Millions Revive HS Shop
Wall Street Journal reporter Te-Ping Chen joins host Ariana Aspuru to discuss how these hands-on skills are helping students get a jump on lucrative old-school careers. Millions Revive HS Shop.
Airana Aspuru: Here’s Your Money Briefing for Thursday, March 6th. I’m Ariana Aspuru for the Wall Street Journal. Driven by rising costs of higher education and a tough job market for white collar workers. High schools are investing in the hands-on wood, metal and machinery skills learned in shop classes.
Te-Ping Chen: Economic downturn or not, AI or not, you’re going to need somebody who’s going to fix your toilet. You’re going to need somebody who’s going to repair your air conditioning unit. And so there’s a sense that these are jobs that are always going to be there.
Airana Aspuru: We’ll talk with Wall Street Journal reporter Te-Ping Chen about how these cutting edge classes are helping students get a jump start on lucrative old school careers. That’s after the break. School districts across the country are spending millions of dollars to expand and revamp high school shop classes. Wall Street Journal reporter to Te-Ping Chen joins me. Te-Ping, did you take shop classes in high school? I know I didn’t.
Te-Ping Chen: I didn’t. It wasn’t offered.
Airana Aspuru: No, it wasn’t even part of our roster at all, but I always thought I would take it when I was in high school. What kinds of skills are offered during shop classes?
Te-Ping Chen: It can really run the gamut, but a lot of it is working with tools ranging from learning how to build a birdhouse to something more advanced. Learning how to work with different kinds of machining tools, programming different machine tools, really all over the map.
Airana Aspuru: And what kinds of careers do these skills lead to?
Te-Ping Chen: Could lead to a career in construction, career in manufacturing, automotive. Depends on the kinds of courses, but a lot of the skills are pretty foundational and would translate into a lot of different kinds of the trades.
Airana Aspuru: By the time I got to high school shop classes weren’t really offered anymore. Where did these classes go?
Te-Ping Chen: Well, a lot of these sorts of classes started to get more of a bad rap after the 1983 publication of the federal report, A Nation at Risk, which really outlined this vision of American schools declining and needing to raise their overall academic caliber. With that came a push against a lot of classes like automotive repair or welding. A feeling at the same time that some of these classes were not quite fair to students who were maybe coming from less wealthy schools or less wealthy families. The sense that they were shunting poor students into these more manual careers while their more wealthy peers were getting to go to college. That created a feeling of stigma in many cases around these kinds of classes.
Airana Aspuru: How do students feel about shop classes coming back?
Te-Ping Chen: It really ranges, of course, in every community. But in a number of schools, there are efforts to try and make these classes feel more accessible, sometimes rebrand them, give them new names. And among the students I spoke to, a lot of them feel like the stigma has really lessened that when they talk to their peers, if they are indeed planning to pursue a career in the trades, there’s more of a feeling of that, hey, those are jobs that pay well, they’re stable, and that can be a good path too.
Airana Aspuru: What economic factors can we look to to understand why hands-on skills are more in demand right now?
Te-Ping Chen: The trades, of course, have long been in demand, especially so now with waves of retirement coming on and more folk aging out of those sorts of occupations. That’s part of it. But I think also a lot of the reason why there is a rise in interest in many cases among say school districts as well as the business community as well as voters and families in these classes, is also because of the rise in the cost of college and the sense that the four-year path, which for many years was presented to students as really the only path might not make the most financial sense, and it might not make the most career sense either when you look at some of the stats and see that many college students graduate and get jobs that didn’t require college degrees.
And so you have a lot of folk who are reassessing whether or not these sorts of college for all paths and mindsets are the best routes for all kids. And whether there might be alternatives out there.
Airana Aspuru: What can the salary look like for some of these workers after graduation?
Te-Ping Chen: It really is all over the map. Because we’re talking about 50 states, all kinds of communities, all kinds of jobs. The jobs are very diverse. I spoke to a dealership out in Bakersfield, California who hires plenty of kids fresh out of high school who’ve taken some automotive shop, and he said that your starting wages may start maybe around $19 an hour, but stick around for four years, work way up. And he’s got kids who are making six figures four years out of high school with no college degree and no college debt.
Airana Aspuru: And we’re also hearing from workers the threat of emerging technology and AI and the feeling that they’re going to take their jobs. Why are people now betting on manual skills?
Te-Ping Chen: Look, it’s an uncertain job market and when you are in a moment like that, looking for jobs that seem more solid, like they’re always going to be there, economic downturn or not, AI or not, you’re going to need someone who’s going to fix your toilet. You’re going to need somebody who’s going to repair your air conditioning unit. And so there’s a sense that these are jobs that are always going to be there and they’re not going to be outsourced to technology or taken away.
Airana Aspuru: And have enrollment trends in colleges supported what we feel has been happening.
Te-Ping Chen: If you look at some of the data, and certainly if you talk to a lot of vocational schools out there, there is a jump in enrollment that has happened in recent years. The percentage of students enrolled in vocational focused two year community colleges jumped 14% in fall of 2024, and it had also jumped by double digits the year prior. And at the same time, we do see the share of workers, young workers ages 20 to 24 in blue collar jobs also growing. It was up to 18% last May. That was up two points from where it was at the start of 2019. It’s hard to say where these trends are going, but definitely if you look at the numbers now, you do see some of that interest being reflected in the data.
Airana Aspuru: In recent years, high schools have added coding classes and integrated more technology into their curriculum to get students ready for the workforce. Is this a step in that direction?
Te-Ping Chen: A lot of those skills would be folded into an overall push for just in general more sense of career readiness and a feeling that students should be equipped with skills that are going to, again, allow them to take paths that aren’t necessarily just prescriptively four-year college. And so it isn’t just actually shop classes that are getting this injection of interest and money from school districts.
There’s been a push towards building up facilities for teaching kids how to be pharmaceutical techs to veterinarians to cosmetologists. And the feeling that really maybe is not the case. That they need to figure out ways to equip students for careers in other directions too.
Source: Millions Revive HS Shop
Why School Districts Are Spending Millions to Revive High-School Shop Classes
Hands-on skills are staging a comeback at leading-edge districts, driven by high college costs and demand for more career choices https://www.wsj.com/news/author/ariana-aspuru
https://www.techedmagazine.com/category/news-by-industry/
Millions Revive HS Shop