Can you afford college and a home?

Student loan payments quash home ownership   Homeownership among young Americans has hit the lowest level on record, according to the Wall Street Journal. It’s probably not a coincidence that this coincides with burgeoning student debt. College graduates with student loans owe an average of

Read More »

Academic vs. vocational education

A well-rounded person needs both.   I feel blessed to have graduated (class of 1965) from one of the best public high schools in the country — Lane Technical in Chicago. Then as now, Lane Tech ranked among national leaders in graduation and college admission

Read More »

You can tattoo yourself out of a job

Every generation freaks out its parents!   Back in the Roaring Twenties most older folks couldn’t understand their children’s fascination with a new style of music known as jazz – “the devil’s music,” as it was widely called. Those children grew up to be just

Read More »

Trade workers must be drug free

Legal or not, you’ll have to choose between a career and getting high.   We live in a society in which use of marijuana and other illegal drugs is widespread. One recent survey showed that about one out of 11 Americans uses illicit drugs regularly.

Read More »

Myth #5 about trade work: it’s for males only

Service firms in particular clamor for female technicians.   Okay, this myth is admittedly hard to refute. Most estimates peg females as only about 2% to 2.5% of all skilled trade workers. That’s probably doubled since the rise of feminism in the 1960s, but progress

Read More »

Myth #3 about trade work: college grads make more money

Performance pay often leads to six-figure incomes.   How much do trade workers earn? That’s a difficult question to answer definitively because so much depends on the type of work (construction versus service, residential vs. commercial, etc.), geographic region and other factors, not least of

Read More »

Myth #1 about the trades

They say the trades are only for those who aren’t “cut out” for college.   Let’s not mince words. A large segment of our society is biased against blue-collar workers. It wasn’t always that way in America. Our founding fathers included numerous artisans and craft

Read More »