Collared

File under: Isn't it always the same? "Students seeking blue-collar careers face sticker shock."

Sudden and rapid increases in the costs of vocational training strike me as a failure of policy. What's needed is a greater focus on not only helping people see where their best paths for the future lie, but in growing the pipelines to those futures. What's driving up prices are large numbers of people crowding into a space that doesn't have the resources to expand to accommodate them. Allowing to things to get to a point where people are beginning to panic about their futures and then hoping that the for-profit actors who enter the space will place as great an emphasis on quality education as they do on  maintaining profitability for owners and investors is a recipe for bad outcomes. Because it's not like we haven't seen this play out before. Private, for-profit schools spend heavily to market themselves to prospective students (and their parents) and that expenditure has to be made up somewhere along the way.

In the end, it's like any other gold rush. The fastest path to wealth is not to be a miner, but to sell picks and shovels to the people who expect to use those tools to better themselves. Sooner or later, presuming that it hasn't happened already, some unscrupulous operator is going to open a school and decide that actually giving the students the tools they need to succeed in a career in the skilled trades is simply too resource intensive. And it only takes one to ruin a lot of lives, perhaps irrevocably. And this is going to happen because, as a society, the United States does not value the sort of planning and oversight that it takes to prevent it. "[A]n aspiring aircraft maintenance technician must shell out $40,000 for a 14-month course in Florida," because the up-front resources to ensure that there were enough programs to keep the cost down weren't spent. Meanwhile, Governor DeSantis recently signed legislation to ban local diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and block carbon taxes in the state. And this does precisely what to increase access to (and thus lower costs for) blue collar training programs? Hell if I know. But it projects to the Republican activist class that he shares the values that are important to them.

Just like when I receive yet another political fundraising e-mail (note the last time I interacted with a political campaign was in 2004) here in Washington (the opposite corner of the lower 48); there's nothing about training people for the skilled trades, or other jobs of tomorrow. It's hyperbolic warnings of how the world will come to an end if I don't start writing checks.

And this is why there are failures of policy. Because there tends to be little or no real concern for them until people are being pulled out of the wreckage and the hunt for guilty begins. I'm constantly reminded of George Will's statement that the United States does not attempt to prevent disasters; it simply cleans up after they happen. Despite the fact it's a bad habit, it's constant enough that one can count on it.