On a recent night, “PBS NewsHour” business correspondent Paul Solman interviewed a spokesman for the Seattle-based national company, Mr. Rooter Plumbing. Most licensed plumbers earn $200,000 a year and even trainees are paid a living wage, but the company has a hard time finding workers.
“It’s the perception of plumbing,” said the spokesman, adding, “young people think ‘just a plumber? It’s manual labor.’”
That perception has to change. To be successful, not everyone needs to go to college. But everyone does need to earn a living. Today, one of the saddest results of COVID is that many people are no longer able to work, to earn a living, to support themselves and their families.
However, with wider distribution of new vaccines, with a unified federal response to the pandemic along with strict adherence to scientific guidelines, by next year, perhaps even sooner, we once again can focus on education and training.
And training is key. According to a November trade industry research report from IBISWorld, “the demand for trade and technical schools is expected to surge … due to the increase in the national unemployment rate.”
I still remember the young man, with his even younger helper, who came to my home in order to install Verizon FIOS. To me, the process seemed incredibly complicated. There were wires, inside and out, attached to fuses and other box-type appliances mounted on my laundry room walls — and yet when completed, my computer, my television and my phones all worked. Years later, they still do.
Ken, the installer, not even 30, told me how much he loved his job, traveling throughout the state, meeting interesting people, including, he laughingly said, a teacher who grew a large marijuana crop in her backyard! (This was before it was legal.)
He said as soon as he graduated from a technical high school, he joined Verizon and they trained him to do what he now does. He proudly told me he owned a home, two new cars and his wife was about to have their second child.
Meanwhile, Ken’s younger brother, who graduated from a local four-year college, was still living with their parents because he could not find a job.
Indeed, college is not for everyone.
In 1928, during the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover called for “a chicken in every pot”; during the last Recession, President Obama said every child should have a chance to go to college. Both presidents’ predictions did not exactly come true.
To be sure, many parents, especially those who didn’t attend college, definitely thought their children should. Even a third-rate institution or a large university with open admission was, according to some parents and students alike, better than no college at all. But a useless major combined with a disinterested student, with or without four years of partying, is not a ticket to employment or success.
On the other hand, learning skills in a technical high school, as an apprentice, or at a two-year community college — skills in technology, computing, health care, beauty care, construction; learning to become an electrician, a plumber, an auto mechanic, a long-distance trucker — plus skills in up-and-coming areas such as cybersecurity, climate change mitigation, transportation (think automatic vehicles), are both necessary and remunerative as well as challenging.
Taking pride in one’s job is extremely important for self-esteem. When people feel good about themselves, they make others feel good as well.
Talk to any technical schoolteacher and they will tell you how few discipline problems they have. And good technical schools also require courses in English — writing and grammar — as well as civics so graduates know we have three branches of government and nine Supreme Court justices and they know who our senators and congresspeople are.
The Ivy League and other good colleges and universities are here to stay. And for many students, they offer great opportunities. But they are expensive and cannot guarantee employment for everyone. Technical schools can.
Lynne Agress, who teaches in the Odyssey Program of Johns Hopkins, is president of BWB-Business Writing At Its Best Inc. and author of “The Feminine Irony” and “Working With Words in Business and Legal Writing.” Her email is lynneagress@aol.com.