By India McCarty
Mike Rowe pledged $10 million to support young people who are interested in learning a trade.
“We’ve grown with every passing year,” he said of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, which supports young people who want to learn a skilled trade. “I started it with a $500,000 donation 16 years ago. We did $5 million last year. We could’ve done a lot more. Last year was the first time our applications went up 10x…This year, we’ve set aside $10 million specifically to help train the next generation of skilled workers.”
Related: Gen Z Cares Less About College, and Mike Rowe Says That’s a Good Thing
In an interview with Fortune, he shared, “This foundation has been made relevant. It’s been a long time coming. I’m not taking a victory lap, but it’s just very strange and surreal and kind of gratifying to see so many people talking about the issue.”
“Our crumbling infrastructure, our widening skills gap, the disappearance of vocational education, and the stratospheric rise in college tuition — these are not problems,” he explained on the foundation’s web page. “These are symptoms of what we value. And right now, we have to reconnect the average American with the value of a skilled workforce. Only then, will the next generation aspire to do the work at hand.”
Despite this boost in application numbers and funding, Rowe told the outlet there is still a lot of work to be done to reverse the negative idea many have of skilled labor.
“You’re talking about turning around a tanker,” he explained. “It took a whole generation or more for the skills gap to get as bad as it is right now. And it’s going to take some time to fix it.”
Rowe has frequently spoken about this skills gap. In a recent interview with Fox Business, he said, “There are able-bodied men in their working ages not only not working, but not looking. That, to me, is one of the greatest alarm bells going on in the country. We’ve never seen that before, not in peacetime anyway.”
He hypothesized that part of the reason behind this is the emphasis on traditional higher education over learning a skilled trade.
“We’re still pushing a lot of kids toward a very expensive path, while the skills gap widens,” Rowe said. “The skills gap is real, but there’s a will gap as well.”
The DIRTY JOBS host praised Gen Z for their interest in trade work, saying, “The four-year degrees are trending down in that cohort. There’s a lot more interest in electricians, and plumbers, and steamfitters, and welders and pipefitters.”
Rowe has been working to spread awareness about the skills gap, as well as the benefits of trade work, and it looks like Gen Zers are listening!
Read Next: If You Want to Learn a Trade Skill, Mike Rowe Can Help
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