For decades, America steadily surrendered much of its manufacturing capacity while our education system increasingly sent young people down one path: go to college, borrow the money, get a four-year degree.
That path worked well for many Americans—but not for everyone.
Skilled trades and manufacturing careers were too often treated as second-class choices, even as employers struggled to find machinists, technicians, welders, electricians and other skilled workers.
Meanwhile, millions of young Americans accumulated college debt, and many discovered that their degrees did not necessarily lead to jobs requiring them. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that the underemployment rate for recent college graduates reached 42.5% at the end of 2025.
Now the Trump administration has launched Foundry School, a national program designed to train Americans for the advanced manufacturing economy. Announced September 3 by Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the program brings together eight major universities and industry leaders to teach everything from factory design and precision tooling to automation, supply chains, plant economics and workforce development.
The need is real. The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte estimate that American manufacturing could require 3.8 million additional workers by 2033—and as many as 1.9 million of those jobs could go unfilled if the nation’s skills and worker shortages are not addressed.
Those shortages also help explain why American employers have sometimes looked abroad for workers with specialized technical skills. A country determined to rebuild its industrial base must also rebuild its own pipeline of people capable of operating it.
The problems did not begin with one president or one political party. They accumulated over decades, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike: offshoring production, undervaluing vocational education, emphasizing four-year college as the preferred route to success, and allowing domestic industrial skills to erode.
The Trump administration’s Foundry School represents a different approach: if America wants to make things in America again, America must train Americans to make them.
That is a straightforward connection between education, good-paying work, manufacturing and national strength—and an attempt to address a problem decades in the making.
