In 1990, Frito-Lay ran a Doritos ad with Jay Leno and a smug promise: “Crunch all you want. We’ll make more.” Funny for snack chips. Not so funny as a workforce strategy. Across industries, companies are treating workers the same way. Cutting jobs to trim costs or chase the next big thing, assuming they can always refill the pipeline. Fire them now, hire them later. We’ll make more.
Only we’re not “making more.” A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed featured Ford CEO Jim Farley, frustrated that he can’t find enough mechanics to build his cars. The irony is hard to miss. Over the last 20 years, Ford has crunched through its own workforce, shedding roughly 129,000 jobs since 2005 through plant closings, layoffs, and restructurings. After years of treating people as a cost to cut, it’s a bit rich to be shocked when the talent pool runs dry.
But Farley and the editorial writers don’t blame Ford’s past choices. They blame kids. Too many high school students are going to college, they argue, so we should make college harder to access and push more young people straight into trades. (Yes, you read that right.) They’re not just missing the point. They’re getting it dead wrong.
College isn’t the opposite of trade. In fact, manufacturing today demands more education, not less: advanced technical skills, strong problem solving, sharp executive function, and exceptional collaboration and communication skills. These are skills learned in post secondary education. Demonizing college to get people into the factory faster is as limiting for American companies as it is for their workers. We need strong career pathways through multiple learning channels, together with the resilience and initiative to continually upskill in the face of rapidly changing technology.
Manufacturing Is Now A High Skills Game
To meet new competitive requirements and leverage rapidly changing technologies, today’s manufacturing workers need more skills. In 1970, 79% of all manufacturing jobs and 92% of production jobs went to workers with no more than a high school diploma. High school dropouts alone accounted for 43% of manufacturing workers. As automation and offshoring triggered plant closings and mass layoffs, reducing the overall number of manufacturing jobs, these undereducated workers were left out in the cold.
Today, manufacturing jobs require higher levels of technical skills and are increasingly awarded to workers with associate’s or bachelor’s degrees, or those with additional training like certifications or apprenticeships. These skilled workers have a higher chance to move into management than their high school colleagues. And also more opportunity to move into other fields in the event of workforce shifts.
Building A Manufacturing Workforce Requires More Access
We already know what works: Career Technical Education (CTE). Studies show that CTE programs graduate students with higher academic achievement, better graduation rates, higher employability and strong career readiness. And CTE programs are not stigmatized like their “vo-ed” grandparents. In 2019, 85% of high school students achieved at least one CTE credit.
But access is still the sticking point. In a study of more than a million Michigan students from 2008 to 2018, nearly 47% of lower-income students had no CTE option in their home school. And with less money and less reliable transportation, they were less able to travel to off-site programs.
Even when students did get CTE, they were rarely in the pathways that pay. While 38% of students took at least one CTE class, only 3.9% enrolled in technology, 5.5% in healthcare, and 3.6% in skilled trades like the ones Jim Farley says he can’t fill.
Michigan isn’t the outlier. It’s the pattern. Across the country, states are struggling to train exactly the students who could benefit most from a career in the trades.
CTE Gets You In The Door. Education Moves You Up
Getting a good job after high school is a critical first step. But in most cases, it’s just that: a first step. The best and highest paying manufacturing roles almost always require post-secondary education. CTE students are more likely than their peers to continue on to two-year colleges, but even community college is out of reach for many. Rising costs and cuts to education and labor programs mean too many students stall out after that first job. As technology races ahead, they’re left standing still. College isn’t a detour from the trades; it’s the runway. Today’s workers need more education, not less.
And it’s not just technical skills. Our obsession with STEM has come at the expense of the humanities and the social sciences, pushing students to stack up narrow credentials instead of broad capability. Any modern workplace needs people who can think practically, creatively, ethically, critically. Who can read closely, handle abstraction, work with others, solve problems, and tell fact from fluff. Those are the muscles that power critical thinking, executive function, and resilience. They’re also what distinguish a good worker from a great supervisor.
Companies Need To Stop Free-Riding And Start Investing
If companies want workers, they have to flip the script: stop acting like entitled beneficiaries of the education system and start behaving like investors in the future of work. This isn’t a radical idea. In Germany, for example, apprenticeship programs walk young people into career-length pathways, pairing classroom learning with deep, on-the-job experience. And they don’t leave them to figure it out alone. My German father-in-law often came home late for dinner because he was helping a company apprentice with his math homework. That’s what investment looks like: caring about the whole person, not just the 9-to-5 output.
American companies need the same mindset. Partner with colleges to shape the learning pipeline and create real paths for reskilling and upskilling. Show up as serious community partners to CTE programs, whether in regional career centers or local high schools. Inside the company, reward mentorship. Make it part of how performance is judged, not a nice-to-have. When bringing someone along is a goal, not a favor, developing new workers becomes table stakes. And finally, make sure every young worker has access to post-secondary tuition support so they can keep learning and keep climbing. That’s how you build the workforce you say you can’t find.
Jim Farley is right about one thing: we do need more high school graduates with clear pathways to work. But blaming college is aiming at the wrong target. College isn’t the enemy of the trades; it is their strongest ally. New workers need both a first job and a path to keep learning: high-quality post-secondary education, two-year or four-year, in disciplines that help them adapt, think, and lead. In a career shaped by constant technological change, college learning isn’t a luxury. It’s a must.
Even skilled workers also need employers who actually invest in them. That means mentorship, strong role models, and real on-the-job development, even when markets soften and strategies shift. If companies like Ford will not invest in the people who build their future, they should not be surprised when the next generation isn’t waiting in line to fill their bays. Treat workers like they are disposable, and the pipeline will eventually run dry. At some point, “we’ll make more” stops being a promise and becomes a lie. And in a year of record layoffs, that lie isn’t just Ford’s problem, it’s corporate America’s reckoning.