Restoring Excellence in Vocational Education

The real reason you can’t get a plumber

Editor’s note: Vocational education may seem, at first glance, to be an incongruous topic for a group focused on excellence in education. It is not. The things worth understanding how to learn, and to learn well, extend well beyond traditional academic subjects. Excellence in education does not mean funneling everyone onto the same narrow path and treating everyone who falls off that path as a failure, but taking education seriously and executing it well no matter what the people involved are learning. With that in mind, we’re delighted to publish Sheela’s guest post on vocational education.

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The post-World War II economic boom was the heyday for vocational education. Commonly associated with shop class, voc-ed, now rebranded “career and technical education” (CTE), involves training for careers in the skilled trades as opposed to academic preparation for a four-year college. In the 1950s and 60s, voc-ed enjoyed high participation rates among students, huge demand for skilled workers, bipartisan political support, and training partnerships with labor unions. It also benefited from the widespread cultural acceptance of a non-college pathway to middle-class life. A factory job was a good job, and “good” back then meant that a non-college-educated person could support a family and earn respect.

In the following decades, however, several factors conspired to effect a progressive marginalization of CTE. The 1963 Vocational Education Act linked voc-ed to the needs of underprivileged students, insinuating that it lacked relevance for more capable students. The changing American industrial and manufacturing landscape of the 70s and 80s, meanwhile, sowed apprehension about the value of training for jobs that could become obsolete. Then came the enormous impact of the 1983 “A Nation at Risk” report, which employed apocalyptic rhetoric to describe what it called a "rising tide of mediocrity" in American education that amounted to "unilateral educational disarmament." The report captured the public imagination and established a story of American educational decline that informs public discourse and policy even now. In doing so, it entrenched an enduring definition for educational excellence: the mastery of traditional academic subjects leading to attendance in a selective, four-year college or university. This definition, in turn, entrenched the era of outsized parental anxiety about selective college admissions, and pressure on children to excel academically.

Before long, CTE was stigmatized as an insidious tool for racial and economic segregation and a dumping ground for those considered less-thans, dead-enders and also-rans. As a result, whole generations have been raised on the notion that one earns cultural prestige, to say nothing of personal dignity, through elite credentialing alone. Ambitious students of all backgrounds, it goes without saying, have been discouraged from considering CTE a worthy life path. Instead, they’ve done as they were told and pursued college. But in another cruelty baked into the system, many who took up the “college for all” call discovered once they arrived on campus that those high school “College Prep” classes had not, in fact, prepared them for college-level work.

In acceding to the de-prioritization of CTE, communities, schools, families and students all bought into the false belief that ambition, high standards and overall excellence do not apply to vocationally directed coursework. As a result, today we are fast approaching a crisis point where the most important members of the CTE work world—our electricians, plumbers, skilled carpenters, HVAC techs and mechanics—are retiring and have nowhere near enough young people to take their places. While some evidence suggests that the winds are shifting and students are coming around to the benefits of non-college paths, the pent-up demand for tradespeople is far outpacing these incremental increases in CTE participation and expansions of programming. We desperately need a nationally-scaled cohort of gifted and talented tradespeople, yet our social norms have browbeaten the students who might have comprised that cohort out of recognizing themselves as gifted and talented.

Mike Rowe, this country’s most famous advocate for the skilled trades, has been collecting evidence on this bleak situation for years. In 2016, Rowe received a letter from a mother describing the experience of her bright, homeschooled son after he applied for the High Voltage Lineman program at Arkansas State University. The school rejected him—for being too smart. “Your grades and test scores are too high and you are too articulate. We ran into this with another kid today. You need to enroll in the university and go into engineering.”

Rowe asks, in response to this story, “What kind of person do the people of Arkansas want to rely upon when the lights go out? An ambitious, hard-working lineman who one day might move on to another opportunity or a less qualified candidate whose primary qualifications for the job were mediocrity and desperation?”

He and his Mike Rowe Works Foundation (Mottos: “Work Smart AND Hard” and “We’ve got a PR problem.”) are playing an outsized role in the good news where excellence and CTE are concerned. His “Work Ethic Scholarships,” offered exclusively for students bound for apprenticeships and trade schools, demand that applicants hold themselves to high standards. One section of the Foundation’s application, in fact, is reminiscent of rules for life that the Stoics might have drawn up for the modern age.

Among the twelve “SWEAT Pledge” commandments that applicants must agree to are these:

I believe there is no such thing as a ‘bad job.’ I believe that all jobs are opportunities, and it’s up to me to make the best of them.

I believe the best way to distinguish myself at work is to show up early, stay late, and cheerfully volunteer for every crappy task there is.

I believe that my education is my responsibility and absolutely critical to my success. I am resolved to learn as much as I can from whatever source is available to me. and I will never stop learning and understand that library cards are free.

Rowe’s is one promising way to confront our national PR problem with CTE schooling and careers, and surely the good money that skilled tradespeople stand to earn will start speaking more loudly for itself, too. Take the emblematic plumber as an example. Depending on factors like location and overtime potential, plumbers today can expect to bring in six figures annually for much of their career. Also, the work of a plumber does not actually involve sloshing around in waste all day. It demands in-depth knowledge of and skill with advanced systems that are in constant technological flux, along with a creative, problem-solving mindset—knowledge, skill, and mindset all rigorously furnished by contemporary CTE programs.

While we’re setting the record straight on plumbers, let’s also correct another popular misperception relating to many of the non-college goers and their non-college-educated families: They don’t reject college because they can’t hack it; they reject it because a culture that prizes intellectual pursuits over other forms of expertise rejected them.

Kids in our system learn as early as elementary school who gets to apply the values of excellence to their work. As David Brooks put it in his November, 2024 cover story on higher education in The Atlantic, “The good test-takers get funneled into the meritocratic pressure cooker; the bad test-takers learn, by about age 9 or 10, that society does not value them the same way.” This undervaluing follows the latter students through middle school, four wasted years of high school and into their work lives, and has enormous consequences.

Educationally elite America’s disdain for non-elite workers goes a good way toward explaining the resentment so many voters feel for Democrats, who, fairly or not, today represent the most obvious manifestation of that ethos. Donald Trump has this disdain to thank for his enduring electoral success, and he knows it. "I love the blue-collar workers and they love me,” he stated in his first inaugural address. “These are the forgotten men and women of our country, and they're forgotten no longer.” To turn back the tide of resentment and repair our national divide, we need to stop behaving as though professional excellence and the self-respect and public admiration that come with it belong only to elite college graduates.

For insight into how to do so, we can look to Great Britain. Walking across London’s iconic Tower Bridge, one’s eyes are drawn down to the Blue Line, where name after name is set in brass and outlined in blue. It is not the English equivalent of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and neither are they the names of wealthy bridge benefactors. These, rather, are prominent tributes to the workers who made the bridge:

John Buchanon, Bridge Master, 1931-1939

Matthew Kirkland, Plater, 1890-1894

John Chalk, Rivet Boy, 1890-1894

Hannah Griggs, Cook, 1910-1915

It is high time that America rediscovers this lost art of recognition. In the coming years, as the shortage of skilled tradespeople comes into clearer focus, there will be calls to scale up promising training programs and build more CTE-centric schools. That’s all to the good, but the much harder work will be to let go of our insistent, outdated conviction that excellence and the esteem that accompanies it are the sole purview of the mind, and not the hands.

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Sheela is a writer and teacher in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. She teaches Italian language and cooking, as well as storytelling, and hosts storytelling events that seek to encourage the airing of difficult truths.