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Have We Led Our Children Astray By Pushing Them To Go to College?
nat rosasco • April 14, 2023
not everyone needs to go to college
As a child and teenager I loved working with my hands. Making things and fixing things was fun to me, and I was good at it. My favorite subject in school was mathematics; it came easy to me, and I was always at the top of my class. My parents encouraged me go to college and study to become a mechanical engineer. I felt I would be letting them down if I did not follow the path they were convinced was right for me, so off to college I went with an amazing SAT score in mathematics and a deplorable score in critical reading.
After my first six weeks in college I was failing miserably in all of the core subjects, including advanced algebra. The only course I was excelling in was the machine shop class. I dropped out of college figuring I would restart the next semester, pay more attention and study harder. It was like the wind had been let out of my sail. I had always been a high achiever and this was such a reality check for me. As I reflected on what had happened, I realized my wiring was such that I am a person who learns by doing. I had not learned to study in a traditional sense, and the fact that high school had not been challenging to me meant I could not keep pace.
I decided not to return to college and instead decided to go to trade school and become a machinist. That was the right decision for me and enabled what has been an amazing career. I am passionate about making things, and my gift for practicable math, geometry and logic made me very good at machining and technology. People who are good at what they do and do it with a passion will always be in demand and have very rewarding careers.
We have a real challenge in America when it comes to our economy and employment. There are millions of unemployed or underemployed people who thought they were taking the right path, encouraged by their parents and society to go to college. Many had not found their passion or what they were uniquely talented at doing. So they went to college and received liberal arts degrees, general business degrees and the like. They graduated from college as a generalist with no particular skill or talent that differentiated them from the millions of other graduates looking for jobs in our largely service oriented economy. It is going to take a long time before our economy is able to employ all these people unless they get some sort of technical training. Did we do our children a disservice?
I speak with owners of small manufacturing companies every day and most all of them tell me their limiting factor to growth is finding skilled manufacturing talent. There are jobs going unfilled. Many OEM’s and product companies want to bring manufacturing work back to America that was previously offshored, but they are struggling because the capacity and talent in America just isn’t there after years of erosion. Not only is this bad for the companies that want to grow and can’t, it is bad for our economy in general as every manufacturing job creates several downstream jobs.
It is time for us to rethink the paths we encourage our youth to take and shine a spotlight on the fact that manufacturing is cool.
CNC machining business in the United States that are ITAR registered, Certified to AS9100 and NIST800-171 compliant are working to meet the customer demand.
we all say there is a skill shortage in manufacturing, but is the root cause that people are not motivated to work and learn hard things?