Contact

Found an error? That is the message I want most

A page here that is out of date or flatly wrong is worth more to me as an email than any other kind of message. Tell me which page, tell me what the right answer is, and point at the rule, the table or the fact sheet if you have it in front of you. Anything that turns out to be wrong gets fixed, the checked date moves, and if the substance of what the page told you has changed, that change is written on the page and left there.

The ground moves under this subject constantly. Wage tables are re-surveyed, the projection decade rolls forward, and states rewrite licensing and permit rules with no announcement anyone outside the trade would ever see. If you work in a trade, run a crew, sit on a JATC or process permits at a school district, and something written here does not match the job as you know it, that is exactly the correction I cannot generate on my own.

hello@notjustcollege.com

The questions I have to hand off

I hold no licence, no bar card, no safety certification and no counselling credential. So I cannot tell you whether the employer down the road is breaking the law, whether one particular teenager may legally perform one particular task on one particular site, or which programme is the right one for your kid. Those answers depend on facts I do not have, and several of them depend on which state you are standing in.

What I can do every time is show you who does have the authority to answer. Hours, permits and hazardous work go to your state labor department and to the federal Wage and Hour Division. Licensing goes to your state board. Anything about a specific apprenticeship goes to the sponsor that runs it, in writing, and the written standards are a public document you are entitled to ask for.

Everything else that lands in the inbox

If there is a question this site has not covered and should have, send it. That is how several of these pages got started.

Some things get a polite no every time: guest posts, link swaps, sponsored placement, paid reviews, and any arrangement where a school, programme, tool brand or staffing firm gets written about in exchange for something. No money has come into this site from any of them and none will. That is not a virtue, it is the only reason the pages are worth reading.