Workforce programs have a family problem around college degrees. It’s more nuanced than policymakers think—and that’s probably why they’re not making headway.

Here’s something I’ve heard a lot more over the past couple years from political and business leaders:

Why don’t we celebrate someone getting certified as a [CAREER YOU CAN GET THROUGH A JOBS TRAINING PROGRAM WITHOUT A DEGREE] as much as we do someone going to college and getting a degree?

My recent conversations with policymakers have portrayed it as a "mommas and grandparents problem." The idea being that families pressure young people toward college because anything less is not a success—or, at the least, not the type of thing they want to brag about. A lot of what I’ve heard seems premised on the idea that a college degree is unaffordable and therefore just a bad idea for workers not readily able to pay for it out of pocket.

It also flows from a vein of college-versus-workforce complaining that's far from new. Here’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, from when he was a senator, in 2018:

And Elon Musk in the last weeks of the 2024 election:

And Lowe’s CEO Marvin Ellison just last week:

This perception issue is real. It’s a hard-to-beat problem that workforce programs can struggle with when recruiting talented young people to jobs where they can make a good living.

That said, I also think a lot about this quote from Ford CEO Jim Farley at an event last October:

I do believe this quote is well-intentioned, but as I wrote a year ago, it misses something huge:

Whether a young person goes to college is a debate for a great many Americans—and it always has been. Because college costs money, and a family will brag if someone in their lives puts the pieces together to make it work.

A lot of decisionmakers in this space don’t understand that. It makes it very hard for them to build compelling policy to lure workers toward technical jobs that don’t require college.

Something I’ve picked up between the lines of complaints about people using degrees as a marker of success? Frustration that a lot of families are pushing their children toward college for status reasons.

Constructively and politely, speaking from my own experience as a class jumper and first(ish)-generation college student, I want to say this:

No duh.

For those who experience poverty, it isn’t just having a “rough go of it.” It’s a multigenerational uphill climb for it to be reasonable to expect good students will end up in a quality school. For many Americans, the social and government systems they encounter often try to sort them back into their circumstances and limit what they’re capable of.

The goal for a lot of Americans without means is to reach a status where they can enjoy America without an incline. Accurate or not, they see people with means—many of whom have college degrees—not having the problems they have.

People without means are well aware that college is expensive. They've known it can be a potentially life-crippling proposition due to debt, something that political leaders of means have recently talked about as if it's a revelation.

Walking that financial high wire and building a functional life out of it is why getting a degree is a big deal for many Americans. It is an accomplishment. Of course, families want to brag about it if they have a kid who they think can make it.

I write a lot about what I call a relatability gap that really weighs down our politics and policy in workforce and education. But I can’t overstate how few people who make decisions about this work really get that experience or have an open mind about why lower-income workers, especially, might still favor college as something to brag about.

It’s a limiter on American workforce policy, and I’ve become increasingly leery that political arguments that war too hard against degrees might backfire. Because what this can sound like is more gatekeeping from the haves to route them away from college, and a sign that the recent emphasis on technical jobs is just another way to put them have-nots in their place.

It’s also not like workforce decisionmakers are doing a lot to make technical jobs more attractive or create easier paths into them. A good example of this is in how I’ve heard political leaders refer to Workforce Pell as something that will be life-changing for workers without means.

I do think Workforce Pell will open doors to some workers; however, with the caveat that it’s still early, I’ve seen or heard that the average per-program payout could be between $1,500 to $2,200. That’s not exactly an eye-opening sum of money. The median price of rent in the United States is around $1,400, meaning that at least half the country is paying most of the average Workforce Pell payout—or more—just to have a place to live for a month.

Communications is policy, and policy is communications. What you tell people about what you’re doing for them, and whether you tell them about it in a way that respects their intelligence and experience, matters to whether people think you’re selling them ideas that are in their best interest.

There is a better tack for this policy conversation. A couple years back, I grabbed dinner with a friend from back home in rural Alabama who didn’t exactly go the college route despite coming from college-educated parents. He only kinda knew what I do for a living, like most of the civilians in my life.

He bragged to me about how proud he was of his son for getting into an electrical apprenticeship. What impressed him about it is that his son, at a very young age, was doing the work to set himself up for the comfortable and happy life that my friend wanted for his son..

That's what I would focus on: the results—that these technical careers, if they fit a young person's interests and skills, are a great way to set them up early on. That they will most likely get ahead, and do so well ahead of them earlier than folks who go to college to figure themselves out. Nothing will be off the table for them—even college if they want to do that someday.

That is something mommas and grandparents can brag about.