According to this, it seems the skilled trades have a similar problem to medicine, where there is/was apparently a shortage of primary care doctors: people ente

According to this, it seems the skilled trades have a similar problem to medicine, where there is/was apparently a shortage of primary care doctors: people enter specialties that pay more. The other part of the story I think is that we fetishized the 4-year undergraduate degree and de-emphasized trade schools over the last 30 years. They touch on this in the article: “And many former paths have closed. In Seattle, Smith notes, 17 public high schools once had wood shop classes, a number that shrunk to 3.” Curiously enough, this change in policy occurred around the same time a de-industrialization in the US (in the wake of NAFTA, normalizing trade relations with China, etc.).