3 weeks ago
AI made the trades hot again. So now they ax Seattle’s wood program?
By
Danny Westneat __
Seattle Times columnist
Chuck McQuinn knows a thing or two about being adaptable.
For decades he was a vascular surgeon, first at Seattle’s Polyclinic and later at Kaiser Permanente. After retiring from that, he did what seems like a hard pivot — now he teaches the Intro to Professional Woodworking course at Seattle Central College.
“It isn’t as different as you might think,” he laughed. One operates on human bodies, the other on wood boards. “The skills needed are attention to exacting detail, perseverance, focus, that sort of thing.”
McQuinn is not finding this same spirit of adaptability in our local political systems.
You may have seen the news that Seattle Central, the city’s first community college, is in a budget crisis again. So it’s proposing to shutter the school’s popular “wood shop” program, where about 80 students a year learn carpentry, construction, boatbuilding, furniture-making and so on.
Seattle Central is in such dire straits it’s also proposing to sell off the Wood Technology Center, which was built for $25 million in 2012 in the Central District.
The school is facing an $8 million shortfall for next year, after already cutting $10 million this year. Slashing 25% in two years — from $73 million down to $55 million — has “serious implications for the college’s ability to sustain operations,” the college president wrote in an alarming report to the school’s board earlier this month.
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“I am compelled to express my profound concern regarding the long-term sustainability of the institution,” Chantae Recasner wrote. “It is unprecedented and feels unfathomable.”
The reasons for all this are familiar across many public institutions. Costs are up (mostly in salaries and benefits), revenue is down (partly due to a collapse in international student enrollment), there’s a general pandemic hangover and tepid funding support from the state. Seattle Central gets about 70% of its budget from the state.
There’s also been fiscal mismanagement, as a previous finance official left the school after making some howling budget flubs.
Bottom line: McQuinn suspects that by this time next fall, he’ll be out of a job.
“We have 70 students on the list for next fall’s class, which takes 18,” he said. “Does that seem like something to cut?”
The irony here is that high schools and colleges have been shuttering wood shop classes and other trade-oriented training for decades, as everything stampeded into computer science.
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But now with artificial intelligence threatening to eat the white-collar job market, the blue-collar trades suddenly are hot again.
The Wall Street Journal recently looked at “What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves.” It featured a data entry specialist now in training to become a firefighter, and a computer science student who had jumped to trade school to become an electrician.
An ex-Microsoft product manager in Sammamish, Babith Bhoopalan, said there’s so much anxiety about AI consuming entire career paths that he created a guide to help students and parents navigate it.
“When we were growing up, career advice was simpler,” he writes about the old days, meaning just a few years ago. “An accounting certification guaranteed employment. A computer science degree was the golden ticket. That world no longer exists.”
But there are “four human superpowers AI can’t replicate,” he writes, one of which is “physical dexterity.”
“Hands-on work in unpredictable environments, requiring improvisation and fine motor skills,” he writes. Think “skilled trades, surgery, emergency response, construction.”
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Or as McQuinn, the surgeon-turned-woodworker, puts it: “AI is not going to be remodeling your kitchen.”
McQuinn said you can feel these tectonic plates shifting in the wood shop building.
“A few years ago, we would have a tech person in our classes now and then, someone who felt they didn’t want to sit in front of a screen anymore,” he says. “But now they say they’re here out of necessity. Now they don’t see a long-term future in tech.”
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Amazing. The perception used to be that the trades were for people who couldn’t get into college. Now you have people dropping out of college to get into the trades.
All of this is in flux, but it’s plainly shortsighted to completely cut any successful trade school program right now.
“I feel they’re really out of step with what’s happening out in the workforce,” McQuinn said of college administrators.
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I also nominate for being out of step: state lawmakers and the governor.
How can you pass the largest tax increases in state history and then instantly have a public college of 12,000 students be so bad off it’s warning of insolvency?
Why isn’t adapting workforce training for the AI era an urgent state priority?
How come all the talk about new taxes has included so little talk about new opportunities and new jobs for a new generation?
McQuinn said the political systems seem sluggish. Example: Rather than closing, the wood center ought to be scaling up training on “computer numerical control cutting” — using software to guide precision wood cuts.
“You have to roll with times,” he said.
It feels instead like we’re shrinking from them.
Danny Westneat: dwestneat@seattletimes.com. Danny Westneat, a metro news columnist at The Seattle Times since 2004, takes an opinionated look at the Puget Sound region's news, people and politics.
More: www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/ai-made-the...
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