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A few months ago, Mike Rowe stumbled upon a 2011 video of himself speaking in front of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee during the Obama administration about the mindset of government toward skilled trades. His argument was that skilled trades were the key to saving our economy, not those jobs that require a four-year degree.
His argument fell on deaf ears.
So he went again in April of 2014, this time testifying before the House Committee on Natural Resources to discuss the opportunities for skilled trade workers in the energy industry. This time he brought props, specifically the poster his guidance counselor from high school pointed to when he tried to bully Rowe into picking a high-priced university over a community college his senior year.
Rowe said he had nothing against college, but the universities his counselor recommended were expensive. “I had no idea what I wanted to study. I thought a community college made more sense, but Mr. Dunbar said a two-year school was ‘beneath my potential’,” explained Rowe.
“Mr. Dunbar pointed to a poster hanging behind his desk — on one side of the poster was a beaten-down, depressed-looking blue-collar worker. On the other side was an optimistic college graduate with his eyes on the horizon. Underneath them, the text read: Work Smart NOT Hard,” Rowe told the committee.
“Mike, look at these two guys,” Mr. Dunbar said. “Which one do you want to be?”
“I had to read the caption twice. Work Smart NOT Hard?” Rowe recounted.
The visual was jarring, not to mention insulting, yet once again, nothing happened.
Rowe made his final plea to Congress in March of 2017 when he once again schlepped to Capitol Hill, this time for the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education. He discussed how Career and Technical Education (CTE) can help close the skills gap and empower students to succeed, and stressed the need to reform the current law.
His message was simple: Career and technical education, and skilled trade professions, need a PR makeover and a champion. “If you want to make America great again, you’ve got to make work cool again,” he said.
This time he got some movement. The Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act (Perkins Act) — the primary federal law aimed at developing and supporting CTE programs — was reauthorized, but not with the robust reform needed. His ideal of a groundswell of support for the trades from our lawmakers never materialized.
Rowe said his quixotic quest sprang from the early days of his mikeroweWORKS Foundation , as he was trying to figure things out. “The first time I went [to Congress], I was trying to figure out what the foundation really ought to be, and I essentially told them the ideals of ‘work’ needs better PR,” he explained.
Rowe reminded lawmakers that good PSAs make people think. “Like the weeping Indian made us think about littering because of the iconography that accompanied the whole campaign. It was also Woodsy the Owl and Smokey the Bear; they all got people to think in terms of basic conservation differently,” he said.
“So my point to Congress was we just have to get people to think differently about the definition of a good job. And we need to put better examples of real people out there who are prospering as the result of learning a trade,” he said.
Rowe realized after three futile attempts of trying to figure out who should do it that no one was ever going to launch that campaign. “No concerned citizen group, no NGOs, certainly no group of corporations — all who had a hand in the anti-littering campaigns of the 70’s — were going to step up, despite their efforts working in every measurable way,” Rowe explained.
So, he’s doing it himself.
“We just shot seven or eight PSAs a couple months ago with people who we helped through the trade scholarship fund at the foundation. HVAC workers, plumbers, welders, all making six figures, and I am going to put these PSA’s out there in the same spirit of those ads that made people think differently about conservation, and we are going to make people think differently about work,” he said.
The spots are pitch-perfect. The first one with Chloe Hudson begins with Rowe dispelling the notion that you cannot make six figures working with your hands. It then cuts to Hudson, a welder who received a work ethic scholarship from mikeroweWORKS and went on to earn six figures a year, talking about the beauty of her life.
“I’m going to raise whatever I have to, I’m going to spend whatever I have to get these examples front and center. So that’s what I’ve got. In a way, it’s nothing new. In another way, it’s me finally saying, ‘Look, this was a good idea 10 years ago, and why not me?’ I’ll do it. I’m going to do it,” Rowe says with his characteristic charm that has endeared him to millions for more than 20 years.
His endeavor is not without risk; in the foundation space, people are suspicious of marketing and advertising, and Rowe doesn’t blame them for being skittish. “If you look at just one random example, whether it’s the Red Cross or the United Way, people go to the sites, and they’re like, ‘All right, well, how much money did you spend in this category of administration or marketing? And how much did you actually put for your program?'” he said.
“It is a conversation I have to have with my own people from time to time because we’re not a scholarship fund primarily. We are going to give away $2 million this year, and we’ve given away close to $8 million so far, and we’re going to give away a lot more. But my purpose in giving the money away through work ethic scholarships is to make sure that I can circle back in a couple of years to find somebody who has a story to tell, because their stories will move the needle with guidance counselors, who, by the way, are still getting bonuses on the number of people they steer toward college, not toward trade schools,” he explained.
Rowe said people really need to acknowledge the “unspeakable stupidity” of taking shop classes out of high schools 40 years ago. “The unintended consequences of that alone have been unraveling in ways that’s just mind-boggling. We effectively removed from view an entire category of vocations,” he said.
“In the long history of stupidity, you’d have to go a long way to find something dumber than universally removing shop class from high school. But of course, at the same time we did that, we started telling that same generation of kids that the best path for the most people was the most expensive path,” he said of the idea that higher education is the only path to success.
Which brings Rowe to wonder: Were they intentionally telling students who went into trades that they were achieving lower education?
It should make us wonder as well: Who did these decision-makers think was going to take care of their plumbing, fix their car, install their air conditioning, repair their furnace, or rewire their house?
Rowe said in their defense, they were launching a PR campaign for four-year schools. “What they did was what always happens with these PR initiatives; you go too far. They weren’t content to merely say, ‘Look, we need more people going into higher ed. We need more doctors, we need more engineers.’ The truth is, we did, but they went too far too fast.”
In short, rather than just making a persuasive case for a four-year degree, they did it at the expense of anything other than a four-year degree. That’s when everything that wasn’t the university path became subordinate.
Rowe said he knows he is not going to open the eyes of the varsity blues crowd. “I can’t. They’re not persuadable. But there are a lot of people in the middle, a lot of people that just want to feel better about the possibility of exploring a career. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to take my own advice. I’m going to stop telling Congress what to do, and I’m going to do it myself,” he said.
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