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Matt Duhaime, left, and Michael Kelly help Chris Drumm
practice putting on a hazmat suit in the fire
science program of
Southern Maine Community College. All three previously earned
bachelor’s degrees and
now are training to become firefighters. Credit:
Molly Haley for The Hechinger Report
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The Hechinger Report
More people with bachelor’s degrees go back to school to learn skilled trades
Trend highlights how some students who get four-year educations don’t use them
By Jon Marcus
November 20, 2020
SCARBOROUGH, Maine — Putting on hazmat gear for the first time turns
out to be a long-drawn-out process, so the trainees who are practicing
this new skill make the time go faster with a little clowning around.
“Smile! Work it! Work it!” one shouts at a classmate as she
jokingly strikes glamour poses for photos in a heavy vapor suit with
rubber boots, two layers of gloves, a respirator and a 26-pound
breathing tank. Another compares the get-up to the uniforms worn by the
child-detection agents in the movie “Monsters, Inc.”
Spread out in a parking lot beside a fire station, these congenial
twenty- and thirtysomethings are enrolled in a community college
program to become firefighters.
Four of the five in this group have something else in common: They
previously earned bachelor’s degrees, even though they’ve now returned
to school to prepare for a job that doesn’t require one.
“I was part of that generation that was told to go to college, so
that’s what I did,” one, Michael Kelly, said with a shrug. “That’s what
we were supposed to do.”
But after getting a bachelor’s degree in political science from the
University of New England — for which he’s still paying off his student
loans — Kelly realized that what he actually wanted to do was become a
firefighter; after all, he said, unlike a politician, no one is ever
angry to see a firefighter show up.
“I spent a lot of money to end up doing … this,” said Kelly, who is now
28, as his colleagues stowed the equipment before they filed back into
a classroom.
A lot of other people also have invested time and money getting
four-year degrees only to return for career and technical education in
fields ranging from firefighting to automation to nursing, in which
jobs are relatively plentiful and salaries and benefits comparatively
good, but which require faster and far less costly certificates and
associate degrees.
First-year nurses with associate degrees can make $80,200 a year and up
and first-year electrical and power transmission installers, who also
need associate degrees, $80,400 — more than some graduates of Harvard
with not just bachelor’s, but master’s degrees.
One in 12 students now at community colleges — or more than 940,000 —
previously earned a bachelor’s degree, according to the American
Association of Community Colleges. And even as college and university
enrollment overall declines, some career and technical education
programs are reporting growth, and anticipating more of it.
In some cases, bachelor’s degree-holders are obtaining supplementary
skills — computer science majors adding certificates in cloud
technology, for example.
But the trend is also exposing how many high school graduates almost
reflexively go to college without entirely knowing why, pushed by
parents and counselors, only to be disappointed with the way things
turn out — and then start over.
“Somewhere along the line it became ingrained that in order to succeed,
whether your children wanted to go to college or not, they had to go to
college,” said Jane Oates, who was assistant secretary in the Obama
administration’s Department of Labor and now heads WorkingNation, a
nonprofit that tries to better match workers with jobs.
When they do start on the route to bachelor’s degrees, a third of
students change their majors at least once and more than half take
longer than four years to graduate, according to the National Center
for Education Statistics. Some of the rest drop out. Even among those
who manage to finish, more than 40 percent of recent graduates aged 22
to 27 are underemployed, meaning that they’re working in jobs that
don’t require their degree, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
reports.
That makes four-year universities and colleges “a really expensive
career exploration program,” quipped Amy Loyd, vice president at the
education and employment policy organization Jobs for the Future.
When Shana Tinkle was finishing high school, it was more or less “a
rite of passage” to go on and get a bachelor’s degree, she said — in
her case, in creative writing from Brown University.
“ ‘You’re supposed to do this. You’ll get a job later,’ ” Tinkle, now
32, remembered being told. “It wasn’t a particularly career-oriented
approach.”
Since college, she has worked as a bartender on a sightseeing train in
Alaska, a teacher in Canada, a crew member on a sailing ship and a
union organizer before ending up here at Southern Maine Community
College with the tentative goal of becoming a wildland firefighter, an
occupation she points out is in extremely high demand.
Advocates for career and technical education say that, for many people,
it makes more sense to start with those kinds of programs, reserving
the option of continuing on to more time-consuming and expensive
bachelor’s degrees later, instead of vice versa.
“They’re doing college backwards,” said Dave DesRochers, a former
offensive tackle for the Seattle Seahawks and now vice president of
PATH2, which helps students figure out what they want to do with their
lives — before they finish high school — and choose their educations
accordingly.
Sebastian Valenzuela learned the hard way. He got a bachelor’s degree
in jazz studies at Loyola University New Orleans and a master’s in
music composition at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee —
credentials he calls “all these pieces of what are now wallpaper.”
Now he’s getting an associate degree in cloud computing at Northern Virginia Community College.
“You can get a good job without a bachelor’s degree,” Valenzuela
said. “You don’t need to go to a fancy school. You don’t need to spend
a lot of money. But how would high school me know that?”
That’s Gianna Dinuzzo’s story, too. “Even deciding what I was going to
major in in college, I was just going through the motions. I graduated
from high school and then — what’s next? Okay, college,” said Dinuzzo,
who earned a bachelor’s degree in community health from Fresno State
and is now studying toward an associate degree at Fresno City College
to become a dental hygienist.
Chris Drumm went to the University of Massachusetts Amherst and earned
a bachelor’s degree in business administration. “I didn’t really know
what I wanted to do,” he said. But “my parents were very insistent on,
‘No matter what you do, you’ve got to get an education.’”
He worked in hospitality for a while, then as a paralegal, and now is
in the firefighter training course at SMCC. “I wish I knew about this
program when I was coming out of high school,” said Drumm, now 25.
Drumm’s fellow trainee Matt Duhaime attended the prestigious Boston
Latin School, from which almost everyone in his class went on to
four-year colleges and universities. “The one that didn’t went into the
Air Force. I remember the teachers and administrators wondering why he
wasn’t going to college.”
Duhaime chose Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, which is
within 30 miles of at least seven ski resorts, largely because “I knew
I wanted to get better at snowboarding,” he said. What he didn’t know
was what to do with the bachelor’s degree in marketing he ended up
with. So Duhaime worked at restaurants until, now 27, he has also found
himself in the firefighter training program.
“Coming out of high school there’s social pressure on you: ‘Where are
you going to college?’ Then there’s social pressure on your parents:
‘Where is your son going to college?’ ” he said. “But the hardest thing
is making such a finite decision about what you want to do at 18 years
old.”
Nicole Buff got a bachelor’s degree in criminology and psychology at
Indiana State University just as the last recession started. With jobs
scarce, she ended up working in a manufacturing plant that makes brake
components for cars and then as a quality technician. Now she’s
pursuing a credential in advanced automation and robotics technology at
Ivy Tech Community College, a field she said she really likes.
“There is a little resentment” about the time and money spent on her
bachelor’s degree, said Buff, now 36. “I’ll never regret learning
something. But I was part of that group of people who listened to their
parents and their teachers and advisers who said ‘Yes, get this and
you’ll be set.’ ”
She laughed. “And I did, and it ended up poorly. I don’t think when
we’re 18 we’re anywhere near ready to plot out what we’re going to do.”
This not only winds up costing time and money; it contributes to a
shortage of workers in skilled trades, said Robert Templin, a senior
fellow at the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program who served
as president of two community colleges.
“It was pretty frequent that we found arts and sciences students who
had not considered when they started their bachelor’s degree education
how they wanted to make a living,” Templin said. “Universities are
still seen as places where young people go to figure out what they want
to do, and that’s expensive, not only for the students and their
parents but for the taxpayers who support those four-year institutions.”
The push to help students make more informed career decisions while
they’re still in high school is coinciding with frustration over the
high cost of college — further heightened by the fact that many
institutions have continued to charge full in-person tuition for remote
classes during the Covid-19 crisis — and increased public awareness of
the potential for jobs at good pay in the skilled trades.
The pandemic also has intensified demand for so-called “middle skills”
workers with certificates or associate degrees, such as nurses and
information systems security technicians.
“If students had more awareness of other options, training
opportunities or workforce demand at an earlier age they might take a
different path,” said Shaun Dougherty, a professor at Vanderbilt
University who studies education policy.
In Virginia, Colorado and Texas, where earnings are tracked, students
with certain technically oriented credentials short of bachelor’s
degrees earn an average of from $2,000 to $11,000 a year more than
bachelor’s degree-holders, the American Institutes for Research found.
Nationally, median pay for a construction manager is $95,260, according
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics; an aircraft mechanic, $64,310; a web
developer, $73,760; and a dental hygienist, $76,220. Plumbers make a
median of $55,160, and the top 10 percent take home $97,170;
firefighters, $50,850, rising to $92,020 for the top 10 percent.
And an analysis by the Georgetown University Center on Education and
the Workforce found first-year nurses with associate degrees making
$80,200 a year and up and first-year electrical and power transmission
installers, who also need associate degrees, $80,400 — more than some
graduates of Harvard with not just bachelor’s, but master’s degrees.
Many of these kinds of jobs are coming open even as the recession cuts
into employment. That’s because more skilled tradespeople are between
the ages of 45 and 64, and nearing retirement, than workers in other
occupations, the staffing company Adecco calculates.
Graduates with bachelor’s degrees still generally make more than people
with lesser credentials — about $19,000 a year more than associate
degree recipients when they’re at the peak of their respective careers,
according to The Hamilton Project. (Six in 10 people who go to
four-year universities or colleges also borrow to pay for their
educations, and end up with an average $28,950 in student loan debt.)
And employers often prefer candidates with bachelor’s degrees, even for
jobs that previously did not require them, a Harvard Business School
study found. This so-called “credential inflation” tends to peak during
and after recessions, according to research conducted at the Federal
Reserve Bank of Boston, which found that, during the last recession,
the proportion of job postings requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher
rose by more than 10 percentage points.
Completing career and technical education is almost always faster and
less expensive than studying toward a bachelor’s degree, however, and
trainees can earn while they learn. That’s the case for several of
these future firefighters, who are already working in fire stations and
getting paid to go on calls.
“It’s just a better pathway for people who are not so sure they
want a bachelor’s degree but they know they want to go into, for
example, firefighting,” said Michelle Rhee Weise, author of the new
book “Long Life Learning” and former senior vice president for
workforce strategies at the Strada Education Network. “And that’s
important to know before they make their huge investment.”
All of this is helping change perceptions of long-disparaged career and technical — previously called vocational — education.
“We have done a lot as far as addressing the recognition of the value
of these jobs,” said Chelle Travis, executive director of SkillsUSA, an
association of teachers, students and industries that focus on it.
This changing awareness is already having an effect. Maine’s community
colleges report that the number of people signing on to short-term job
training quadrupled over the last two years, to 3,625 in the 12 months
ending June 30. El Paso Community College in Texas is expanding those
kinds of programs; its president, William Serrata — who chairs the
American Association of Community Colleges — told education journalists
in September that his counterparts are also preparing for an increase
in demand.
Arkansas, where a quarter of skilled tradespeople are at or near
retirement, has launched a campaign to nudge more people into career
and technical education. And New Jersey educators agreed this year to
create smoother routes for students from vocational high schools to
community colleges for career and technical education.
Parents still see four-year universities as the ultimate goal, however,
high schools are ranked on the basis of how many of their graduates go
to one and some jobs in manufacturing and skilled trades continue to be
looked down upon.
“It’s not as cut-and-dry as too many students are going to
four-year degree programs,” said Alisha Hyslop, director of public
policy for the Association for Career and Technical Education. “It’s
more that we need more education for students before they get to
college, more career awareness and exploration opportunities to learn
about careers.”
There’s some risk that this could end up diverting low-income and
racial and ethnic minority students into training for skilled trades
while their higher-income and white classmates continue to get
bachelor’s degrees.
“That is the big concern, and part of why people are a little
reluctant to take it on,” Dougherty said of the idea that high schools
more proactively help students pick career paths. “It has to be done
thoughtfully so that we don’t go back to a tracking model [based on]
the color of your skin or your ZIP code.”
Still, he and others point out that higher education is already deeply
stratified in these ways, with more affluent Americans going to the
most prestigious universities and lower-income ones to community and
for-profit colleges.
“So the question becomes,” Weise said: “How are we going to do this better?”
Sometimes the question may be more simple: What makes someone happy?
For Peter Wong, it wasn’t necessarily the bachelor’s degree in
anthropology he earned at Loyola University Chicago, or even his
subsequent law degree.
What Wong really wanted to do was work around food.
“I went to college because that’s what we did,” Wong said. “My mother
said, ‘You’re going to get a degree if it kills me.’ I really didn’t
want to go. I was just there trying to figure out what I wanted to do.”
He ended up in sales jobs and worked for a bank for a while and then for a national retailer. “It was a paycheck,” he said.
Now 52, and having moved home to Chicago to be closer to family during
the pandemic, Wong is studying toward an associate degree in culinary
arts at Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana.
“I don’t regret the stuff I’ve done,” he said. “But I wish I had done this 20 years ago.”
Tinkle, the aspiring wildlands firefighter with the Brown degree, said she hears that a lot.
“A lot of people I’ve met have said to me, ‘I wish I’d done what you
were doing when I was your age,’ ” she said. “And I tell them: ‘Well,
you should have.’ ”
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