This story is part of our November 2025 issue. To read the print version, click here.

Twenty years ago this fall, Universal Technical Institute opened its Sacramento campus, teaching recent high school graduates, young adults and veterans a series of technical skills that equip them to work in the automotive industry, HVAC and welding after they leave the institute.

Today, UTI Sacramento, one of 25 UTI campuses nationwide, has close to 2,000 students on its leafy site in Natomas. These young men and women, with an average age of 24, according to President Tess Kraiker, enroll in courses that last from one year up to 90 weeks. When they leave, they can access a tuition reimbursement incentive plan signed onto by over 7,500 employers around the U.S. that will allow them to pursue more training and education, as well as qualify for sign-up bonuses for UTI graduates — a recognition of the high level of skills they will be bringing with them from their technical education.

Related: Apprenticeships Aren’t Just for Carpenters and Firefighters Anymore

“We supply the transportation industry with the next generation of technicians,” says Kraiker, who has been with UTI for 16 years and witnessed growing enthusiasm for such programs.  “I’ve seen a shift in the ways parents and counselors see a career in the trades. It’s been pretty neat to see.”

Around the Capital Region, technical and trade programs in high schools, in community colleges such as Cosumnes River, American River, Sac City and Sierra, and in stand-alone entities such as UTI, are flourishing.

At Del Campo High School, dozens of kids learn firefighting and EMT skills in a program led by retired firefighter Scott Schneider. They train on a real fire engine and hose bed simulators and have access to personal protective equipment gear and thermal imaging equipment. They work on a burnt-out car that can repeatedly be set on fire and navigate a maze inside a metal shipping container-like construction that mimics rescue conditions inside a burning building. When they are further along in their studies, they can accompany a fire company on real responses to emergencies.

“This is going to take you places you want to go. Take it seriously, buckle down and develop the love to learn. There’s always going to be something new to learn, because the technology keeps changing. Specialize. Find something you can do really well.”

― Colin Wells, UTI grad and specialty auto mechanic

“It’s changed me physically, made me tougher mentally, made me respect my peers more and be more social,” says 16-year-old Ben Velasquez, who wants to become a firefighter after he leaves school. “I’ve lived here my whole life. It’s a beautiful area. I want to give back to it.”

At Mira Loma High School, students can attend an aviation pathway program, training to fly on flight simulators, learning to pilot and maintain drones and studying the scientific theories of aeronautics. They have access to a cutting-edge wind tunnel and a 3D printer.

These programs have been buoyed by a growing realization that an expensive four-year university education may not be the best option for many young people entering the workforce. The reality is that many trades offer pathways to lucrative, interesting careers. After decades in which students were essentially told that their choices were college-or-bust — even though only about 30 percent of high school graduates end up going through a four year university — these days more educational institutions are reviving the old concepts of the vocational school with apprenticeships and hands-on learning to prepare kids for good careers in the trades.

Related: Trade Schools Offer a Career Path to Our Youth

Sierra College has an extensive CTE program, offering classes in mechatronics, information technology, or IT, and business, among others. American River has a strong restaurant program, along with law enforcement and construction programs, to name a few. You can train to be a pharmacy technician, medical billing expert or architectural drafter at Cosumnes, while Sac City offers refrigeration, cosmetology and dental hygienist as part of its CTE program.

At the high school level, Rosemont High School, for example, 10th-grade students who don’t want to only focus on academics are offered three career and technical education pathways, or CTE. One is focused on engineering and construction, a second on the culinary arts and a third on media. Each has cutting-edge equipment — the media pathway even has its own television studio — and all utilize experiential, hands-on learning methods.

More than 500 students are enrolled in these pathways. Many of them get part-time jobs in their fields while they are still in school, and they can also take college courses in their respective fields, meaning they come out primed to get apprenticeships, and then union cards, in the trades.

When the students graduate from these programs, some do go on to universities — studying everything from medicine to rocket science; others choose an array of technical career pathways. Engineering pathway graduates have gone on to work in the Navy’s nuclear submarine program, according to Rosemont principal Mitchell Jones, as well as for NASA.

For Colin Wells, who graduated from the UTI campus in Phoenix, Arizona, his specialty of understanding the workings of exotic British cars such as Bentleys and Jaguars, as well as the exclusive McLaren has opened up all kinds of doors, financial and otherwise. Wells now lives in Walnut Creek in the Bay Area, earns good money and has the technical skills to buy cheap high-end cars that need a little tender loving care and to restore them — which is why he can, these days, be seen driving an elegant old Bentley along his hometown streets. He also knows how to work HVAC systems and has the skills to do plumbing and electrical repairs on his home.

His advice to young students enrolling in a technical program? “This is going to take you places you want to go. Take it seriously, buckle down and develop the love to learn. There’s always going to be something new to learn because the technology keeps changing. Specialize. Find something you can do really well.”

Wells says that the technicians in the luxury dealership where he currently works “are making between $45 and $55 per hour, plus bonuses.”

It’s that lure which draws a student such as 16-year-old Ana Fotofili, who enrolled in the Capital College & Career Academy (CCCA) in Sacramento when it opened its doors just over two years ago. She is currently a junior and will be part of the academy’s first graduating class in 2027.

Related: Bridging the Job Gap: Community-led training programs help people find jobs and escape poverty

“I want to go work. I don’t want to go to college. I just want to get to work — in construction or real estate, flipping houses,” Fotofili says while walking between one of the 21 classrooms on the small campus and past the fenced-in, overgrown area that Principal Kevin Dobson plans to turn into additional classrooms once a state grant, aimed at promoting the mechanical trades, materializes.

On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, the students at CCCA have six classes, a mix of academic and technical offerings. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings they do job shadows. Afterwards, they return to campus and take part in art classes. The technical classes run the gamut from woodworking in a campus shop, to learning the ins and outs of electrical work from local electricians.

Fotofili has recently been attending construction classes at American River College. She has also been job-shadowing with McCarthy construction company, learning how to put together estimates on building projects. At the same time, she’s also doing academic courses; for her language requirement, she is taking Mandarin.

“I’d never been in a school that cared,” the 16-year-old in ripped jeans, a black top and a bandana says. “I used to do whatever. They care; they get you on track; they change you as a student.”

For John Pellman, director of curriculum and instruction at the Academy, Fotofili’s enthusiasm provides proof positive that the theories animating CCCA’s instructional team are working. “There’s a reason why the focus on trades and construction is becoming more in demand and popular.”

Related article: Trained in the Trades: Area companies and educators are developing much-needed middle-skill workers, but will low wages make it impossible to fill the void?

There is, he says, a new “toolbelt generation” that wants to acquire more hands-on skills and is less concerned with traditional academic disciplines. One of the academy’s students, he notes, went to a carpenters’ training program in Fairfield and developed an interest in scaffolding.

Seeing his enthusiasm, the CCCA team helped him to get a summer job with a scaffolding company, and now, two days a week, he does paid work for the company while still attending CCCA classes. Another student is being paid to work on cars. Three students are working with CalTrans engineers on bridge-building projects. “You can’t get better than having bridge builders at CalTrans giving you feedback on how you’re doing,” Pellman says enthusiastically.

Principal Dobson at CCCA estimates that his academy has students from 30 different ZIP codes. By the end of the decade, he hopes that each of the four grades will have more than 100 enrollees, providing valuable career pathways to teenagers approaching adulthood who in the past might have fallen through the cracks.

A similar motivation animates Brett Wolfe, director of college and career readiness with the CTE program at high schools in the San Juan Unified School District. Students can train to become medical assistants, learn about agricultural business and take classes in welding, animation, horticulture, construction and robotics.

“We want to make sure the students can earn a livable wage,” Wolfe explains. To that end, his office is continuously scouring labor market statistics, looking for industries that are in high demand and tailoring technical programs in the high schools to meet this demand. It’s a tactic that is proving increasingly popular with school kids and their parents. Out of the roughly 12,000 high school students in the district’s schools, upwards of 2,300 of them are taking CTE classes.

Grace Kovar, 17, is among them. A senior at Casa Roble Fundamental High School in Orangevale, Kovar, whose grandmother was an ER nurse and whose boyfriend has many relatives in the medical field, has opted for the medical pathway. She and her peers have access to a mock-up of a doctor’s office, complete with beds for patients, equipment to monitor vital signs, machinery for equipment sterilization, urinalysis and suture removals.

Related article: Graduating Into a New Life: Education and job training programs ease the reentry process for formerly incarcerated Californians

They are in that room, which has school desks in front of the row of beds, three hours per day, learning everything from an introduction to pharmacology to how to interpret EKGs. When she learns history, it is history that has a medical emphasis. When she learns English literature, the focus is on books, such as a biography of Typhoid Mary, with a medical bent.

Kovar is thinking about doing an “externship” (a non-paid internship, organized by the school) at a plastic surgery facility. She’s leaning toward becoming a pediatric nurse or working on women’s health care once she leaves high school with the tranche of medical certifications the pathway provides. “It (the program) all leads you in a good direction,” she explains. “It’s nice having a group of people all learning the same stuff at the same time. It builds a community between us.”

On the other side of the campus, Nate Smith, his arms tattooed, his head sporting a black Peaky Blinders cap, and his eyes shielded by protective glasses, teaches kids at the auto shop. They are diligently working on a donated 1956 sky blue Ford Customline, a golf cart, and miscellaneous engines and other car parts while AC/DC plays in the background.

“We’re trying to make really good entry-level technicians,” Smith explains, as he details how the students are taught the theory behind hydraulics and combustion, as well as how to pull cars apart, do diagnoses, put cars on lifts, patch tires and so on.

“They have something not all schools have,” Fotofili says of the technical programs. “Opportunities to get exposed to the real world.”

–

Stay up to date on business in the Capital Region: Subscribe to the Comstock’s newsletter today.