Exclusive — Blue Collar Tour: Skilled Trades ‘in Super-High Demand,’ ‘Forget College Debt’

Tyler Sasse, founder and owner of Western Welding Academy, said on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow that his Blue Collar Tour of high schools across America informs students of lucrative opportunities in skilled trades.

“We roll into these high schools and talk to these kids about joining the blue collar trades, forget college debt,” he remarked, “and it’s our way to really help inspire the next generation of our country. Somebody needs to be in here doing this work.”

Skilled tradespersons such as welders, plumbers, machinists, and carpenters “are in super-high demand,” Sasse observed. His organization’s Blue Collar Tour, now in its third year, is planning on visiting 30 schools in 30 states to inform high school students of these opportunities.

Take-home pay for skilled trade workers is typically between $80 and $200 thousand per year, Sasse determined. He said a construction superintendent in South Dakota recently informed him that concrete finishers were being paid $75 per hour for a particular project.

“I don’t say this to the kids, because I don’t want to seem to be advocating for it, but I dropped out of high school when I was 16 years old,” Sasse shared. “I literally have a 10th-grade education, and my best year ever — I was as a welder working by the hour — I made $352,000 dollars.”

Sasse said Western Welding Academy emphasizes work ethic, accountability, and integrity in its instruction for students.

He remarked, “They show up every day, they do what they say they’re going to do, and when they screw it up, [they] just admit it, [exercise] extreme ownership, and move on.”

Sasse contrasted both the costs and opportunity costs of most trade schools with conventional four-year college and university programs.

“Most trade schools are six-to-nine months versus a four-year college,” Sasse stated, “but the minute you get out of that trade school — guess what — you get to go to work. So you’re going to make money for three and a half years while your buddy, who’s in a four-year college [program], is just racking up more and more debt. So you get this massive three-and-a-half-year jump on anybody that’s the same age.”

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Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.