Can American Schools Fuel Trump’s Manufacturing Revival?

A key question is going unasked: Are we any better at teaching CTE than reading and math?

President Trump’s vision to revive American manufacturing—a linchpin of his economic and national security strategy—rests on a bold promise: a renaissance of high-tech factories staffed by skilled tradespeople. The White House, defending steep tariffs to incentivize domestic production, argues that decades of trade deficits have “hollowed out” our manufacturing base, resulting in “a lack of incentive to increase advanced domestic manufacturing capacity.” This in turn has “undermined critical supply chains; and rendered our defense-industrial base dependent on foreign adversaries.”

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick painted a bracing picture of this industrial renaissance. “There's going to be mechanics, there's going to be HVAC specialists, there's going to be electricians—the tradecraft of America,” he exclaimed on CBS’s Face the Nation earlier this month. “Our high school-educated Americans, the core to our workforce, is (sic) going to have the greatest resurgence of jobs in the history of America, to work on these high-tech factories, which are all coming to America."

It’s a stirring vision, but it hinges on a question that’s been largely ignored amid the political and economic debates over tariffs: Does America’s education system have what it takes to produce the workforce needed to staff a manufacturing revival? To put the question bluntly, are we any better at Career and Technical Education (CTE) than teaching kids to read and do math proficiently?

The evidence suggests a mixed picture: CTE is a comparative bright spot in America’s challenged education system, but serious hurdles, from misaligned training to automation’s rising demands, raise doubts about whether schools are equipped meet the moment. Fewer than 40 percent of Americans hold a college degree, so Lutnick is correct to say high school-educated Americans are the “core” of our workforce. But manufacturing is no longer reliably safe terrain for an unskilled worker with minimal education. Even before Trump took office, a 2024 report from Deloitte forecast a need for up to 3.8 million additional skilled manufacturing employees by 2033—while also predicting that half of those could go unfilled if skills and applicant gaps go unaddressed.

Let’s start with the good news. CTE delivers tangible outcomes where core academics often stumble. While only 26 percent of eighth-graders scored proficient in math on the 2022 NAEP, the nation’s report card, CTE programs are demonstrably funneling kids into the workforce. High school CTE “concentrators” (students who take multiple CTE courses) tend to outperform non-concentrators in terms of earnings and employment rates. Even more encouragingly, a 2022 report published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University found CTE concentrators are 8.4 percentage points more likely to avoid poverty and are significantly more likely to earn above the poverty threshold seven years after high school. They are also less likely to be “disengaged,” i.e. neither employed nor participating in education or training.

These are positive outcomes and unsurprising. With 85% of 2019 high school graduates earning at least one CTE credit and 77% of CTE students graduating on time—often despite being at-risk—CTE’s focus on jobs over test scores suggests that K–12 can do something right when the goal is paychecks, not just test scores. At its best, CTE aligns education with the practical demands of the labor market, offering pathways to careers that don’t require a four-year degree but still promise stability and dignity.

But those successes are not universal, and the broader K–12 system’s weaknesses casts a long shadow over Trump’s manufacturing ambitions. A 2019 report by my former colleagues at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that CTE programs often fail to align with the needs of local job markets. Nothing useful comes from schools churning out workers trained as welders in regions where robotics or advanced manufacturing jobs dominate—or might in the future. More concerning, only about five percent of CTE concentrators focus on manufacturing, lagging behind other fields such as health science, agriculture, business management, and hospitality and tourism. A report co-authored by Shaun Dougherty, a professor and research director at Boston College, found that schools have an even tougher time filling CTE teaching positions than openings in academic subjects—and that CTE teachers in high-growth areas with occupational licenses are much more likely to leave the profession and enter industry, where they can earn more.

The broader K–12 system’s academic struggles don’t inspire confidence, either. That 26 percent math proficiency rate among eighth-graders isn’t just a statistic; it’s a flashing red warning light. The elephant in the room is automation, which shifts manufacturing job demands toward advanced skills like robotics and CNC (computer numerical control) programming, which involves writing instructions, or code, that tells a CNC machine how to operate and perform tasks like cutting, drilling, or milling. In sum, manufacturing isn’t what it used to be; it’s no longer about low-skill, repetitive tasks but about sophisticated, tech-driven processes. If three-quarters of our students can’t master middle school math, the demands of modern manufacturing are likely beyond them.

The poor performance of K–12 education doesn’t augur well for a renaissance in even semi-skilled labor. Specialized CTE high schools and post-secondary schools perform well, but most CTE students are still in traditional settings, notes Dougherty. “I don't think that we have evidence that in those settings, comprehensive high schools where we're offering CTE, that we are systematically doing better in teaching CTE than we are in math and reading,” he tells me.

Finally, and perhaps ominously, there are factors schools can’t fully control. Soft skills like initiative and work ethic are critical in manufacturing, yet they’re notoriously hard to teach. Tim Taylor of America Succeeds, a nonprofit aimed at mobilizing business to support education, shared a telling anecdote about an Austin, Texas manufacturer who handed out 75 business cards at a career fair, inviting students to visit their office for a job interview. Only three showed up. Taylor’s organization emphasizes mid-skill, mid-wage jobs as the goal—not low-skill, low-wage work that’s easily automated or offshored. But fostering the initiative to seize those opportunities requires more than curriculum; it demands a cultural shift.

So, can American education rise to the challenge of Trump’s manufacturing revival? The answer is a qualified maybe. CTE is a proven pathway for getting kids into the workforce, and its focus on practical skills makes it better suited than traditional academics to meet industry’s immediate needs. If we’re serious about this revival, we’ll need more than tariffs and rhetoric. We’ll need to ensure CTE programs are tightly aligned with local economies and forward-looking enough to prepare students for an automated future. We’ll need to fix the academic foundations—math, literacy, problem-solving—that underpin technical skills. And we’ll need to cultivate a culture that values hard work and opportunity, not just credentials.

Photo by Spencer Davis on Unsplash