Can gov help more with trades schools or four year colleges.

From today's WSJ below. The job market sucks for college grads right now who have spend a fricken fortune and been sidelined for four years. The federal gov shells out big bucks for this as kids take out a host of federal sponsored student loans.

Or kids can shell out a ton less money to become skilled in a trade (where there is tremendous demand for their services). For example, the average schooling to become a trained electrician runs $5,000 to $15,000 and takes 9-18 months. Want to become that mechanic working at Ford? A certified trade school program will run $15,000-$25,000 and take about 10-12 months.

Or you can attend the University of Michigan (out of state tuition $80,000/year times 4) and have take your luck in the current job market.

Mr. Farley told a podcast last week that he can’t find enough skilled mechanics to run his auto plants. Specifically, Ford can’t fill 5,000 mechanic jobs that pay $120,000 a year.

“We are in trouble in our country. We are not talking about this enough,” Mr. Farley said. “We have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and tradesmen.” He said Ford is struggling to hire mechanics at salaries that Ivy League grads might envy.

“A bay with a lift and tools and no one to work in it—are you kidding me? Nope,” Mr. Farley lamented. “We do not have trade schools” in this country. He’s right to a large degree. Few high schools teach trades these days. Community colleges are mostly remedial high school education, and government worker-training programs have poor results.

Government subsidies for college and graduate education have encouraged the young to go to college even though they might be better off learning a trade. This has created a skills mismatch in the labor market. Unemployment among young college grads is increasing, while employers struggle to hire skilled manufacturing workers, technicians and contractors.

Only 114,000 Americans in their 20s completed vocational programs during the first 10 months of last year, compared to 1.24 million who graduated from four-year colleges and 405,000 who received advanced degrees. Yet recent bachelor’s recipients in their 20s were 5.6 percentage points less likely to be employed than those who finished vocational programs.