Shrug, I graduated college well over a decade ago. I turned down several job offers in the low to mid 30k range and accepted one in the upper 30s (Computer Science). At the time Chemical Engineering majors were entertaining jobs in the upper 40s to low 50s. You can double the initial salary within 5 years in most cases.

And that’s why people are pushing for 4 year degrees. Plus the much lower incidence of on the job injuries. If the kid has no aptitude for college, but is mechanically inclined then I definitely agree that a Vocational training is the way to go (and that’s the direction my brother went, and it’s done very well for him), but shooting down college degrees is really pretty silly.

Every industry seems to to react differently to supply and demand. Those who run the industry heavily influence the “supply”. In the helicopter pilot world our companies lobby the government to lower standards to increase the supply. Nurses have had the “supply” flooded with immmigrants, just as the trades have had done to them. Every has witnessed the whole dissappearing of jobs outside the border.

Nobody can really say if FREE TRADE works or not because it’s never actually been practiced.

Go Union; the pay, training, and working conditions are better, and it’s easier to go from Union to Non-Union than the other way around.

Pursue either electrical work, or HVAC. It’s knowledge intensive work, and it won’t break your back.

Just remember that construction/skilled trades is a different world than many people are used to today. You meet a lot of very interesting, strange, and sometimes offensive people. Also, 40 hrs. a week, every week, from now until retirement is not a realistic expectation. There will be 1000’s of hours of overtime some years, and others you may end up riding the unemployment train for a few months here or there. Construction especially is very boom and bust.

I’m an IBEW Apprentice as well, and in my class at least, the apprentices without any form of college are in the minority. Try it out at least, and if you don’t like it (and many don’t) just remember that the training is paid, and you have nothing to lose.

Now that it’s time to get a “real job”, a blue-collar path seems much more appropriate for me. But I frankly have no idea where to start, or what’s involved. I’m reading through the website above and it’s opening my eyes,

Any advice for a complete newbie?

“Is my kid a hands-on, mechanically-inclined person or an academic type?”

Like a lot of people I grew up with and like most of my family I was pressured to get a 4-year degree. So I got a 4-year degree. I hate, hate HATE sitting at a computer all day long. My body hates it and gets back at me by getting fat and giving me blood-sugar problems.

Fast forward 5 years, I decided to try my hand at being a sparky. True, not every day is a walk in the park but the day flies by and I make better money than I ever have and can look at what I have achieved at the end of the day and be satisfied.

In my local, journeyman wiremen make $40/hr. If you are lucky you get to experience all kinds of cool high-power applications and no matter what you learn how to build a whole system of a building from the ground up.

http://www.mikeroweworks.com/

The other problem, I suspect, is that almost everyone seems to have horror stories of dealing with a shady contractor, or a plumber who doesn’t finish his work, or of contractors just doing generally substandard work. Even though its a tiny, tiny minority of tradesmen, they still tend to give the trades a bad name. Why would anyone want to go into that field if these are going to be your coworkers?

I always find it interesting when people claim that we are a post manufacturing society. If you look at the numbers, we produce more than anyone else in the world - more than China and Japan combined!

http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=22129

The skilled trades are going to be around for a long, long time.

As we go further towards becoming a knowledge economy, the trades will be be further pushed down the job preference list. Everyone will want to be a movie star or pro athlete because of the high pay for the amount of work, and then the list will go down from there, with blue collar jobs predictably near the bottom due to their typically high labor/effort per dollar ratio. And as the numbers of skilled workers decrease, their rates will increase as capitalism/economics dictates. There will come a balance and base skills will always remain, but we will undoubtedly lose some of the specialized knowledge.

Similar issues can probably be raised about all blue collar careers/occupations/trades.

If the demand is dramatically outstripping the amount in the NJATC’s program, they will undoubtedly increase the size of the program.