About TradeSchoolOutlook
Data-driven ROI analysis for trade and vocational programs — because skilled trades deserve the same scrutiny (and respect) as four-year degrees.
What Is TradeSchoolOutlook?
TradeSchoolOutlook scores every trade and vocational program in America on a 0–100 scale that combines real graduate earnings, AI career resilience, job market demand, and return on investment.
We built this because most "college ROI" tools ignore trade schools entirely. Welders, electricians, HVAC technicians, and dental hygienists deserve the same transparent data that computer science and finance majors get. In fact, many trade programs deliver stronger ROI than four-year degrees — with less debt and more resilience to AI disruption.
The TradeSchoolOutlook Score
Every program gets a composite score from 0 to 100 based on four factors:
How much graduates actually earn (1 year and 5 years after completion), compared to the national median for the same trade.
How shielded the career paths are from AI automation. Trades that require physical presence, manual dexterity, and real-world problem solving score highest. We use GPT task exposure research (OpenAI) and the AI Occupational Exposure index (Felten et al.) to quantify this.
Total annual job openings and 10-year growth projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A great salary means little if the field has 200 openings nationwide.
Total projected 10-year earnings divided by program tuition. This isn't a discounted cash flow — it's a simple, transparent ratio that answers: "How many times over does this program pay for itself?"
Earnings Projections
Each program page shows a 10-year earnings projection chart. Here's how we build it:
- Starting point: Actual median 1-year post-graduation earnings from the College Scorecard (not estimates — real reported wages).
- Growth rate: Derived from actual Scorecard data where available (comparing 1-year to 5-year earnings). When multi-year data isn't available, we fall back to BLS projected growth for the mapped occupations.
- Guardrails: Growth rates are floored at 1% and capped at 12% annually to avoid unrealistic projections.
The chart always shows a single confident line. Trade careers don't have the volatile disruption risk that desk jobs face — an electrician's value proposition doesn't collapse because of a new language model.
Why Trades Are AI-Proof
Every program page includes an AI resilience rating. Here's the framing: while AI is reshaping white-collar work in unpredictable ways, skilled trades remain fundamentally physical, local, and human.
You can't send a robot to rewire a house, fix a leaking pipe at 2am, or assess a patient's breathing. The jobs that score highest on our AI-proof scale — HVAC, welding, dental hygiene, electrical work — require hands-on skills that current AI simply cannot replicate.
We still model three internal scenarios (optimistic, base, conservative) for scoring purposes. The score range shown on each page reflects how the rating shifts under different economic assumptions. But unlike college degrees facing direct AI disruption, the spread between trade school scenarios is typically very narrow — which is the whole point.
Data Sources
Program-level earnings at 1 and 5 years post-completion, median debt at graduation, tuition, and enrollment. This is the same federal data source used by the White House College Scorecard tool.
Occupation-level employment, projected growth rates, annual openings, and median wages. We map each CIP program code to its corresponding SOC occupation codes using the federal crosswalk.
Task-level AI exposure scores from two independent research sources. GPT exposure measures what fraction of a job's tasks could be augmented by large language models. AIOE (AI Occupational Exposure) provides a complementary measure from academic research.
Methodology Notes
- Programs are included if they have valid 1-year earnings data from College Scorecard and map to at least one BLS occupation.
- "Earnings Multiple" is not a discounted ROI. It's total 10-year projected earnings divided by tuition — a simple, transparent ratio.
- AI resilience scores blend GPT exposure and AIOE using occupation-level weights proportional to employment in each mapped career path.
- The CIP-to-SOC crosswalk means one program may map to multiple occupations. We weight by employment share, not equally.
- State-level pages aggregate programs by the school's state. Programs are only counted once (at the school where they're offered).
Sister Site
Considering a four-year degree instead? DegreeOutlook applies the same scoring methodology to 24,000+ bachelor's and master's programs. The key difference: college degrees face meaningful AI disruption risk, so DegreeOutlook models three explicit scenarios. Trade programs don't need that — the work is inherently hands-on.
Contact
TradeSchoolOutlook is an independent data project. We have no affiliation with any school, trade union, or recruiting company. Questions or corrections? Reach out at hello@tradeschooloutlook.com.