Labor Shortages in the Trades

Here’s an article at Forbes that supports the argument, frequently made by one of the regular commenters here, that it’s just too hard to find skilled workers in the trades in the United States:

Welders, carpenters, HVAC technicians–the U.S. has far too few of them. The shortfall in welders alone runs as high as 240,000, and it will get worse. The American Welding Society predicts it will reach 340,000 by 2024. The average welder is 54 years old, compared with about age 40 for the American workforce as a whole. Young people simply aren’t going into skilled trades like welding.

The shortage of skilled tradespeople amounts to a tragic mismatch. These jobs can pay well. Including overtime, welders can make more than $100,000 a year–and the lack of welders means there’s plenty of overtime. A welder will need a high school diploma or GED equivalent, followed by at least nine months of professional training. Private welding schools run about $16,000, but many junior colleges with a vocational focus offer training for far less. In financial terms the return on investment is terrific. So why aren’t more young people headed into the skilled trades?

The explanations offered include:

1. Few American high schools offer vocational training.
2. Flawed conclusions about the value of higher education.

On the latter subject here’s an interesting observation from the op-ed:

The average salary for a lawyer in the U.S. is $135,000, but the median salary isn’t much over $110,000, as most lawyers aren’t partners at Skadden Arps. So a hustling welder can make more than a median lawyer, with far less money invested in education. The welder can be earning money by age 18, the lawyer not until 25.

There’s one more thing that should be added to that. The distribution of incomes among lawyers isn’t normal (in the statistical sense) and not just because the average and median are different. Incomes in the practice of law occur in a bimodal distribution (a curve that looks like the two humps of camel). The farther right of those two humps corresponding to higher incomes consists of lawyers who graduated from top law schools. The peak of that further left hump is around $40,000. “Average” and “median” don’t really mean anything when talking about lawyers’ incomes because there are two of them.

I’d add another factor to the two cited. We’ve had more than a generation of education policy that has over-emphasized academic achievement. Not only is that gender-biased (as mentioned in the op-ed) it ignores the economic realities.

Here’s my proposal: we should only provide subsidies for STEM and vocational training. Young people can still follow their bliss if it leads them to pursue majors in French literature or art history (or interest studies) but that shouldn’t be paid for out of the public purse. That will mean a dramatic change in how the subsidies are paid rather than just how much is paid.