Catherwood LibraryILR School

As America?s economy has shifted from an industrial base to a post-industrial service base, four-year colleges, professional and graduate schools have become the gold standard of education, with vocational and technical schools increasingly looked upon as second-class educations leading to dead end jobs. With technology playing an ever greater role in the workplace, however, and an increasing number of high-school graduates choosing to pursue four-year degrees, a growing demand for highly skilled craft and technical workers has created a job market now being explored by some unlikely candidates. Some companies that rely on highly skilled manual labor have begun recruiting efforts at high schools, and are finding that many topflight students are attracted to non-desk jobs where they can make starting salaries on par with those earned by undergraduate degree.