Ford can't find mechanics for $120K: It takes math to learn a trade
- Joanne Jacobs
- Nov 17, 2025
- 2 min read
Ford pays auto mechanics $120,000 a year, but can't find enough workers, said CEO Jim Farley on a podcast. Nationwide, employers "have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and tradesmen.”
Farley complained that "we don't have trade schools anymore," reports Avi Zilber in the New York Post.
The Ford CEO's grandfather was one of the company's early employees, hired to work on the Model T. “We are not investing in educating a next generation of people like my grandfather who had nothing, who built a middle class life and a future for his family,” Farley said.
Ford is spending $4 million to fund scholarship for auto technicians.
“The community colleges, the career tech programs do a solid job in providing foundational training, but we often see that they’re out of date when it comes to keeping up with how fast things are moving from a technology standpoint,” said Rich Garrity, a board member of the National Association of Manufacturers.
We have trade schools, writes Robert Pondiscio. We have high school vocational programs, now called Career and Technical Education, or CTE. What we don't have are enough young people with the literacy and math proficiency needed to learn skilled trades.
"Today’s auto technicians work with computer software, advanced sensors, high-voltage systems, and digital schematics," he writes. "Servicing an electric vehicle requires interpreting data flows, troubleshooting electronics, and following precise, multistep instructions." It's not a job for "grease monkeys."
At University of California San Diego, one of the nation's top public universities, one-in-eight freshmen can’t do middle-school math. They were passed on with inflated grades: 25 percent of remedial math students earned straight A's in high school math, and 20 percent passed Calculus.
National test scores show most students have weak reading and math skills. They can't just "fall back" on a trades job, writes Pondiscio. They're not prepared for that either.
Workers who struggle to read grade-level text cannot read complicated technical manuals or diagnostic instructions. If they can’t handle middle-school math they can’t program high-tech machines or robotics, or operate the automated equipment found in modern factories and repair shops.
America has good jobs, writes Pondiscio. "It lacks a K–12 system capable of preparing students to seize them."
Many years ago, when cars were a lot simpler, a high school shop teacher told me that few of his students had any chance of working as auto mechanics. "They can't read the manual," he said.
Companies are laying off white-collar workers, but there are high-paying opportunities in the skilled trades, tweets Mike Rowe. While touring a data center, he met with young electricians "making well over $200K a year. They constantly get offers from the competition for ever-increasing salaries, because the need for electricians is acute, and their jobs are not threatened by robots or AI."
Rowe is expanding his scholarship program for trade-school students.
If anyone has these job listings for $120,000 my son is interested. Since the highest salary shown at Glassdoor is $79,000 for a Ford Auto Mechanic.
My son at the age of 23 has worked for three companies in the greater Milwaukee area as a maintenance shift leader, solely because he can read at a college level, he can follow directions and do basic algebra in his head. He makes more money than the schoolteachers who dismissed him for wanting to work with his hands. Fortunately, we live in a very red county whose school district held on to it principles.
Schooling is not organized to teach students useful things in the real world. Schooling incentivizes getting good grades, not real learning. That works for English or history, because no one really cares if you only learn 70-80% of your Shakespeare or Civil War history. But in the trades, you have to know the material. The first thing the kids have to overcome the conditioning that just passing the test is all that matters.
More and more testing, more and more practice. The same type of problem, over and over till they get it. And please, once they prove they get it (via testing), let individuals within the class move ahead to the next set of skills. Everyone working at his own level, not always in groups (they have to be tested individually, after all). No one should expect that all students will proceed at the same pace; but the teacher should understand what the curriculum is, and what comes first, what you go on to, etc.
I live down the block from a very skilled and diligent K-6 math teacher. She says there are two main obstacles to her student's learning: lack of preparation (they didn't learn previous skills and, since math is cumulative, they can't learn subsequent skills) and teachers who themselves aren't very good at math.