MIKE ROWE WANTS MORE PHILOSOPHER-WELDERS

The Dirty Jobs host on "essential" work, college, and the skills gap

- NICK GILLESPIE

MIKE ROWE IS best known for his stint hosting the Discovery Channel’s long-running Dirty Jobs, where he performed the sort of work we all rely on but don’t want to think about too much, from cleaning septic tanks to putting hot tar on roofs to disposing of medical waste. Rowe frequently talks about the value of the hard work that’s too often dismissed by a society fixated on sending everyone to college.

In July, Reason’s Nick Gillespie caught up with Rowe at FreedomFest, held this year in Memphis, Tennessee. They talked about why men have fallen behind women in school and work, whether young people have been misled about the value of college, and how Rowe’s foundation—mikeroweWORKS— matches young people interested in learning trades with employers who need applicants.

Reason: You’ve talked about how we’ve made work the enemy, about how vocational and technical schooling at the high school level has all but disappeared in a mad rush to push people into a college track.

Rowe: We gave college a giant P.R. campaign—that it really did need—starting back in the ’70s. All that great press came at the expense of virtually every other form of education. As a result, we created a giant gap in the work force between blue- and white-collar jobs—white were clearly ascendant, blue clearly subordinate.

The rift in our work force and the labor shortage we’re seeing today can be walked right back to the moment we decided to take shop class out of high school. So many things followed that as a result. One of those things, in a completely tertiary way, was a show called Dirty Jobs, which basically gave me permission to crawl through sewers and channel my inner 8-year-old.