For the past 50 years, college and university attendance has been held up as the only path to success by educators and parents alike, especially parents who attended college, so much so that the trade classes were rarely mentioned to students as a post-high school option.

That resistance to giving children an option in vocational education in the 1980s and ’90s came home to roost in the past decades when the inevitable, steep decline of available skilled workers and tradespeople hit home.

But there has been a cultural shift in the past few years that is turning that resistance to trade schools on its head. At least part of that has to do with the out-of-control costs of attending a university and the debt that follows you decades after graduation, but it also has to do with how political college campuses have become.

[This matters more for America’s future than just for a dunk on Academia. If we want to become a self-sufficient economy as a manufacturing power again, we need a workforce that has the skills necessary to do that at scale. That means a robust trades sector of labor, where those not inclined toward academic pursuits can learn lucrative manufacturing-based skills and find jobs for themselves. Rick Santorum talked about this in 2011, but few listened at that time. If we want to “on-shore” supply chains again, we need the workforce to do it. — Ed]