The Brian Lehrer Show

As blue-collar jobs shift require more technical training, Katherine Newman, professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University and the co-author of Reskilling America: Learning to Labor in the Twenty-First Century (Metropolitan Books, 2016) argues for the U.S. to borrow practices from European countries and offer vocational training to more students, instead of automatically assuming college is best.

Newman said despite millions of people being unemployed in the U.S. many middle-skilled jobs go unfilled. But this wan't always the case; in the 1930s the U.S. had the type of vocational training in high schools across the country that enabled millions of American to find steady jobs that propelled them into the middle class, but at some point the U.S. favored a different type of economy. "We moved our emphasis into university education," she said. "The white collar zone became the prestige ranks for everyone to aim for and we slowly disinvested in this sort of training."

But with an estimated 2.5 million of these jobs, such as welders, carpenters and airplane mechanics, projected to enter the U.S. workforce in 2017 and account for 40 percent of all job growth, Newman said it's time for the government to invest in and provide sustained vocational training. " A consistent investment that emphasizes the value of this type of education and respects the kinds of careers it's headed for is what the country needs," she said.