Trump's Vocational Education Con
The president promised to revitalize vocational training and help the working class. Instead, he's cutting workforce programs by a third while targeting universities with political theater.
Trump's Vocational Education Con
The president promised to revitalize vocational training and help the working class. Instead, he's cutting workforce programs by a third while targeting universities with political theater.
by Bill Scher
During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump demeaned institutions of higher education as boondoggle bastions of Marxism and scary “DEI” policies, while touting the value of vocational education to help people get good-paying jobs. Now back in the Oval Office, he has the opportunity to turn his impulses on education into policies. But we’ve seen far more focus on who he wants to punish than who he claims he wants to help.
Harvard and Columbia have faced the most vicious attacks, including attempts to rescind federal funding, influence faculty hires, and ban admission of international students. Trump recently threatened to revoke Columbia’s accreditation. Beyond those targeted salvos, the pending tax cut and spending reform measure known as the One Big Beautiful Bill includes a stiff tax increase on university endowments, especially for institutions with large endowments.
Trump’s efforts to help bolster and broaden the working class through vocational education have received less attention, which is understandable because the efforts are meager at best. The need to train workers with the skills necessary to find good-paying jobs is always essential, but the need is even more acute today with artificial intelligence and automation rapidly upending the nature of work.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in April titled “Preparing Americans for High-Paying Skilled Trade Jobs of the Future,” signaling a reorientation of education policy.
The executive order didn’t do much on its own. It directed certain cabinet secretaries to produce by late July a set of “strategies to help the American worker” and “identify alternative credentials and assessments to the 4-year college degree that can be mapped to the specific skill needs of prospective employers.” By late August, the secretaries must detail a “plan to reach and surpass 1 million new active apprentices.”
Those plans haven’t been released yet, but the Trump administration and congressional Republicans don’t have to wait. They could start investing in more vocational education in the One Big Beautiful Bill. And Trump could show his support for additional investment in his Fiscal Year 2026 budget, which is supposed to inform Congress’s work on the annual spending bills that keep the federal government functioning.
So why are we seeing far more vocational education cuts than investments?
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