To put it mildly. Thank you very much Mike Emanuel
on that.
To another Mike, you know this fellow very well,
Mike Rowe. Mike Rowe works foundation founder.
You know, Mike puts his money where his mouth is
and and looks at trade schools and opportunities that are
just common sense abroad but not in this,
in this country. Mike, we've talked about it before,
right? Electricians and plumbers and welders,
all that. Those are highly valued,
coveted and well recognized fields in countries like Germany and
Italy and much of Europe.
The Asia? Not so much.
Here. You're leading an effort to change that.
How's it going? Well, thanks to you.
Pretty good. I personally want to thank you,
Neil, for covering this story.
It's It poses a lot of inconvenient truths for
people in our education system and many of our elected
officials,
but the evidence is now undeniable.
It demands A verdict. That article in the Wall Street
Journal that Emmanuel was just talking about?
It's a big deal. I've been beating this drum for
16 years now.
And little premature for a victory lap,
maybe, but the date is in and Gen.
Z is just not having any of it.
The cost of college. I mean,
you're a finance guy, so let me just
oversell it for a minute.
Nothing in the history of Western civilization has ever become
more expensive more quickly than a four year degree.
Not food, not health, not energy,
not real estate, nothing. It is unexampled.
And yet, even as the skills gap has widened,
even as 10 million positions have just yawned open in
this
in this chasm, positions that don't require a four year
degree but rather training,
we have still been telling a whole generation of kids
that the best path for the most people is the
most expensive path.
They're just not buying it anymore.
You know, I wonder why that is what got it
to change.
Obviously the the, the sticker shock colleges that that'll do
it for a lot of people and then a lot
of people come to discover,
boy, I have a devil of a time booking an
electrician or a plumber and there must be a reason
for that.
What's doing it? Well, it's math.
Every year for the past 15 years,
for every 5 tradesmen who retire to replace them
now, right. You don't have to be a genius to
just add that up and realize the exponential weight of
that just gets heavier and heavier.
I challenge anyone watching this right now to find a
construction project going on in their neighborhood.
Go talk to the general contractor.
He's over budget and he's under time.
He's he's not going to come in on time.
And and the reason is always the same.
It's a paucity of skilled
labor. So Gen. Z gets it.
And your first question was right on point.
They get it in South Korea,
they get it in Switzerland,
they get it in Germany.
They put all the options on the table right in
front of a
1415 year old kid. They don't take shop class out
of high school.
They put it there and they walk them through it
and they say,
look, this is a path.
It looks a lot like work.
But over here, the stigmas and the stereotypes and the
myths and the misperceptions that keep kids from even exploring
these these trades and the number of guidance counselors,
Neil, who are affirmatively bonused on their ability to get
kids onto the college track and not the vocational track,
people say, Mike, how could college get so expensive?
The answer is, how could it not?
We freed up a bottomless pile of free money and
turned the screws on a whole generation of kids and
told them they'd be finished if they didn't take this
path. So that's starting to get very,
very wobbly. And I think this year you're going to
see APR problem in higher Ed unlike anything we've seen
in our lifetime.
Well, you've been on it long before.
A lot of people. What I love about you,
Mike, I'm not blowing. You smoke.
You don't forget your roots.
You don't forget where you come from,
and you don't forget just average working folk and knowing
that they're they're not only the lifeblood of our country,
but a very profitable lifeblood for their kids and their
offspring.
So thank you for doing that,
Mike. Good seeing you again.
You too. Thanks.