More People with Bachelor’s Degrees Back to School to Learn Skilled Trades

“I was part of that generation that was told to go to college, so that’s what I did,” Michael Kelly said with a shrug. “That’s what we were supposed to do.”

But after getting a bachelor’s degree in political science — for which he’s still paying off his student loans — Kelly realized that what he actually wanted to do was become a firefighter. After all, he said, unlike a politician, no one is ever angry to see a firefighter show up.

“I spent a lot of money to end up doing . . . this,” said the 28-year-old as his colleagues stowed the equipment before they filed back into a classroom.

A lot of other people also have invested time and money getting four-year degrees only to return for career and technical education in fields ranging from firefighting to automation to nursing, in which jobs are relatively plentiful and salaries and benefits comparatively good, but which require faster and far less costly certificates and associate degrees.

One in 12 students now at community colleges — or more than 940,000 — previously earned a bachelor’s degree, according to the American Association of Community Colleges. And even as college and university enrollment overall declines, some career and technical education programs are reporting growth — and anticipating more of it.

“I thought I was the only one following this road, but apparently a lot of people are,” said Noor Al-Hamdani, 26, who is getting an associate degree in nursing at Fresno City College, a community college, after having already earned a bachelor’s degree in public health from California State University at Fresno.

In some cases, bachelor’s degree holders are obtaining supplementary skills — computer science majors adding certificates in cloud technology, for example.

But the trend is also exposing how many high school graduates almost reflexively go to college without entirely knowing why, pushed by parents and counselors, only to be disappointed with the way things turn out — and then having to start over.

“Somewhere along the line it became ingrained that in order to succeed, whether your children wanted to go to college or not, they had to go to college,” said Jane Oates, who was an assistant secretary of labor in the Obama administration and now heads WorkingNation, a nonprofit that tries to better match workers with jobs.

When they do start on the route to bachelor’s degrees, a third of students change their majors at least once and more than half take longer than four years to graduate, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Some of the rest drop out.

Even among those who manage to finish, more than 40 percent of recent graduates ages 22 to 27 are underemployed, meaning that they’re working in jobs that don’t require their degree, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports.

That makes four-year universities and colleges “a really expensive career exploration program,” said Amy Loyd, vice president at the education and employment policy organization Jobs for the Future.

When Shana Tinkle was finishing high school, it was more or less “a rite of passage” to go on and get a bachelor’s degree, she said — in her case, in creative writing from Brown University.