Rich Karlgaard of Forbes puts the college-for-everyone campaign in perspective.

A FEW WEEKS AGO I spoke to a trade group of construction company CEOs and CFOs. I thought their top concern would be taxes, regulations, the slow-growth economy or, perhaps, the 2016 election. Wrong. It was the lack of skilled labor.

Welders, carpenters, HVAC technicians–the U.S. has far too few of them. The shortfall in welders alone runs as high as 240,000, and it will get worse. The American Welding Society predicts it will reach 340,000 by 2024. The average welder is 54 years old, compared with about age 40 for the American workforce as a whole. Young people simply aren’t going into skilled trades like welding.

The shortage of skilled tradespeople amounts to a tragic mismatch. These jobs can pay well. Including overtime, welders can make more than $100,000 a year–and the lack of welders means there’s plenty of overtime. A welder will need a high school diploma or GED equivalent, followed by at least nine months of professional training. Private welding schools run about $16,000, but many junior colleges with a vocational focus offer training for far less. In financial terms the return on investment is terrific. So why aren’t more young people headed into the skilled trades?

Lack of exposure is one reason. As reported by David Freedman in the July/August 2016 issue of The Atlantic, only 1 in 20 public high schools offers serious vocational training.

A second reason owes to incorrect conclusions drawn from the growing pay gap between the college-educated person and the noncollege-educated. In general the trend is true, but the skilled-trades jobs are an exception. The average salary for a lawyer in the U.S. is $135,000, but the median salary isn’t much over $110,000, as most lawyers aren’t partners at Skadden Arps. So a hustling welder can make more than a median lawyer, with far less money invested in education. The welder can be earning money by age 18, the lawyer not until 25.

A third and controversial reason has to do with gender. While women earn 60% of both undergraduate and master’s degrees, as well as 47% of law degrees and 48% of medical degrees, men still vastly outnumber women in the skilled trades. So the question isn’t why are Americans not going into skilled trades, but why are young American men not going into them?