College for All Was a Scam $$$ Especailly When they Took Trades Out of the High Schools
SubX.News® Economy Report |
America is finally waking up to a truth Chicago learned the hard way: the College-for-All model was a billion-dollar scam, and the damage is hitting now.
The newest labor data shows that Americans with bachelor’s degrees or higher now make up a record 25% of all unemployed workers nationwide.
That’s 1.9 million college-educated adults age 25 and older who did everything the system told them to do — and still ended up jobless.
And Chicago helped lay the groundwork for this collapse.
For more than a decade, Chicago Public Schools quietly dismantled vocational education in neighborhood high schools, ripping out shop classes, trades programs, and hands-on pathways that once fed students directly into middle-class work.
Auto shop, welding, carpentry, electrical, graphic design, printing — gone.
Equipment thrown out. Veteran trades teachers pushed aside under the banner of “reform.”
Pic from 2005 Chicago’s shop classes, such as the carpentry shop above, are being reduced again. Substance photo by John Kugler.
Internal CPS documents — like the 2009 OHSP CTE Retooling memo — show exactly what happened: a top-down shift toward centralized, selective “career academies” and away from vocational training inside regular high schools.
Substance News reporting from 2010 and 2011 documented the fallout in real time, even as a Harvard Graduate School of Education study publicly warned that the College-for-All ideology was already failing working-class kids.
Students installing network system in a laboratory to save costs and get practical experience.
Harvard’s conclusion — ignored by CPS leadership — was simple: a healthy economy needs multiple pathways, and not every teenager benefits from a forced march into college debt.
Eliminating trades programs removed the only reliable ladder thousands of Chicago teens had into skilled, well-paid work.
Now the bill is due.
Students unloading a lumber delivery having fun while working hard. No standardized tests here just splitters and muscles.
Degree-holders are the fastest-growing block of unemployed Americans, even though their unemployment rate (2.8% in September 2025) is still lower than workers without college.
But the share tells the real story: this is the highest percentage of unemployed degree-holders in recorded U.S. data going back to 1992.
Meanwhile, the country is desperate — absolutely starving — for electricians, welders, auto techs, plumbers, HVAC specialists, machinists, heavy-equipment operators, and industrial trades that CPS once trained students to master before shutting the programs down.
Chicago helped build this shortage by dismantling its own pipeline at precisely the wrong moment, choosing ideology over real-world economics.
And now a generation raised on “college is the only path” is left underemployed, over-leveraged, and locked out of the very jobs the school system removed from their reach.
Key Statistics
Record High Proportion of Unemployed: 25% of all unemployed Americans now have four-year degrees — the highest on record since tracking began.
Unemployment Rate for Degree Holders: 2.8% (Sept 2025), up from 2.3% the year before.
Comparison:
Overall U.S. unemployment: 4.4%
Adults without a high-school diploma: 8.2% unemployment
Growth concentrated in sectors like healthcare and hospitality — not white-collar tracks.
Market Shift:
Economists cite a slowdown in professional hiring and concerns about AI replacing white-collar jobs — exactly the sector CPS pushed millions of students toward.
Why Many Say “College for All” Was a Scam
The critique isn’t that college is worthless. It’s that politicians sold it as the only path while ignoring skyrocketing tuition, student-debt burdens, and the collapse of the middle-skill labor market they helped kill.
Skyrocketing Costs: College tuition rose far faster than wages for decades, leaving the average borrower with $40,000 in debt and fewer ways to pay it off.
Shrinking ROI: The “college earnings premium” has narrowed. Some data now show young men with degrees have the same unemployment rate as those who never attended college — erasing a decade of advantage.
Job Mismatch: Over half of Gen Z graduates told surveys their degree was a “waste of money.”
Skills Gap: The U.S. economy needs skilled labor. Politicians told an entire generation to ignore it.
Meanwhile, federal officials continued pushing most students into four-year colleges. Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s College for All Act exemplified the national push to double-down on an already-failing model: more students, more enrollment, more debt — while trades education collapsed.
We were sold an incredibly expensive product with a marketing pitch that stopped being true for millions of people — all while the affordable, high-demand alternatives were deliberately taken off the menu. And the people who did it still refuse to admit they were wrong.
College can still be a great investment — for the right fields, the right students, and the right price. Engineering, computer science, nursing, accounting, and other specialized programs continue to pay off, especially for students who borrow little and enter stable, high-skill professions.
But the blanket “College for All” ideology that dominated U.S. policy from 2000 to 2020 is now seen as one of the biggest public-policy failures of the century.
The labor-market numbers of 2025 are the receipts: record unemployment among degree-holders, shrinking ROI, and a workforce flooded with bachelor’s degrees while the country runs a desperate shortage of electricians, mechanics, welders, and skilled trades that schools — including CPS — intentionally dismantled.
After pushing everyone into expensive degrees, here’s your reward:
a name tag, an apron, and a latte steamer.
Because after twenty years of politicians chanting “college is the only path,” the promised high-skill economy never showed up — but the service counter did.
Would you like a soy or whole milk with that … HiHo
Sources for Report
Unemployment Rate – College Graduates – Bachelor’s Degree, 25 years and over (CGBD25O) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CGBD25O#:~:text=Notes:,Population%20Survey%20(Household%20Survey)’.
Americans With Four-Year Degrees Now Comprise a Record 25% of Unemployed Workers https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-21/americans-with-four-year-degrees-now-comprise-a-record-25-of-unemployed-workers
Americans with four-year degrees now comprise a record 25% of unemployed workers https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/11/22/us-degree-holders-unemployment-rate/#:~:text=Americans%20with%20four%2Dyear%20degrees,unemployed%20workers%20%2D%20The%20Japan%20Times
What does ”college is a scam” refer to in terms of higher education? https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/1kn0d1d/what_does_college_is_a_scam_refer_to_in_terms_of/
College is a good investment https://www.ppic.org/publication/is-college-worth-it/
How Does Student Debt Harm the Economy? https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-student-debt-affect-the-economy/
Is College Still Worth the High Price? Weighing Costs and Benefits of Investing in Human Capital https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/page-one-economics/2023/09/01/is-college-still-worth-the-high-price-weighing-costs-and-benefits-of-investing-in-human-capital
Do the Benefits of College Still Outweigh the Costs? https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/current_issues/ci20-3.pdf
Jayapal and Sanders Introduce College for All Act https://jayapal.house.gov/2021/04/21/college-for-all/
What is going on in Chicago’s Career and Technology Education (CTE)? John Kugler – May 08, 2010 https://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1383
Harvard report challenges value of ‘College for All’ approach John Kugler – February 03, 2011 https://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1979
Harvard Report Questions Value of ‘College for All’ By Catherine Gewertz — February 02, 2011 https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/harvard-report-questions-value-of-college-for-all/2011/02?tkn=LRYFz0eeP4vfR6uAAk21S5FZDHQhtDqJv4ki&cmp=clp-edweek
Dr. John Kugler is a 20-year ISBE-certified vocational teacher and administrator, with 15 years of industry experience in the trades and manufacturing in the city of Chicago. He is the former President of the Illinois Association for Career and Technical Education (IACTE)
