Is it worth the money and stress to attend a four-year university? Why do students feel stigmatized by their community for not attending college? Does this response supersede common sense at times?
The stigma surrounding college attendance was not brought into the mainstream until the 1980s, when our country shifted from focusing on vocational education to liberal arts. Even though the competition to get into college has increased, the public’s perception of alternative post-high school routes is still negative.
LM has an incredibly high enrollment in four year college directly after high school, with the percent of students from the 2022 class attending university being as high as 85 percent. This number compared to the ten percent of students who choose to enroll in the military, participate in a gap year, attend a career school, or are employed full time after high school is a drastic difference. Being such a stark change from national averages (38 percent of U.S. students didn’t attend college immediately after high school in 2023), many realize just how prevalent the stigma of not attending four year college could be in our community.
Vocational education is a certain structure of learning in which the focus is related to job pathways in order to ensure the correct skills and mindset are imparted into the student for the workforce. This type of education typically is a pathway to an apprenticeship, which is work-based training to ensure a job right out of school. Once in the workforce of the trades, many are able to join unions, increasing job security, higher wages, greater equality, and a better work environment.
Over the past half-century, a narrative has been pushed by the American public that college is for all, and the more enrolled people there are, the better. There was a radical shift in the country: attending college was the only way to become successful.
As an attempt to target a larger audience, many trade schools publish statistics that highlight the amount of debt many Americans have accumulated from college tuition. According to the Federal Reserve in 2018, the United States currently has $1.5 trillion in outstanding student debt. Almost forty percent of students who start a four-year college program do not complete it, and only two-thirds of people with a college degree believe the debt was worth the outcome. And of the people actually employed ten years after being able to finish the degree, 45 percent of them are doing work that only requires a high school diploma, per Higher Ed Dive.
Vocational-technical education became a path not just for students who wanted to pursue a career in the trades, but it also became an avenue teachers encouraged for the students who couldn’t sit still, had poor grades, or were otherwise marked as not “college-worthy.” Public opinion began to associate vocational-technical education with bad students who were not “smart” enough to go to college—a path for the ones who couldn’t complete what they were supposed to, if you will. Because of the pressure for schools to focus more on achievement and college acceptance rates, more students who may have wanted to pursue a career in the trades were pushed onto the track of university.
But none of it is true. High school students that have taken on average two courses that relate to a career subject have a 95 percent chance of graduating, much higher than the national average, which is 85 percent. A 2019 study conducted by the US Department of Education also found that students who took the ACT and career and technical education classes in high school scored higher than those who did not on math, science, and language arts.
As we all have seen, college is becoming increasingly expensive, leaving many students with an overarching question of affordability. From the 2010-2011 school year until the 2022-2023, tuition inflation rose 3.63 percent each year on average. This has made the average tuition for out-of-state students just shy of $29,000 dollars a year, not including room and board, the Education Data Initiative found. Starting salaries for trade jobs in Pennsylvania are usually around $50,000 a year, ZipRecruiter found. These numbers are staggering considering that more than sixty percent of Americans attend some college.
Although you could argue this is a personal issue, more incitement into the huge demand of the trades needs to be understood. It is projected that by 2030, 2.1 million trade jobs will be unfilled. These numbers mean the efficiency of their services will decline due to shortages of people skilled enough to complete the jobs. Our worldwide population is only growing, which will increase demand. Therefore, supply needs to be increased. And if no action is taken, drastic effects could plague our economy, even possibly causing a recession.
This change in public opinion, along with the growing emphasis on college for all, has led to a perception that the trades are not desirable career pathways.
If more exposure to the trades and the career options they provide received more media coverage, the stigma of choosing trade schools would decrease. Furthermore, if guidance counselors in high schools began educating students about vocational opportunities as much as college ones, more students would feel comfortable pursuing the trades while also being confident about future success.
