Abreu is a Queens Tech graduate, and his son is now a student at the school as well.
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For the students at Queens Tech, as for many young people across America graduating into what every newspaper and expert tells them is a wonderful economy, adult life is no longer about how much money they stand to make out of the gate. It’s about what size hole they might have to crawl out from just to break even. Perhaps that’s why there’s a renewed sense of energy surrounding CTE: Burg said that in the almost ten years she’s been principal—a timeline that roughly correlates with the last financial crisis—she consistently saw an uptick in applications. Brookings noted renewed interest nationwide as well.
The advanced cable trainers (kits containing cables and wire cutters) let students practice on miniature versions of cable lines.
Haw Wunna Zaw, a student at Queens Tech, says that even if a construction worker makes as much money as a doctor, they don’t earn as much respect in American society.
“I feel like everyone has the expectation that you have to go to college to get more money, and that’s a lie,” she told me. “You waste more money to go to college than you get out of it.”The only problem, Barcos explained, was that her parents didn’t think trades like electrical installation were appropriate for women. That mind-set is one Abreu said he’d had to contend with over the years with relative frequency, though he’d also seen immigrant parents cheer on daughters with 95 percent averages who decided they wanted to help fix the crumbling transit system."As union membership has declined, old-school patronage has broken down, and tech companies have disrupted industry after industry, fixing escalators for a living is less sexy than ever."
Seventeen-year-old Brigitte Barcos originally attended Queens Tech for cosmetology before switching to the electrical installation track.