Beware the Advice to Skip College

By Anthony P. Carnevale

All across the country for the next few years, we will see ribbon-cutting after ribbon-cutting for new infrastructure projects, celebrating high-paying jobs that don’t require college degrees. Everybody who is anybody will be there for the cameras. A reporter in the crowd will inevitably ask, “Does this mean that people don’t need to go to college to get a good job?” Both Republican and Democratic office-holders will unabashedly respond, “YES!”

Our political leaders deserve our gratitude for working together to create new blue-collar jobs and new infrastructure after decades of decline. But they are making too much of a good thing. President Biden talks frequently about new factory jobs at a semiconductor plant in Ohio that pay an average of $130,000 a year, for example. “And you don’t need a college degree for all of them; you need the training,” he said in a recent speech.

The President was telling only part of the story. Jobs paying that highly for workers without a college degree exist, but finding one is like spotting a four-leaf clover. Workers without a college degree earning $130,000 or more make up just one percent of the workforce.

Yes, thanks in part to the infrastructure law, blue-collar jobs in construction, iron-working, and the like will grow in the next decade, but they are declining as a share of the overall job market. A great number of these jobs will last just a few short years, and then expire. It takes a lot of workers to build a road or tunnel, but far fewer workers to maintain it.

While incentives for domestic manufacturing in the CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act will result in higher domestic production, one new chip plant in Ohio doesn’t mean the manufacturing industry is coming back in America. Technology is still disrupting manufacturing — it takes a lot fewer workers to make electric cars than cars with internal combustion engines. Notwithstanding dramatic changes in trade law, international supply chains will be back. The manufacturing industry long was the biggest employer in America. At the peak of its employment, in 1979, manufacturing accounted for 22 percent of American jobs. Now it is down to 8 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a share that will continue to shrink through at least 2031.

The “skip college” advice will gain momentum between now and the next national election because politicians on both sides of the aisle are fighting for the crucial blue-collar vote. If they’re going to keep the White House and win back the House of Representatives, Democrats need to hold the “Blue Wall” by winning states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Republicans need to hang onto white working-class voters, now the bedrock of their party.

Unfortunately, when politicians say “you don’t need college,” the people most likely to listen are the ones who historically are the least likely to go to college anyway: men from racial/ethnic minority groups and working-class white families. The message will be ignored in upper middle-class households, where parents intent on passing on their status are busy readying their children for college. And the divide in society between those with high-paying managerial and professional jobs and those with lower-paying manual-labor jobs will only continue to grow.

The need for postsecondary education, meanwhile, is infiltrating nearly every occupation, even those long associated with lower educational levels. In manufacturing, for example, 56 percent of jobs required at least some postsecondary education in 2021. The shop supervisor of yesteryear has been replaced by the college-educated manufacturing engineer of today. The result is that only one-third of manufacturing jobs over the next decade will go to people with a high school education or less.

In the construction industry, the percentage of employees who will need at least some postsecondary education will increase from 37 percent to 45 percent between 2021 and 2031, the largest increase in the proportion of workers needing postsecondary education expected for any industry during that period.

In 2021, 68 percent of all jobs required at least some postsecondary education. By 2031, that proportion will grow to 72 percent. That’s the more realistic long-term message about our future. High-paying jobs for less-educated workers sound alluring, but it’s not right to encourage people to believe that the economy is somehow going to party again like it’s 1979.

Dr. Carnevale is the director and research professor at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. CEW is a research and policy institute within Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy that studies the links among education, career qualifications, and workforce demands.

Thanks to Kathryn Peltier Campbell, Catherine Morris, and Martin Van Der Werf for editorial feedback; Fan Zhang for graphic design; and Johnna Guillerman and Abiola Fagbayi for publication support.

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