Everyone going to Stanford will get a tech job in SV, which is nice for about 0.1% of the population, but its a national problem and rando graduate of some state U has at best 50/50 odds of getting a job in their field or working retail/restaurant/bartend work. Better off as a 22 yr old electrician than as a 22 yr old unemployed kid in moms basement.
Most of the building trades have also fared badly (with electrician somewhat of an exception), as wages have collapsed over the past few decades in trades like carpentry and roofing.
The problem is that these programs are notoriously underfunded (the financial assistance barely helps. It's like 10k a year if you're very lucky), have their resources misallocated, and do just enough to say that they're doing "something". Their funding is also often lumped in with other welfare "handouts". So when people vote against funding "handouts", they vote against helping people who need it most.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Adjustment_Assistance
Where I live, we have Second Career Ontario[1]. When I was in college, several of my classmates were formerly highly paid tradespeople who ended up unemployed and unable to find work after the decline in Ontario's manufacturing sector. The Second Career program funding was enough for them to go back to school for a couple of years. To to best of my knowledge, all of my classmates ended up making the transition to a new career successfully.
I've seen programs in other jurisdicitions that provide some funding for retraining, but not enough funding to teach people enough skills in enough depth for them to realistically be able to move to a new career.
:-)
Seriously though: I have been begging plumbers to come and work on a reasonably high-priced project at my house. I reached out to 10+, no one is interested - they are booked for weeks in advance.
What would it pay for them?
$6k got me a 4 hour response of a 5 man crew with an excavator to replace a rusted section of a wastewater pipe, which involved digging 14ft down and demolishing part of my driveway (and pouring new concrete in after it was finished)
> No more than 2 days of work for 1 person.
You'll have us believe a plumber charges $375/hour for this project, based on the $6k quote?
This is not typical, so either your project is extremely difficult or you're not telling us something else.
Trades are great, but we, as a society, are not really prepared to deal with them. It's easy for someone working a comfortable desk job to say "those kids should go into the trades" without realizing the following things:
1. Trade jobs often involve non trivial amounts of physical risk.
2. Trade jobs rarely allow you to work until normal retirement age (65 or even 70). I never met a diesel mechanic over the age of 50, and precious few in their 40s.
3. Despite all that, they don't pay as much as your desk job.
If you're going to sit a kid down and give them the option between a physically demanding, difficult trade job or a climate controlled, higher paying desk job, what do you think they are going to choose, realistic or not?