Why interest in trade schools has jumped

Jerome Grant is CEO of Universal Technical Institute. He joins us now. Jerome, welcome to you. Thank you for having me. Kelly, any protests on your college campuses? No, we don’t have any on our college campuses at all. There’s our campus structure is a bit different. It’s a single building with students coming in, doing their work and and quickly moving off into their work life and their family life. So to put a point on it, what is the most lucrative field these days? If people were entering and looking for a way to kind of immediately achieve a pretty solid living, what are the paths they’re really looking for? Well you know within our within our world areas like welding, renewable energy and of course healthcare are are very, very strong in in terms of earning, earning potential. And I think that’s one of the reasons why students are now starting to think more deeply about alternatives to a four year education. What is the cost roughly say to become someone who could go and enter one of those fields and how long would it take? Well for instance welding is about a nine month program, it’s about $22,000 to to become and so you’re out working with a a great job within nine months. I think that’s one of the the benefits people see which is you could be an auto mechanic within a year, a nurse within two you can be out there practicing much more quickly than moving into a a four year degree. Is there a mix shift in the kinds of people who are coming into your colleges, Is there is from a financial point of view for investors as well. What do you think is driving enrollment trends and what should we expect to continue driving them? Yeah, that’s a that’s a great question. So we’re seeing double digit increases enrollments in both of our units, both Concord Career Colleges and Universal Technical Institute. Looking at the trade side, Universal Technical Institute has about half their students coming from directly from high school. About 35% come from unskilled labor or likely should have come right after high school but went out into the market and about 15% come from the military. And and we’re seeing, you know, quite good results of students coming directly out of high school, which is underscoring that notion that students are making new decisions about what they do after after high school. We’re also seeing strong results in our military population as well. And so as people are are rotating out of their military service, they’re they’re thinking deeply also about where they go for there. Where are you seeing changes at the margin for instance enrollment of men versus women, the age demographics, you know those kinds of things does sound like it’s not exactly the population that it might have been 510 or 15 years ago. Well, we we have two very different populations in the healthcare field. It tends to be someone in their mid 20s to 30 who’s making their second choice in a career predominantly women although we’ve got very strong focus programs on bringing more men into the into into the healthcare fields on the transportation trades and energy side. It’s a 18 to 24 year old primarily a male that is coming in and and we’re also making strong strides to bring more more women into the into the area. And I think that’s actually one of the dynamics you’re seeing move. You know, most prominently we 5-6 years ago there in that side of the business there was maybe 3-4 percent and now we’re up in the six, 7% range of women coming into it as they see more women making the choice to move into these professions. Do you think, I mean it’s interesting to see the pop culture kind of grapple with this as I believe it was a recent South Park episode that showed lawyers and doctor or or or lawyers and and white collar professionals hanging around at a Home Depot trying to you know find someone to do to do work while they were out of a job. And this idea that AI is going to put a lot of people who had by paying work perhaps in a very different position going forward. Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And you know I get asked a lot about how AI is affecting what what we’re doing and and we see AI as an an enormous enabler. You know, AI is helping us target those students better. That may fit into the the model of going into skilled trades or or healthcare. AI is helping our curriculum help our students learn faster and more deeply and get their questions answered more quickly. And AI is helping our in our employment community diagnose problems quicker, whether it’s humans or automobiles. But AI is not going to fix your car, and AI is not going to put an IV in your arm. And that’s where our workers come in. Interesting, just to circle back to the example of that welder, 22,000 dollars, nine months to get the the certification, if that’s what it’s called, what do you think that wage might be for a person starting out? Do you have any idea? But they’re going to start out in the, you know mid to high $20 range, but there’s a very solid career path beyond that for them as they you know demonstrate their skills out in the market. And that’s one of the things that we pride ourselves on is whether it’s with our manufacturer partners or employer partners is that is that we help them plot out. There’s those career paths as people prove their proficiency throughout their. Throughout their careers. Yeah. And again this constant kind of sort of theme in society lately where people say sometimes it’s just satisfying to fix something with your own hands and and at least have a sense at the end of the day of of completing the task of Jerome. Thanks for joining us. We hope to check back in soon. Great thanks for having me. Jerome Grant with UTI coming.