Higher education began on Tuesday for some San Antonio area students, who will graduate in two years with no college debt, they will have a well paying job waiting for them, and many will earn money at that job while they are studying, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
They are participating in the Texas Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education Program.
Mary Batch of Toyota Motor Manufacturing of Texas, where some of the graduates will work, says since skilled workers are needed for today's high tech manufacturing, the industry decided to work together and train their own workers.
"A lot of them don't even know what manufacturing is, but once they get exposed to it, they're just awestruck," she said.
Batch says young people today don't realize that many manufacturing facilities are as high tech as any firm at Geekdom, and manufacturing often involves cutting edge technology.
She points out that the jobs that these students will fill will not be replaced by robots
."They are the people who are going to program and maintain and repair the robots," she said.
She said working on today's manufacturing floor requires the kind of training that the program provides. She says its not like working at a car factory in the fifties, when manufacturing work involved repetitive assembly line work all day.
And she said what has not changed is the fact that manufacturing pays among the highest wages available to recent graduates, especially when you consider that there won't be tens of thousands of student loans to repay.
Batch recalled former students who now own two homes and have profitable investments due to their manufacturing training.