A matter of degree

EDUCATION: Their friends are going on to graduate school or articling as lawyers. But a growing number of American young people are deciding to train as manual labourers after their first college degree.

One reason is money. Plumbers, electricians, car mechanics and carpenters often earn more than typical white-collar workers, and apprenticeships are less expensive than postgraduate degrees.

For some young people, the incentive is being able to work with their hands. College graduate Adam Osielski of Washington, DC, decided not to go on to law school after spending two years working for a charity in Haiti, building schools. Osielski, 29, was fascinated by the work electricians were doing and when he returned to the US, he enrolled in an apprenticeship programme offered by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

"I'm proud to be a plumber." Jarrad Taylor

“I have friends my age who are just deciding to go to graduate school,” Osielski told The Washington Post. “I’m glad to be already working and developing a career.”

Thanks to the recession, enrolment in trade schools is rising. But despite the good career prospects in trades, American parents and high-school guidance counsellors want young people to go to university instead. “It’s hard to get high school counsellors to point anyone but their not-very-good students, or the ones in trouble, toward construction,” says Dale Belman, a labour economist at Michigan State University. “Counsellors want everyone to go to college. So now we’re getting more of the college-educated going into the trades.”

Jarrad Taylor was an honours student in high school who spent two years at Penn State University, where he studied engineering and creative writing. Then he got a summer job as a plumber — and dropped out of college. That was seven years ago, and at first, Taylor says, he was embarrassed to tell people he was a plumber. “Now I’m proud of it,” he says. “Most of my friends from college are in IT. And I have more discretionary income than all of them.”