BY: Beanie Geoghegan

The surge in young people choosing to pursue Career and Technical Education (CTE) rather than attend a four-year college or university is one of the silver linings from government school closures during the COVID pandemic. Middle and high school students who had been programmed since kindergarten to believe college was the next obligatory step after high school graduation suddenly found themselves questioning what they’d always been told and seeking alternatives.

For most students, attendance and class participation were focal points throughout their school careers. Some schools and districts ran campaigns promoting the importance of daily attendance, even giving out prizes and awards to students who never missed a day of school. Often, class participation was weighted in a student’s grade and could mean the difference between an ‘A’ and a ‘B’ on a report card, which could ultimately determine eligibility for college scholarships. Before school closures, the message was clear that presence and participation were essential to the end goal, and the assumed end goal was college.

Beginning in March 2020, students (especially those in middle and high school) began to question some of the messages they’d internalized to that point. Many grew skeptical of the push for daily attendance. Some wondered if more school was really what they wanted. Others recognized they needed something beyond a high school diploma, but they didn’t see the value or necessity of incurring debt for a college degree to pursue their career interests. The disruption of the normal routine and distance from the traditional classroom setting allowed students to consider their futures from a different perspective. 

Once upon a time, students who were capable, bright, and interested in working with their hands had opportunities to explore their options in high school “shop classes”. The push for “college for all” and the heavy emphasis on STEM took precedence (and funding) over providing opportunities for students to learn how to design, build, and repair things. This was to the detriment of many students forced down college and career paths they didn’t love that left them unfulfilled and disappointed. It also negatively impacted the industries that rely on skilled trade workers to succeed. 

According to an article in Forbes last April, “Over a million trade jobs remain unfilled, including 500,000 in manufacturing alone. An aging workforce, with five tradespersons retiring for every two replacements, combined with a cultural bias toward college degrees over vocational training, has created a persistent skills gap.” Mike Rowe has sounded the alarm for years that, “bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. is impossible without a workforce.” This issue has been festering for a long time, but it took the government closing schools for months on end to bring it to the surface.

While government school closures contributed to so much irreparable damage to millions of students in many other ways, we can credit those school closures for giving some students time and space to consider alternatives to four-year degrees that saddle them with crippling debt. Those school closures might also be the catalyst for revitalization of the skilled workforce necessary to restoring manufacturing in our country. 

Thanks to the resurgence of CTE and a high demand for skilled tradeworkers, some of the students who found their education and teen years abruptly disrupted are now finding their young adult years more fulfilling than they could have ever imagined. They are making lemonade out of lemons and finding it’s a good way to earn a living.