High-Paying Trade Jobs Sit Empty, While High School Grads Line Up For University Like most other American high school students, Garret Morgan had it drummed into him constantly: Go to college. Get a bachelor's degree. "All through my life it was, 'if you don't go to college you're going to end up on the streets,' " Morgan said. "Everybody's so gung-ho about going to college." So he tried it for a while. Then he quit and started training as an ironworker, which is what he is doing on a weekday morning in a nondescript high-ceilinged building with a concrete floor in an industrial park near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Morgan and several other men and women are dressed in work boots, hard hats and Carhartt's, clipped to safety harnesses with heavy wrenches hanging from their belts. They're being timed as they wrestle 600-pound I-beams into place. Thanks: Newmark's Door More below. I have some experience using a spud wrench to set iron.
The problem stems from Boomer and GenX parents, relatives, friends, and high school advisers. All have bought into the idea that Blue Collar work is a dead end. These young people go off to college take on substantial debt, and graduate to work at Home Depot watering plants, pull the handle at Starbucks, or manage a liquor store (I know one of each and many more). The plant waterer is an engineer who had fine grades, the Starbucks Barista did not graduate and saw no future in debt-ridden higher education, the liquor store manager is married to the Starbucks Barista and feels the same way as she. The problem is none of these young people have a direction, feel in control of their lives, or have a clue about what it is they want to do in life. The socio-economic pathway which was so obvious 30 years ago was long ago torn down, and the way ahead is now shrouded in fog. All that is out there for the young Millennials today is the unknown, and that is too daunting for many of them. On the other hand, all of the people I know in the trades either have good jobs as tradesmen, apprentices, or shop owners. The shop owners do very well, living well into the upper middle class. The tradesmen earn a solid middle class living as a journeyman and do even better, hitting the lower slopes of the upper middle class, if they are expert but not shop owners. The apprentices do better than most of the college graduates outside of the few that actually fully launch by graduating with a STEM degree and work in their fields. One of the few stories I have of post-college launch success is a friend's daughter who attended USC. She left school with more than $200,000 in debt and a degree in engineering (her husband had a similar degree and debt). Both she and her husband took jobs in San Francisco because his parents had an apartment over their detached garage which they offered the couple for free. The apartment did not have a kitchen, so they also ate with the parents. Yeah, weird, but it worked. They had a combined income of $180,000 or so, per year and paid off their school debt in five years or so. The problem with college debt is the fact that taxes eat up so much of income. For that couple, taxes would have eaten at least 25-30% of their income, payroll taxes would have eaten another 20%, state and local income taxes would eat another 15%. Because they had none of the ordinary expenses necessary to support a household and only the expenses to support their work needs their sales tax expenses would have been low but still likely about 1-3% of income. Taxes alone eat about +60% of income for a couple like this living in San Francisco. They did not have living expenses or housing expenses, but if they did, they would have been stuck paying this debt off for the better part of two decades. Instead. They were able to take the remaining $30,000-35,000 per year each and use it to pay down their student loans. Pretty much this entire problem has been created by the Boomers desire to socialize the American economy and scrape as much wealth and income into their pockets as possible. The Boomers received a great nation full of fully paid newly built infrastructure, with an operating socio-economic-educational model and over the following 50 years they extracted as much wealth as they could, and then ran the infrastructure and the system into the ditch. The Boomers leave America to the GenX, the Millennials and the following generations in a far poorer state than they received it. That is not the social compact. The Millennials need to wake up politically, understand what the Boomers have done, and rebalance the ledger. That will be hard for the Boomers but necessary.
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