The Trade School Path That Could Save a Generation

Let me tell you about two young men from the same block in Southeast Washington, D.C. I will call them Marcus and Deon because I know their families and they did not ask for their lives to be used as illustrations, but the illustration is necessary because the data alone does not capture what is at stake. Marcus graduated from high school in 2018 with decent grades and the unquestioned assumption, shared by his mother, his teachers, his guidance counselor, and every authority figure in his life, that the next step was college. He enrolled at a state university, declared a major in communications, took out $47,000 in federal student loans over three years, and dropped out after his junior year when the money ran out and the purpose never materialized. He is twenty-five now, working at a warehouse distribution center for $18 an hour, carrying $47,000 in debt for a degree he does not have, and the degree he does not have would not have meaningfully improved his earnings if he had it.

Deon graduated from the same high school the same year. His uncle was an electrician, and Deon had spent summers helping him on jobs, and when Deon told his mother he wanted to go to trade school instead of college, she cried. She did not cry because the plan was bad. She cried because she had been taught — by the culture, by the schools, by a generation of messaging that equated college with success and everything else with failure — that her son was choosing a lesser path. Deon enrolled in a two-year electrical training program. Total cost: $14,000. He completed his apprenticeship, passed his journeyman exam, and at twenty-five he is earning $72,000 a year with full benefits, overtime availability that pushes his annual income above $90,000, and a clear path to master electrician certification and business ownership. He has no debt. He has a pension building. He owns his tools and his truck. He is, by any measurable economic standard, in a stronger financial position than 80% of his peers who went to college.

Marcus made the decision the culture told him to make. Deon made the decision the data supported. And the tragedy is not Marcus’s story alone — it is that his story is replicated hundreds of thousands of times every year, across the Black community, because we have built a cultural consensus around college that does not survive contact with economic reality.

The Numbers That the Culture Ignores

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes occupational employment and wage data annually, and the numbers for skilled trades are not ambiguous. The median annual wage for electricians in the United States is $60,040. For plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters: $59,880. For HVAC mechanics and installers: $51,390. For structural iron and steel workers: $57,160. For elevator and escalator installers and repairers: $102,420. These are median figures — half of workers in these fields earn more, many significantly more.

With overtime — which is abundant in most trades due to chronic labor shortages — annual earnings for experienced tradespeople routinely reach $80,000 to $120,000. With business ownership, which is the natural trajectory of many trade careers and which requires nothing more than a license, a truck, and a reputation, earnings of $150,000 or more are documented and not uncommon. A master plumber who owns a small operation with two or three employees can generate $200,000 or more in annual revenue, and the capital required to start that business is a fraction of what a four-year degree costs.

Now consider the comparison. The average cost of a trade school program in the United States is approximately $17,000 and takes two years to complete. The average cost of a four-year bachelor’s degree, including room and board, is approximately $104,000 at a public university and significantly more at a private institution. The time to completion for a bachelor’s degree is not four years for most students — it is closer to five and a half years, and for Black students at many institutions, the six-year graduation rate is below 50%.

This means that the trade school graduate enters the workforce two years earlier, with one-sixth the debt, earning a salary that is competitive with or exceeds the salary of the average bachelor’s degree holder. The college graduate — if they graduate — enters the workforce two to three years later, carrying five to six times the debt, and earns a median starting salary that, in many fields, does not exceed what the tradesperson was already earning by that point.

The Employment Reality

Ninety percent of trade school graduates are employed within six months of completing their programs. The comparable figure for bachelor’s degree holders is approximately 70%, and that figure includes employment in any field — including positions that do not require a degree. The underemployment rate for recent college graduates — those working in jobs that do not require the degree they earned — is estimated at 40% or higher by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Meanwhile, the skilled trades face a labor shortage so severe that it constitutes an economic crisis in slow motion. The Associated Builders and Contractors estimates that the construction industry needs 650,000 additional workers beyond normal hiring to meet demand. By 2028, projections indicate more than 3 million unfilled skilled trade positions across the American economy. Electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC technicians, machinists — these are not jobs that are going away. They are jobs that cannot be offshored (the pipe is here, not in Mumbai), cannot be easily automated (a robot cannot yet navigate a crawl space to repair ductwork), and that increase in demand as the country’s infrastructure ages and new construction continues.

The person who completes a two-year trade program today enters a labor market where employers are competing for workers, where starting salaries reflect that competition, and where job security is as close to guaranteed as any occupation in the modern economy. The person who completes a four-year degree in communications, psychology, sociology, or any of the other fields that absorb the majority of Black college students enters a labor market where they are one of thousands of applicants for positions that may not exist by the time they graduate.

The Cultural Barrier

Given these numbers, the question becomes unavoidable: why is the Black community not flooding trade schools? Why are Black parents not celebrating the child who announces an apprenticeship with the same pride they reserve for the child who announces a college acceptance? Why is the tradesperson treated as a consolation prize rather than as a strategic economic choice?

The answer is cultural, and it is rooted in a history that is understandable but that has outlived its usefulness. For Black Americans, college represented liberation. During segregation, access to higher education was restricted, fought for, bled for. The ability to attend college was proof that the barriers had been breached, that the next generation had arrived somewhere the previous generation was forbidden to go. College was not just an economic calculation. It was a civil rights victory made personal. And that emotional resonance — the mother who weeps with pride at her child’s college acceptance letter — has calcified into a cultural commandment that equates a four-year degree with success and any other path with failure.

This commandment ignores the data. It ignores the fact that 40% of Black students who enter four-year institutions do not graduate within six years, and those students leave with debt and no degree — the worst possible economic outcome. It ignores the fact that the earnings premium for a bachelor’s degree has been declining for decades in fields outside STEM, business, and healthcare. It ignores the fact that student loan debt, which disproportionately burdens Black graduates and especially Black women, functions as a form of negative wealth that delays homeownership, business formation, and every other wealth-building activity for years or decades.

And this commandment ignores something that should be a source of pride rather than shame: the trades are in the DNA of Black America.

The History They Erased

Enslaved Black people built the physical infrastructure of the United States. This is not a metaphor. The White House was built by enslaved laborers. The United States Capitol was built by enslaved laborers. The plantations, the railroads, the bridges, the roads, the churches, the courthouses of the American South were built by Black hands that were among the most skilled in the Western Hemisphere. Enslaved Black craftsmen were carpenters, blacksmiths, coopers, masons, and ironworkers whose work still stands two centuries later.

After emancipation, Black tradesmen dominated the skilled labor markets of the South. In 1865, Black workers constituted the majority of skilled craftsmen in many Southern cities. They were the carpenters, the bricklayers, the plasterers, the painters. The quality of their work was not in question. Their market position was not in question. What was in question was whether white workers would tolerate the competition, and the answer, enforced through union exclusion, licensing barriers, violence, and the systematic dismantling of Black access to apprenticeships, was no.

The exclusion of Black workers from trade unions is one of the most consequential and least discussed acts of economic violence in American history. It took a population that dominated skilled labor and, over the course of a century, pushed it out of the trades entirely — not through competition, not through inferior skill, but through organized racial exclusion. The unions that were supposed to protect workers were weaponized to protect white workers from Black competition, and the result was the decimation of Black wealth-building through skilled trades that persists to this day.

Black representation in registered apprenticeship programs is approximately 11% — below the 13.6% population share. This is not because Black young people lack aptitude for trades. It is because a century of exclusion created a cultural break between the Black community and the skilled trades, and that break has been reinforced by a cultural narrative that treats trades as beneath the aspirations of a people who sacrificed so much for the right to attend college.

The German Model and the American Delusion

Germany operates the strongest economy in Europe. It has the fourth-largest GDP on earth. Its manufacturing sector is the envy of the industrialized world. And approximately 60% of German students enter vocational training rather than university education. This is not treated as a failure. It is treated as a feature — a system that matches young people with careers that suit their abilities, that provides them with rigorous technical training, and that produces a workforce capable of building things that the world wants to buy.

The German dual-education system combines classroom instruction with paid, on-the-job apprenticeships. Students earn while they learn. They graduate with no debt, with marketable skills, and with employment prospects that make the American college graduate’s job search look like a cruel joke. Skilled tradespeople in Germany are respected professionals, compensated accordingly, and the country’s economic dominance is built on their backs.

The United States, by contrast, has spent fifty years telling every student that a four-year degree is the only path to a middle-class life, and the result is $1.77 trillion in student loan debt, a skilled labor shortage that threatens the physical infrastructure of the country, and a generation of young people who were promised that a diploma was a ticket to prosperity and discovered that it was, for many of them, a ticket to debt service.

The Black community has absorbed this delusion more completely than any other demographic group, in part because the emotional significance of college in Black culture is greater, and the cultural cost of questioning it is higher. The parent who suggests trade school is accused of having low expectations. The guidance counselor who recommends an apprenticeship is accused of tracking Black students away from college. The cultural machinery that was built to protect Black aspirations is now protecting Black debt.

The Entrepreneurship Angle

Here is the piece that the college-or-nothing narrative misses entirely, and it is the piece that should matter most to a community that talks constantly about economic empowerment while steering its children toward employment rather than ownership.

A licensed electrician with a truck and a set of tools is a business owner on day one. Not in theory. In practice. The barriers to entry for starting a trades business are among the lowest of any professional field: a license, a vehicle, basic tools, and the willingness to answer the phone when it rings. The capital required is a fraction of what any other business demands. The customer base is guaranteed by the simple fact that pipes break, wires need running, air conditioners fail, and roofs leak, and none of these problems care about the state of the stock market or the latest disruption in the technology sector.

The scalability is straightforward. One tradesperson becomes a crew of two, then four, then a company with employees, vehicles, and contracts. The path from apprentice to business owner is shorter, cheaper, and more reliable than the path from college graduate to business owner in almost any other field. And the resulting business builds real wealth — not the paper wealth of a stock portfolio, but the tangible wealth of equipment, contracts, reputation, and recurring revenue that can be passed to the next generation.

Programs That Are Building the Pipeline

The infrastructure to rebuild Black participation in the skilled trades exists and is growing. YouthBuild, a national program operating in over 260 communities, provides young people aged 16–24 who have left high school with construction skills training, educational support, and pathways to apprenticeships and employment. The program targets precisely the population that the college-for-all narrative has failed most catastrophically — young people who did not thrive in the traditional academic environment and who have been offered no alternative except low-wage service work.

Helmets to Hardhats connects military veterans with apprenticeship and career opportunities in the building trades. Black veterans, who represent a significant proportion of the post-9/11 veteran population, are an undertapped pipeline for skilled trades recruitment — they already have discipline, physical capability, teamwork skills, and a comfort with structured training that translates directly to apprenticeship programs.

Apprenti, founded in partnership with the Washington Technology Industry Association, has expanded beyond technology to include skilled trades apprenticeships, with a specific focus on increasing diversity in fields where Black and Hispanic workers are underrepresented. The income-share model used by several trade training programs — where students pay nothing upfront and repay a percentage of their income after employment — removes the financial barrier that prevents many Black families from investing in trade education.

Several HBCUs have begun developing partnerships with trade organizations and construction companies, recognizing that the traditional four-year degree model does not serve every student and that the trades represent an opportunity that their institutions have historically overlooked. These partnerships are in their early stages, but they represent a critical evolution: the institutions that the Black community trusts most are beginning to validate the trade path, and that validation matters because cultural change follows institutional endorsement.

The Booker T. Washington Vindication

It is impossible to discuss the skilled trades and the Black community without invoking Booker T. Washington, and it is impossible to invoke Washington without navigating a century of mischaracterization. Washington’s emphasis on vocational education and economic self-sufficiency was ridiculed by Du Bois and the Talented Tenth as accommodationism — a surrender of political rights in exchange for manual labor. This characterization has defined Washington’s legacy in Black intellectual culture for over a hundred years, and it is one of the most costly misreadings in the history of the African diaspora.

Washington did not oppose education. He founded Tuskegee Institute, one of the most important educational institutions in Black history. He did not oppose political rights. He lobbied presidents and funded legal challenges to segregation through channels that were not public because public advocacy would have endangered his students and his institution. What Washington understood — what the data now confirms beyond any reasonable dispute — is that economic independence is the foundation on which every other form of freedom is built, and that a people who can build, repair, and maintain the physical infrastructure of a society will always have economic value that no political reversal can take away.

“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”
— Booker T. Washington

Washington was not wrong. He was early. And the century the Black community spent dismissing his economic vision in favor of a strategy that produced employees instead of owners is a century of wealth that was never built, businesses that were never started, and economic independence that was traded for the prestige of degrees that, for millions of Black graduates, delivered debt rather than deliverance.

The Most Expensive Form of Snobbery

I want to speak directly to the Black parent who is reading this article and feeling the resistance. The resistance that says: I did not sacrifice so that my child could be a plumber. I did not fight so that my son could be an electrician. I did not march, and my parents did not march, so that the next generation could go backward to manual labor.

I understand the resistance. I understand its roots. But I need you to hear this: your child with a plumbing license and a small business will out-earn, out-save, and out-build your neighbor’s child with a communications degree and $80,000 in student loans. Your child will own a business while the other child is applying for jobs. Your child will be building equity while the other child is servicing debt. Your child will be hiring employees while the other child is updating a resume. The numbers are not ambiguous. The outcomes are not theoretical. The data is published, verified, and available to anyone willing to look at it.

The most disrespected career path in the Black community is the one that builds the most wealth with the least debt in the shortest time. That is not a coincidence. It is a cultural failure rooted in a historical misunderstanding that has hardened into gospel, and the cost of that gospel is measured not in prestige but in the millions of dollars of wealth that Black families did not build because they were too proud to build things with their hands.

The ancestor who laid the bricks of the White House was not performing a lesser act than the senator who works inside it. The craftsman who built the cathedral is not less important than the preacher who fills it. Skill, applied to material, transformed into structure — this is the oldest form of human dignity, the most reliable form of economic independence, and the most direct path to the ownership that the Black community talks about endlessly and pursues insufficiently.

Three million trade jobs are going unfilled. The training takes two years. The debt is minimal. The employment is near-certain. The path to ownership is direct. The earnings are documented. The only thing standing between a generation of young Black people and this opportunity is a cultural narrative that mistakes pride for strategy and prestige for prosperity. That narrative needs to die so that the generation it is holding back can live.