Because college isn’t for everyone, these skills-based camps will teach your kid a trade

In the early 2000s, being on the verge of graduating from high school meant you’d better have your college applications out—along with a few safety schools—to ensure you’d end up somewhere. College was seen as the ultimate path to success, so more and more students were enrolling. If you weren’t going to college, you probably didn’t work hard enough in high school, weren’t motivated enough, or simply couldn’t afford it.

But the financial piece didn’t stop plenty of us from believing we had to throw our life’s savings (or our parents’) at the beast and, at the same time, saddle ourselves with crushing debt that may last a lifetime. College was just that important. (To be fair, we also didn’t exactly realize that debt would start multiplying exponentially.)

It’s never been a fair assumption that higher education is the only way of achieving financial freedom, or happiness. Plenty of rewarding, respectable, and even high-paying jobs don’t require a college degree. Still, there was a time when going to college—even if you planned on partying for four solid years and rarely going to class—was viewed as the ultimate foot in the door. 

That doesn’t change the fact that college seniors often graduate en masse and take jobs in restaurants, family businesses, or work temp jobs. Sometimes, they just live in their parents’ basements for a year or two, struggling to get close to any job they might actually want. By 2019, 50% of millennials were moving back in with their parents and the four-year college plan seemed to be providing the guarantee of stability less and less.

Enter the skills-based camp

Given that there’s a wave of people pushing back against the ingrained idea that college is an absolute necessity, new programs and camps are popping up to support them at the middle school and high school ages—when the college push typically starts. 

MyWIC is a free Philadelphia-based camp for seventh to 12th-grade girls that mentors them for careers in construction—an almost entirely male-saturated business. They can learn skills like carpentry, electrical, painting, pipe-fitting, and many other trades in an environment that aims to be “gender-neutral.” While this program is unique because it helps train girls who want to work in trades, there are many programs with the same kind of offering. Nuts, Bolts & Thingamajigs, for instance, has camps in over 20 state offering education in 3D printing, DIY drone-making, robotics, welding, and more. They also have “metal mania” for girls. 

While college is a necessary, meaningful, and career-shaping path for many, the idea that it can and should be for everyone doesn’t hold up in today’s world. Not every young person wants to go to college. At the same time, society depends on so many skills that aren’t taught in universities. They’re typically taught through work experience, mentorships, and programs designed to educate on specific skill sets—and that kind of experience is deeply valuable.

Many parents fret about the idea of their kids not going to college. Others want their kids to follow their passions, even if that doesn’t involve getting a degree. Jennifer L.W. Fink is a mom of four boys and author of the book Building Boys: Raising Great Guys in a World That Misunderstands Males, living in rural Southeast Wisconsin. She says her 17-year-old son, Sam, won’t be going to college, even though he has a 3.9 G.P.A. and could easily land a scholarship. Instead, he’s planning to build his lawn care and hardscaping business.

“He knows his skills and talents better than I ever will, and he’s gotta build a life that works for him,” she told Fast Company of why she never tried to redirect him. In October, she’s even taking him to a conference of over 20,000 people in the industry called Equip. “Some people take college trips with their kids,” she says. “We’re going to Equip.”

Sam learned his trade, mostly, by tinkering around his house from the time he was young. Eventually, he began taking over the family garage. Fink says he routinely does projects around the house and is currently building a patio.

In fact, learning by doing is exactly the way that many people who don’t go the traditional college route sharpen their crafts, which might be one reason why skills-based camps and programs are gaining in popularity.

It’s not just programs in trades, either. STEM camp enrollment has been on the rise for years, given there are so many skills to be learned, and not all of them point kids toward college. But it’s not hard to find programs for kids interested in just about anything. From learning advanced technology to video production to audiovisual skills, there are camps and courses to be found.

For so many kids, college is still going to be their first choice (even if they only get into their last school of choice), but for more and more work-bound young adults, it isn’t, and that’s not just okay—it’s good for them and for the world they live in.

Luckily, programs to support varied interests keep emerging, and parents seem to be getting behind their kids’ desire to pave their own way. Perhaps it’s because they learned the hard way that passion is more important than anything, or they’ve taken notice that it’s pretty tough to train our brains for an ever-changing world from inside a classroom.