only took a little real combat experience to cure their snobbery, and set them to designing gun pods to mount on the F-4’s. College is good for many; but hands-on experience will keep other careers just as necessary – and remunerative – as tradition has proved them to be.

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