Yeah, but it has done wonders for the earnings of electricians and plumbers. Eventually, people will figure this out.

One of the reasons I prefer union shops, particularly in the case of the IBEW, is that their apprenticeship programs, and training requirements, and standards generally result in much better work by people who know what they are doing.

There is a world of difference between the casual hiring and training of random companies and the organized approach of the IBEW.

 

Because most of manufacturing moved overseas? ... and therefore there was a loss of salary's worth over time?

More likely automation. A factory that used to employ a legion of machinists is now completely run by three guys banging on keyboards.

The number of skilled workers needed no longer justifies trade schools.

 

Because most of manufacturing moved overseas? ... and therefore there was a loss of salary's worth over time?

Trade schools improve people’s incomes and don’t necessarily depend on manufacturing. Yes, commercial plumbing and electrical are heavily used by the manufacturing segment but that’s not everything.

 

My dad has an old blowtorch (used memorably to singe some wasps one time) and some old soldering irons. I always wondered what that weird hook thing was on top of the torch. It’s a matched set! Very old mystery in my head now solved.

 

The number of skilled workers needed no longer justifies trade schools.

Well, there were carpentry classes, auto and auto body shops, cosmetology, book keeping, Ag shop, woodworking, welding, some basic electricity and HVAC, that are still valid trades. Steno, typing, machine shop, not so much... I have a cousin who got his college degree in horticulture and has made a decent living out of selling plants, residential and commercial landscaping and groundskeeping. He even does commercial indoor landscaping providing indoor plants and maintaining them for banks and offices and such.

 

Why do we suppose this happened?

Lots of reasons, many unrelated, at least initially, but they tended to reinforce themselves into a self-fulfilling prophecy. As is often the case, something that should have been a small shift got blown out of proportion and the pendulum swung way too far.

Reported: Skilled labor jobs are being outsourced overseas. Heard: There aren't going to be ANY skilled labor jobs anymore.

Reported: Automation is taking the place of some skilled labor jobs. Heard: Automation is going to eliminate ALL skilled labor jobs.

At about this same time, we started being ultra-concerned with every student's self-esteem and it quickly somehow became the normal mindset that a student that's not on a college track is going to suffer poor self-esteem, so let's be sure to get every student on a college track, and vo-tech courses aren't in line with that thinking, so we need to steer kids away from vo-tech courses.

Vo-tech courses typically cost more to operate than other courses, so they were a ripe target for trimming the budget as soon as their defenders and promoters got shouted into silence.

The Federal Government really started throwing huge amounts of money, in grants and student loans, at college-bound kids and, not surprisingly, the colleges (including an explosion of for-profit colleges) started recruiting feverishly telling students that a college education was the only way to secure their future (trot out the news stories about skilled labor jobs going extinct) and that they should not even consider what it costs because the Federal Government will make sure that they can pay for it.

Another factor in the mix is that a significant fraction of immigrant families are driven by seeing their kids have significantly greater success than they had, and a good education has almost always been a corner stone of that. But this has always been the case throughout American history, so I don't know if it fed into the anti-trades, pro-college bandwagon that swept the nation.

What I wonder is whether that pendulum is going to swing back too far the other way. We are seeing the beginnings of an anti-college backlash, largely due to the huge numbers of people that bought the hype and took out huge student loans to get degrees that have no value in the marketplace. I'm afraid that, instead of putting in rational policies aimed at achieving a proper and sustainable balance, we will end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Again.