Vocational Education for All

Why America Needs Mandatory Vocational Education in High School

Vocational Education for Decent Lives

Since the middle of the last century, lawmakers and educators have focused intensive effort on maximizing academic achievement in public high schools and passing as many students as possible into traditional higher education. Federal support for higher education has run well upwards of $100 billion annually for years, while the Perkins V Basic State Grants program, the primary federal funding source for career and technical education (CTE), hovered around $1.4 billion in 2025—a high for recent years. Only $694 million of that actually made it into the secondary education system.

A 2009 report from the Brookings Institution, unsubtly titled “A New Goal for America’s High Schools: College Preparation for All,” captures the spirit of the age:

… recent years have seen an upsurge of support for the goal of helping all students … prepare for college, enter college, and earn a terminal degree. Attaining that goal, we believe, would boost economic mobility in the United States and help the nation live up to its ideals of equality of educational and economic opportunity.

Invoking this spirit, President Barack Obama stood before a North Carolina middle school in 2013 and asked, “How many students here expect to go to college?” Lest the assembled parents and educators miss the point, the president turned to them and added, “I expect all of them to raise their hand.”

The American people have a very different view of public education’s purpose. Eighty percent of young adults, and 71% of parents of young adults, say it is more important for public education to help students “develop the skills and values needed to build decent lives in the communities where they live” than to help them maximize their chances of getting into a good college. Less than half those parents, and only around 30% of young adults, think the school system is actually doing that.

The college-for-all model fails not only on purpose, but also on outcomes. Predictably, those served poorly by the dominant model, and offered no meaningful alternative, are struggling. In 2004, the median income for households headed by someone with at least a bachelor’s degree was $117,300 (in 2024 inflation-adjusted dollars), versus $58,920 for households headed by those with a high school degree but no college. By 2024, it was $132,700 for the college household, while high school grads had gained no ground at $58,410.

Labor force participation for adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher was 71.5% in September 2026, versus 56% for high school grads with no college. “The long-run decline [in labor force participation] is concentrated among men without four-year degrees,” according to a 2026 report from the American Institute for Boys and Men. “Participation among prime-age men with at least a bachelor’s degree has declined by about 3 percentage points over the past 50 years, compared with … about 8 points for men with a high school degree or less.”

The picture is not so rosy for those who are earning degrees either. In June 2026, 42% of recent college graduates were working in jobs that didn’t require a bachelor’s degree. Fifty-two percent of college graduates are underemployed a year after graduation. The gaps in unemployment rates and earnings, compared to workers without college degrees, are narrowing.

And students are leaving college lacking the psychological resilience to navigate the real world and succeed on the job. No wonder the percentage of Americans that rate a college education “very important” plummeted from 75% in 2010 to 35% in 2025. Mastery of a practical skill is a powerful antidote. The writer and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford presaged the damage that conflating “white collar” with “intellectual” would do to our educational system, and the promise that dissolving that false equivalence might hold:

Such a partition of thinking from doing has bequeathed us the dichotomy of “white collar” versus “blue collar,” corresponding to mental versus manual. These seem to be the categories that inform the educational landscape even now, and this entails two big errors. First, it assumes that all blue collar work is as mindless as assembly line work, and second, that white collar work is still recognizably mental in character. Yet there is evidence to suggest that the new frontier of capitalism lies in doing to office work what was previously done to factory work: draining it of its cognitive elements. Paradoxically, educators who would steer students toward cognitively rich work options might do this best by rehabilitating the manual trades, based on a firmer grasp of what such work is really like.

Grappling with reality is, after all, how we come to understand and master it. Francis Fukuyama, reflecting on Crawford’s work, puts it even more sharply:

[M]ost forms of real knowledge, including self-knowledge, come from the effort to struggle with and master the brute reality of material objects—loosening a bolt without stripping its threads, or backing a semi rig into a loading dock. All these activities, if done well, require knowledge both about the world as it is and about yourself, and your own limitations. They can’t be learned simply by following rules, as a computer does; they require intuitive knowledge that comes from long experience and repeated encounters with difficulty and failure. In this world, self-esteem cannot be faked.

Crawford and Fukuyama are tapping into a pedagogical tradition as old as Plato, who understood that “mastery of some part of reality and a constructive response to it that repairs a genuine need” is a fundamental “kind of knowing.” Alfred North Whitehead made the implications for education systems clear in 1929:

The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical: that is, no education which does not impart both technique and intellectual vision. In simpler language, education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well. This intimate union of practice and theory aids both. The intellect does not work best in a vacuum. The stimulation of creative impulse requires, especially in the case of a child, the quick transition to practice. Geometry and mechanics, followed by workshop practice, gain that reality without which mathematics is verbiage.

College graduates desperately need the sense of mental agency that vocational education can offer, just as much as students who don’t go to college. While many college-completing elites continue to fret that “you can’t tell people they shouldn’t go to college,” most people have a quite different view. A July 2026 New York Times story describes the strong organic interest in vocational education many high schoolers express, only to face cultural counterpressure based on outdated prejudices that favor college. “Gen Z is increasingly turning to trade schools in hopes of future-proofing their careers against A.I.,” the story announces, “[b]ut getting their parents and peers on board can be a challenge.”

One student describes the dynamic: “I feel like a lot of people nowadays, they just go to college because their mom told them.” Mandatory vocational education would directly assault the stigma against non-college pathways by denying students the choice to avoid it, and by giving all families a stake in its quality.

In a future with widespread labor market disruption from AI, the wisdom of mandatory vocational education will be even more apparent. “The American laptop class is a political powder keg,” American Compass’s Abigail Ball has observed. “As the comfortable jobs they were promised become harder to land, and the self-validating stories they told themselves of their own value come unwound, competition will become fierce.” Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, said much the same thing in discussion with Teamsters Union general president Sean O’Brien. Describing his own circle of highly educated elites:

You went to Yale, you were told … everything was going to work out for you, and now you’ve gotta retrain and work at the Teamsters. You think that person’s really reacting rationally to that? They’re going to get really angry politically … I don’t believe it’ll be a rational answer to this, where people will be like “Oh, let me stand in line and retrain and learn how to be something I’ve always not really looked up to.” I mean, the people I grew up with … if you told them they’re retraining to like, do high-end manufacturing … I don’t know how well they’ll react to that.

The laptop class’s educational trajectory has left it with little exposure to, awareness of, or social comfort with other kinds of work. At a moment of potential economic disruption, when maximal fluency across different types of work is wise, this is an educational mistake. The potential social and political crisis brewing among the disaffected knowledge worker class is also, of course, a compelling reason for them to elevate the social status of blue-collar work now.

Vocational Education for Good Citizens

American education has also always had a fundamental democratic purpose. Alexis de Tocqueville famously believed that “in the United States, the education of the people powerfully contributes to the maintenance of the democratic republic.” A functional republic requires citizens with a strong sense of internal agency, who see themselves first and foremost as productive contributors and problem solvers, rather than passive consumers. All citizens must have appreciation for how the world works, and gratitude that it works at all, rather than ignorance and hubris. And they must respect fellow citizens in their many walks of life rather than cast disdain across the divides of a socioeconomically fractured society.

In his 2009 book The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools, the educator E. D. Hirsch laid out the stakes:

Our educational thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the schools as the central and main hope for the preservation of democratic ideals and the endurance of the nation as a republic … [The Founding Fathers] consistently alluded to the fact that republics have been among the least stable forms of government and were always collapsing from their internal antagonisms and self-seeking citizens. The most famous example was the republic of ancient Rome, which was taken over by unscrupulous Caesars and destroyed by what American founders called “factions” …. To keep that from happening, we would need far more than checks and balances in the structure of the national government. We would also need a special new brand of citizens.

As I have argued elsewhere, a healthy social fabric and functional political community emerges “from recognizing the reality of a shared lot and common fate.” American democracy needs citizens who understand themselves to be full and equal participants in the shared project of America’s communal, economic, and national life. The current design of secondary schooling, with “alternative pathways” as the only suggested antidote, seems determined to produce the opposite and is succeeding all too well.

The civic role of secondary education is even more urgent given that, as researchers Sam Pressler and Soren Duggan argue, “the college degree has increasingly become the great sorting function in American life,” with immense predictive power for both economic outcomes and social outcomes, from how many friends a person has to how likely they are to get married or access community spaces.

The partition of the intellectual and the practical leads to substantive ignorance of the world’s complexity, an accompanying failure to appreciate the fellow citizens who build it and keep it running, and a belief that Americans in different occupations are somehow fundamentally different, all of which undermine a sense of interdependence. Crawford is again instructive, describing the odd social dynamic that emerges when white-collar work (say, a boardroom meeting) is interrupted by the breakdown of its usually invisible blue-collar scaffolding (say, the HVAC system):

The repairman’s presence may make the narcissist uncomfortable, then. The problem isn’t so much that he is dirty, or uncouth. Rather, he seems to pose a challenge to our self-understanding that is somehow fundamental. We’re not as free or independent as we thought. Street-level work that disrupts the infrastructure (the sewer system below or the electrical grid above) brings our shared dependence into view … we all live in the same physical reality, ultimately, and owe a common debt to the world.

Deliberately instilling awareness of that common debt is an urgent civic necessity. Affirming that tangible and academic skills are equally important—and therefore equally important for all students to develop—is a good place to start.

Gratitude, in this respect, is also an end unto itself. As Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch taught, it is the root of all moral consciousness. Cicero called it not only the greatest of the virtues, but the mother of all others. What are good citizens, he asks, but those who are grateful for what they have received from their country? It also provides an ideal point of departure for whatever a student might pursue next. Our task, says Yuval Levin, is to “begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it.” Universal vocational education can help instill greater respect for the spectrum of contributions required to build the society of which we are rightly proud, and keep it working.

Importantly, that community-oriented element of vocational education can be experienced directly and concretely. By its nature, vocational education demands a much richer connection to local communities and economies than conventional classroom teaching. Skilled teachers must move into the classroom from a variety of fields, from carpentry to culinary arts. Local businesses, trade associations, unions, and community and technical colleges must provide opportunities for on-the-job experience. For vocational education to work, it has “to have a community where people have a deep care for lifting it up at all levels,” as Mike Betts, CEO of the Betts Company, a manufacturer of industrial springs, said of his local school district’s CTE program. “Nothing is more important than education and, for education, career and technical education is the game changer for sure.”

Leaders and scholars from across academic fields and the political spectrum identify the concept of national service as a cure for what ails America. They are right to seek answers. Today, young people complete high school and head down their divergent paths without ever being brought together by some institution that reinforces their commonality, builds solidarity, and instills the habit of being useful to others. We should indeed want a place we could send them, something useful they could do, and some way to ensure they all go. Universal vocational education is the place to start. A commitment from communities to give students a first experience as productive contributors, and to insist that all students partake, is a much clearer path to a shared national experience of service.

Policymakers have long assumed that a departure from the college-for-all model of secondary education would face stiff resistance from students, parents, teachers, and local governments. That assumption is wrong. Americans outside the elite bubbles where college attendance are taken for granted are already headed in the right direction. A majority of parents would prefer a three-year apprenticeship for their child over a four-year full ride to college. Most students would too. The question for federal policymakers is not how to convince the public, but how to support and accelerate a bottom-up evolution that is already underway.

Likewise, teachers—who are on the front lines witnessing the broken promise of college-for-all—increasingly signal their own openness to change. In May 2026, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, delivered a speech praising the pedagogical benefits of vocational education for students regardless of their postsecondary trajectory, emphasizing its value in addressing AI’s negative effects on student development, and calling for making it standard across all grade levels:

[A]ctive learning is the antidote to cognitive offloading—that is, outsourcing thinking to AI. Where active learning is the norm is career and technical education. CTE is learning by doing. It prepares high school students for both higher education and in-demand career pathways. … Students engage in programs from skilled trades to healthcare to advanced manufacturing. They take part in internships and work-based learning, they receive industry certification in their areas of study, and many earn college credits. … CTE students build things. They troubleshoot and fix things. They work in teams. They can explain what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. No wonder they have great job prospects, whether or not they go to college. … More than 90 percent of students who concentrate in CTE graduate, and about three-quarters of them continue their education after high school. This pedagogy prepares students as much for college as it does for career. Let’s make it the norm for all students.

For their part, many states and school districts are already aggressively pursuing new investment in vocational education, having read the writing on the wall. “School districts around the U.S. are spending tens of millions of dollars to expand and revamp high-school shop classes for the 21st century,” reported the Wall Street Journal in 2025. “They are betting on the future of manual skills overlooked in the digital age, offering vocational-education classes that school officials say give students a broader view of career prospects with or without college. With higher-education costs soaring and white-collar workers under threat by generative AI, the timing couldn’t be better.”

Middleton High School is one of Wisconsin’s highest-rated high schools for academics; over a quarter of its students eagerly signed up for new classes in construction, manufacturing, and woodworking once they became available. Students share none of the older generation’s stigma; as one student said, “I haven’t met a single person that looks down on someone else, just because they’re doing the trades instead of college.” Enrollment in vocational classes offered by Houston’s Spring Branch Independent School District is spiking, even before completion of a new CTE center. Some states require at least some CTE credits to graduate, a majority of states allow CTE courses to substitute for other graduation requirements, and a small but growing number require career planning.

Federal policy should support and accelerate this bottom-up shift. The first and most obvious way to do that is funding.

Resource constraints limit the spread of high-quality vocational programs and the share of students who can participate in one. Vocational education is generally more expensive than teaching in standard classrooms. Instructors must be recruited from a broad range of specialties—many of which, as students and parents are discovering, pay high wages. Training often requires specialized equipment that differs across a wide range of occupations, a steady supply of materials, facilities that existing spaces may not provide, and transportation to off-site opportunities.

Less than a billion dollars in annual Perkins funding will not get the job done, or even have a noticeable effect. But in a typical year, the federal government spends more than 100 times as much subsidizing the traditional higher education that leaves many students with poor prospects and leaves out many more students entirely. We have the resources; the question is whether we will make our tradeoffs more wisely.

Any effort to introduce and rapidly expand a complex new educational model will also encounter practical challenges of implementation. New forms of assessment and accountability will be required, for example. Here, too, the federal government can help. The Department of Labor (DOL) should offer technical support to states and school districts piloting models of mandatory vocational education, and synthesize and publish the lessons learned from those pilots, as well as best practices already learned from existing CTE programs nationwide. As American Compass has previously noted, “While [school] districts can, and should, tailor career pathways to their specific needs and resources, they should not each be reinventing the wheel. Federal, state, and industry guidance on curriculum frameworks, materials, standards, and credentials ease the process of launching pathways, improve their quality, and increase their value.”

Such DOL research and synthesis would help school systems tackle the technical questions that would inevitably emerge from a decision to require vocational education for all students. For most of these, school districts already have answers. Defining what counts as “vocational,” for example, is a task states are already well versed in confronting. “Broad but rigorous” seems to work best. The key is identifying training tied to plausible and willing employers and real, well-paying occupations.

Traditional trades are not the only paths that fit the bill. The Fresno Unified School District (California’s third largest) offers 81 career pathways through which 12,000 students earned 32,000 industry credentials in 2025. Potential pathways are identified thematically (“biotech” or “construction technology”), then validated against the realities of labor demand, student interest, and feasible industry partners, then translated into a sequence of classes that run through all four years of high school. These paths aspire to be integrated with academics rather than in competition with them, because a “strong CTE pathway combines traditional academic coursework, an emphasis on soft skills that benefit all students, sector-specific technical training, and workplace experience.”

Nevertheless, requiring vocational education for all will entail tradeoffs. But no one should pretend that the current model does not. Setting the default to college-prep academic coursework and few practical skills makes an obvious tradeoff as well—one that serves most students poorly. Offering two different tracks and allowing students to choose between academics and vocational education improves upon our current one-size-fits-few approach, but also further entrenches our societal partitions and fails to fully deliver on education’s formative role for those who choose college prep. The best system will be one that makes a baseline of both academic and vocational preparation mandatory for all students, while allowing students to place relatively more weight on one or the other, and to choose the kind of vocational education of most interest to them.

Yes, the result will be less time studying literature or chemistry for students intent on continuing to college. So be it. A firm grounding in a vocation is as important for that student as some understanding of literature and chemistry is for the one determined to pursue a trade. And, good news, the student who does want to pursue college will have no shortage of opportunities to focus further on literature or chemistry then. Existing, well-designed programs that combine academic and vocational education deliver excellent results on standardized tests and students highly sought by college admissions officers.

Would universal early exposure to vocational education and well-paying jobs divert some students who might otherwise have stayed on the academic track and succeeded in college? Good. That concern, often voiced about offering multiple tracks at all, is a cultural objection, not an educational one. So what if a student becomes a carpenter instead of a professor? If both options are genuinely open to the student, both lead to dignified work that helps build a decent life, and both are afforded social respect, what makes either path superior? It would seem more appropriate, at this moment in our nation’s history, to mourn the many students headed toward precarious adjunct professorships in flailing institutions of higher education, who could have become carpenters.