Back in 2019, what share of parents said career and technical education was a good fit for a high-achieving student?
13 percent. That’s a shocking number, and it jumped off the page to me because at the time, I was working in technical higher education and spent much of my time advocating for its benefits. Today it is 35 percent. Over the same stretch, the share of parents saying any type of student should consider CTE went from 62 percent to 83 percent, and the share who prefer a traditional four-year degree for their own kid dropped from 74 percent to 58 percent. That comes from Britebound, who surveyed 2,230 parents of middle and high school students in March 2025 against its own 2019 data.
A near tripling in six years. That’s encouraging! That is almost exactly the window in which our field kept telling itself the parents were the problem. I have said it myself, on a panel, with a slide. I don’t think I was wrong, I was probably just incomplete in my take.
We may still be answering a question parents stopped asking
When somebody in workforce or economic development cites parent perception of manufacturing, they are almost always reaching for any one of a multitude of studies that stood firm on that point. It was good research done by serious people, and I have leaned on it plenty. But it seems like parents are starting to measurably change their minds. So, are the parents still the obstacle?
On Friday, October 2, thousands of manufacturers open their doors for MFG Day. I wrote a couple of weeks ago that this is a positioning problem, not a pipeline problem, and that the third thing I would change before October 2 was to talk to the adults. I’ll admit in prepping for this article I need to walk part of that back. Not the talking to them part. The part where I assumed the job was to convince them. In this case, I’m glad to be kind of wrong.
They moved toward a category, without fully understanding it
“Skilled trades” is a warm phrase in most American kitchens now, and the picture that comes with it is a truck, a toolbelt, and a local business with the owner’s name on the side. Genuinely good career, and I am glad the culture came around to it. I often joke with friends and family that if I had to do it over again, I’d be a licensed master plumber and own Padilla Plumbing Co. (Not really joking). But a bunny suit equipment technician on a fab floor is not in that picture for most parents, even though it is the same instinct pointing at it. A parent in Pflugerville can believe completely in hands-on careers and still have no idea that job exists twenty minutes up the road, what it pays, or that the training runs for ten weeks. We spent years asking parents to change their minds. They did, then we didn’t have the follow-up ready.
AI-proof is the wrong filter, and mobility is the missing one
The other thing reshaping kitchen-table advice right now is AI, and this is where the well-meaning version of the conversation goes sideways. In January the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas published an analysis by Tyler Atkinson and Shane Yamco finding that workers age 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations saw employment fall about 13 percent between late 2022 and September 2025. That tracks with what I have written before: the work AI takes first is the work already written down, and a technician career is built on knowledge that cannot be typed into a prompt. I still believe both things.
Now look at the occupations the Dallas Fed puts on the least-exposed end of the same scale. Cashiers. Janitors and building cleaners. Laborers and freight, stock and material movers.
Read that list again.
Low AI exposure, low wage, no ceiling. That is not safety. That is a holding pattern with good job security, and if “the robots cannot do it” is the whole filter a family is using, that list is where the filter lands them. Sometimes families have better information than that, sometimes not if we are honest. What separates a durable hands-on career from a dead-end one was never exposure. It is whether the job publishes a pay scale, pays for your next credential, and moves you sideways into systems you did not know last year. If economic mobility is the goal, then upwards salary mobility should be part of the equation.
Texas already wrote part of the answer into law
Here is the part I do not hear enough about. House Bill 120, passed by the 89th Legislature and effective September 1, 2025, rewrote what a Texas school counselor owes a family. Section 33.007 now requires counselors to provide information about career training and earning a postsecondary credential while still in high school, including what those programs cost and how many students complete them. The Texas Education Agency has to run annual training for counselors on statewide postsecondary outcomes trends. The same bill created a high school advising program districts can fund for graduates through their first two years out and tripled the Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH) allotment to $150 per student.
Read that statute as a program operator and it says something specific. The cost, completion, and outcomes numbers are assumed to exist. If a program cannot produce those three on request, a counselor cannot really use it and stay inside the law. What’s the old adage about good intentions?
And yes, there is a real capacity conversation underneath this. The American School Counselor Association put the national student-to-counselor ratio at 372 to 1 for 2024-25 against a recommended 250 to 1. High schools finally got inside that recommendation, landing between 195 and 224 students per counselor. Elementary and middle schools sit between 571 and 694. Middle school is where the math sequence and the first CTE course get chosen, and it is where the coverage is thinnest. Britebound surveyed parents of grades 6 through 12 for a reason. I sat on a school board, and the parent who turns up in October asking about course sequences is not the parent who needs convincing of anything.
Central Texas is not short on things to point at
The inventory here is genuinely good. In January the state put a $3.5 million Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund grant into Texas State Technical College’s Williamson County campus in Hutto for an accelerated semiconductor technician program: equipment technicians, process technicians, gas control system specialists, ten weeks long. Austin Community College trains more than 3,000 semiconductor and advanced manufacturing workers a year, and in June its programs were picked for a ten-state expansion under the National Network for Microelectronics Education, with the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Institute for Electronics leading the southern node. The Austin Infrastructure Academy reported connecting over 1,500 residents to jobs in its first year, with average earnings increases around $18,500. Credit where it is due. The pathways are here and they are open.
Three things I would put in front of a parent this week
Answer the three questions the statute asks. What a program costs, how long it takes, how many finish, and what they earned. One page, plain language, per program, somewhere a parent finds it in under a minute. If you have those numbers, publish them. If you do not have them yet, work to build them, because that is worth doing whether or not anybody asks.
Stop selling the category and name the job. “Advanced manufacturing” is a sector code. “Equipment technician, second shift, Taylor” is a job. Parents who already believe in hands-on work do not need another pitch for hands-on work. They need to know which job, where, what shift, and what it pays in year one and year four.
Bring the middle school families. MFG Day tours are built for juniors and seniors. The course choices that make a technician pathway possible happen earlier than that, in the grades with the thinnest counselor coverage in the building. Invite the sixth and seventh grade families too. Nothing else about the tour has to change.
I will be in College Station on October 22 and 23 as a panel speaker at the Texas Semiconductor Summit, where Day 2 is all about workforce, talent, and ecosystem development, and this is the piece of the argument I am least certain about, so I ask you to consider it with me: if the adults in these kids’ lives have already moved, and we are still spending awareness dollars trying to move them, what should that money be buying instead?
I have a few ideas, and I would really like to hear yours. Let’s connect!
Edgar Padilla is the Founder & Chief Strategist at Padilla Futures Group, a workforce, education, and economic development advisory firm. He is currently embedded with the City of Austin Economic Development Department as a FUSE Executive Fellow, focused on the advanced manufacturing and semiconductor industry and workforce. He is a former senior executive in technical higher education, publicly-elected school board trustee, Deloitte and EY alum, and experienced non-profit, EDO, and education board member. Views are his own.
Originally published on LinkedIn.