Somewhere between the invention of the guidance counselor and the mass marketing of the four-year degree, the United States quietly decided that a young person who could wire a panel, lay a pipe, or frame a wall was a lesser specimen of citizen than one who had written a seminar paper on the sociology of seminar papers. We are now paying for that decision in burst pipes, six-figure student loans, and a skilled-trades shortage that the Department of Labor estimates will leave more than half a million construction jobs unfilled through the rest of this decade. The experts who built this arrangement are, I notice, not the ones holding the wrenches.
The plain truth is this: a republic whose people cannot build, repair, or tend to the practical world around them is not self-governing in any meaningful sense. It is dependent, and dependent people make dependent citizens. The habit of competence is not a supplement to civic life; it is civic life, at its most honest and most durable.
There was a time when this was not considered a controversial observation. The founders of American popular culture, the ones who wrote almanacs and set up lending libraries and formed volunteer fire companies, understood that the republic’s survival depended on the formation of capable, self-reliant people long before it depended on correct political opinions. They built institutions that were small, local, practical, and deliberately designed to make individuals more useful to themselves and to their neighbors. The Junto, the mechanics’ institute, the apprenticeship compact, the mutual aid society: these were not charming colonial curiosities. They were the operating system of a self-governing people. The theory came later; the habits came first.
What do we have instead? A credentialing apparatus of baroque complexity that costs families an average of over $38,000 per year at a four-year public university, according to the Education Data Initiative, and frequently delivers graduates with neither a marketable skill nor a coherent idea of how to repair the gutter falling off their apartment building. Meanwhile, the median annual wage for an electrician in the United States now exceeds $61,000, and master electricians in many urban markets earn well past six figures. The plumber who shows up on a Tuesday afternoon in January is not suffering from a prestige deficit. The kid who took out $80,000 in loans to study communications may well be.
The enemy here is not higher education as such. A good university education, pursued for genuine intellectual purpose, remains one of the finer things a society can offer a curious mind. The enemy is the monoculture: the decades-long political and institutional consensus that every young American should travel the same path regardless of aptitude, interest, or circumstance, and that any deviation from that path is a failure of ambition rather than an exercise of good sense. This monoculture has done something quite specific: it has stripped the trades of their dignity by treating them as residual categories, the place you end up when college did not work out, rather than as distinct crafts with their own traditions, their own apprenticeship ladders, and their own genuine claim on a young person’s pride.
The prescriptions are not secret, and they are not expensive relative to the alternative. High schools can restore genuine shop, electrical, and construction programs alongside academic coursework, not as a consolation prize but as a parallel track of equal standing. Several states have begun doing exactly this, with Missouri and Tennessee expanding career and technical education funding in recent years to positive early results in both enrollment and post-graduation wages. The Perkins V federal act, reauthorized in 2018, provides states with funds to do precisely this work. Most states have not used those funds with anything approaching urgency.
Employers, particularly in construction and manufacturing, can rebuild the registered apprenticeship model that served the country well for most of its history. A registered apprenticeship is not merely on-the-job training; it is a structured multi-year program combining paid work with classroom instruction, culminating in a recognized credential and a journeyman’s wage. The number of active registered apprentices in the United States has grown modestly in recent years, reaching about 600,000 as of the most recent Department of Labor figures, but the potential pool is vastly larger. Germany, to take the most frequently cited comparison, runs apprenticeships for roughly 1.3 million workers annually through a dual-system that involves employers, vocational schools, and the government in a formal compact. The United States has no serious equivalent at national scale.
Local civic associations, chambers of commerce, and trade unions can do what governments are slow to do: create the social context in which a young plumber or electrician is introduced to the broader community, mentored by experienced tradespeople, and recognized as a contributing citizen rather than someone who missed the bus to college. The volunteer fire company and the mechanics’ institute of an earlier century served this function without waiting for federal authorization. There is nothing preventing their modern equivalents from doing the same, except the habit of waiting for someone else to begin.
And parents can stop treating the guidance counselor’s college-track recommendation as a natural law. A teenager with a talent for problem-solving and a discomfort with sitting still for six hours a day is not a candidate for remediation. She may be a candidate for electrical work, or carpentry, or HVAC, or any of a dozen other crafts that will make her more useful, more solvent, and more genuinely free than four years of courses she did not want in debt she cannot discharge.
A society that cannot build its own buildings, fix its own plumbing, or wire its own circuits is not suffering from a skills gap. It is suffering from a failure of self-respect, and self-respect, once credentialed away, is considerably harder to get back than a journeyman’s card.
, Silas Poor Richard