trade school instead of a bachelor's degree

[sanantone]

Community colleges usually require placement exams for college courses, but I'm not sure if this is true for vocational courses. Requiring them for everyone might help their completion rates. This doesn't have to mean that everyone who fails gets turned away; they can take remedial courses along with the degree-seeking students. 

When you look at a CC degree requirement, if the math is a transfer math, it will require a placement test.  When a department renames their math using the dept alpha, it takes it out of the transfer category and removes the placement requirement.

I did this with my dept's math.  Our program launched with a course called Applied Math Topics that was part of the transfer/ liberal arts/ arts and sciences catalog.  Our students couldn't hit the benchmark, and the developmental courses were huge barriers, so I actually authored the class Culinary Math that we used from our second year forward (still in use). By taking MAT110 or whatever it was, and transitioning over to CUL110, we assured everyone could come in directly to that math.  MANY failed (I've shared that here before) but even still, I still think it was a far better math than the previous course that didn't relate to their field.  

I'm no longer at that college, but they have also since created a department based Spanish. So like math, it's now Spanish through the culinary dept.  It also means the faculty credentials can be lowered and that the course is no longer a gen ed... so there are pros and cons.

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<Major automotive players including Nissan North America, Manheim and Interstate Batteries are pushing young people to become auto technicians through an advocacy group called the TechForce Foundation. It’s urging repair shops to talk up their potential wages as much as possible and go way beyond traditional high school career fairs.

"You gotta get out there and start talking with them in middle school,” said TechForce director of national initiatives Greg Settle.>

My oldest son rec'd 3 scholarships from TechForce and though he's in a specialty program, the guys in the general auto program at his college are being RECRUITED *literally* with full salary jobs that also pay 100% of your student loans and numerous other benefits.  They are climbing over each other to one-up the next company so they can get the kids with special training.  It's crazy, I don't know that the article is only focused on outliers, I have heard radio ads here announcing open interviews - hiring 20 for plumbers $100,000 each.  It's crazy.  
I'm not motivated by money, however, I do find myself motivated for my KIDS to have high paying careers - I probably should work on that lol, but I get why parents want their kids to head off to college, really, I do.  But with 50% drop out rate, it's not a terrible idea to go with the old-fashioned wisdom of having a trade to "fall back on" before heading to university.   All my kids have a trade / certificate of some kind but I'm also heavily pushing all toward grad school too.

Glassdoor, Salary.com, and Indeed have collected salary information from millions of people, so those are good places to look. BLS data are going to be more comprehensive. According to them, only the top 10% of plumbers earn more than $93k.

The auto shop industry probably does need to raise their wages to attract more people because they're kind of low. I thought about completing a correspondence automotive program for myself. Auto repair shops are worse than car salespeople when it comes to scamming customers. I like that some female mechanics have started teaching women basics because women are the most likely to get ripped off. There are also some women who operate repair shops with all women mechanics.