WSJ Your Money Briefing - Why School Districts Are Spending Millions to Revive High-School Shop Classes

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Welders, mechanics and carpenters could have a promising future in the digital age. School districts around the U.S. are spending tens of millions of dollars to expand and revamp high-school shop classes. Wall Street Journal reporter Te-Ping Chen joins host Ariana Aspuru to discuss how these hands-on skills are helping students get a jump on lucrative old-school careers. Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Nova Kane, forming theaters March 14th. Here's your Money Briefing for Thursday, March 6th. I'm Mariana Aspuru for the Wall Street Journal. Driven by rising costs of higher education and a tough job market for white collar workers, high schools are investing in the hands-on wood, metal and machinery skills learned in shop classes. Economic downturn or not, AI or not, you're going to need someone who's going to fix your toilet. You're going to need somebody who's going to repair your air conditioning unit. And so there's a sense that these are jobs that are always going to be there.

We'll talk with Wall Street Journal reporter Deping Chen about how these cutting-edge classes are helping students get a jump start on lucrative old-school careers. That's after the break. When the frustration grows and the doubts start to creep in, we all need someone who has our back to tell us we'll be okay, to remind us of our ability to believe, because their belief in us transfers to self-belief and reminds us of all that we're capable of. We all need someone to make us believe. Hashtag, you got this.

You got this. School districts across the country are spending millions of dollars to expand and revamp high school shop classes. Wall Street Journal reporter TaPing Chen joins me. TaPing, did you take shop classes in high school? I know I didn't. I didn't. I didn't. It wasn't offered. No, it wasn't even like part of our roster at all.

But I always thought I would take it when I was in high school. What kinds of skills are offered during shop classes? It can really run the gamut, but a lot of it is working with tools, ranging from learning how to build a birdhouse to something more advanced, learning how to work with different kinds of machining tools, programming different machine tools, really all over the map. And what kinds of careers do these skills lead to?

Could lead to a career in construction, career in manufacturing, automotive, depends on the kinds of courses. But a lot of the skills are pretty foundational and would translate into a lot of different kinds of the trades. By the time I got to high school, shop classes weren't really offered anymore. Where did these classes go? Well, a lot of these sorts of classes started to get more of a bad rap after the 1983 publication

of the Federal Report, A Nation at Risk, which really outlined this vision of American schools declining and needing to raise their overall academic caliber. And with that came a push against a lot of classes like automotive repair or welding and also a feeling at the same time that some of these classes were not quite fair to students who were maybe coming from less wealthy schools or less wealthy families and the sense that they were shunting poor students into these more manual careers while their more wealthy peers were getting to go to college.

And overall, that created a feeling of stigma in many cases around these kinds of classes. How do students feel about shop classes coming back? It really ranges, of course, in every community, but in a number of schools, there are efforts to try and make these classes feel more accessible, sometimes rebranding them, giving them new names. And among the students I spoke to, a lot of them feel like the stigma has really lessened, that when they talk to their peers, if they are indeed planning to pursue a career in the trades, there's more of a feeling that,

hey, those are jobs that pay well, they're stable, and that can be a good path too. What economic factors can we look to to understand why hands-on skills are more in demand right now? The trades, of course, have long been in demand, especially so now with waves of retirement coming on and more folk aging out of those sorts of occupations. That's part of it. But I think also a lot of the reason why there is a rise in interest in many cases among say school districts, as well as the business community, as well as voters and families in these classes is also because of the rise in the cost

of college and the sense that the four year path, which for many years was presented to students as really the only path, might not make the most financial sense and it might not make the most career sense either when you look at some of the stats and see that many college students graduate and get jobs that didn't require college degrees. And so you have a lot of folk who are reassessing whether or not these sorts of college for all paths and mindsets are the best routes for all kids and whether they might be alternatives out there. What can the salary look like for some of these workers after graduation?

It really is all over the map, right? Because we're talking about 50 states, all kinds of communities, all kinds of jobs. The jobs are very diverse. I spoke to a dealership out in Bakersfield, California, who hires plenty of kids fresh out of high school who've taken some automotive shop. And he said that your starting wages may start maybe around $19 an hour, but stick around for four years, work way up.

And he's got kids who are making six figures, four years out of high school with no college degree and no college debt. And we're also hearing from workers the threat of emerging technology and AI and the feeling that they're going to take their jobs. Why are people now betting on manual skills? Look, it's an uncertain job market.

And when you were in a moment like that, looking for jobs that seem more solid, like they're always going to be there, economic downturn or not, AI or not, you're going to need someone who's going to fix your toilet, you're going to need somebody who's going to repair your air conditioning unit. And so there's a sense that these are jobs that are always going to be there and they're not going to be outsourced to technology or taken away. And have enrollment trends in colleges supported what we feel has been happening? If you look at some of the data and certainly if you talk to a lot of vocational schools out there, there is a jump in enrollment that has happened in recent years.

The percentage of students enrolled in vocational focused two-year community colleges jumped 14% in fall of 2024 and it had also jumped by double digits the year prior. And at the same time, we do see the share of workers, young workers ages 20 to 24 in blue collar jobs also growing. It was up to 18% last May. That was up two points from where it was at the start of 2019. It's hard to say where these trends are going, but definitely if you look at the numbers now, you do see some of that interest being reflected in the data. In recent years, high schools have added coding classes and integrated more technology into their curriculum

to get students ready for the workforce. Is this a step in that direction? A lot of the skills would be folded into an overall push for just in general more sense of career readiness and a feeling that students should be equipped with skills that are going to, again, allow them to take paths that aren't necessarily just prescriptively for your college.

And so it isn't just actually shop classes that are getting this injection of interest and money from school districts. There's also been a big push towards building up facilities for everything from teaching kids how to be maybe pharmaceutical techs to veterinarians to cosmetologists. And just again, the sense that students for a long time have been told that their one option is to go to college and that's the way to succeed and the feeling that now that really maybe is not the case and that they need to figure out ways to equip students for careers in other directions too. That's WSJ Reporter Tiping Chen.

And that's it for your Money Briefing. This episode was produced by Zoe Kolkin with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Arianna Aspuru for The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening.