Training Cost Comparison

What the model is

For each route and each year, the tool does one subtraction and keeps a running total. During training, the year’s contribution is earnings minus tuition minus tools and fees. After training ends, it is earnings. The running total is the net cash position, and the tool prints the working so you can check every line of it.

That is the whole model. It is deliberately simple, because complexity here mostly buys false precision. It does not discount future dollars, it does not model raises inside a year, it does not model tax, and it assumes the training finishes on schedule. Every one of those assumptions is generous in the same direction for every route, which is what makes the comparison usable even though the absolute numbers are rough.

Forgone earnings is the variable that decides this

Ask a parent what a training route costs and they will name a tuition figure. Ask what it costs to not be working for two years and the conversation goes quiet, because that number does not appear on any invoice and nobody sends you a bill for it.

It is usually the biggest term in the comparison. A route that pays from the first week starts accumulating a positive balance immediately, while a classroom route starts digging. By the time both routes reach the same wage, the gap between them can be large enough that the higher-paying route never catches up inside a ten year window. Or it catches up in year seven, which is also worth knowing, because it tells you the decision is about the second decade rather than the first.

The tool reports that crossover explicitly. If the route that wins at the end spends the first six years behind, it says so. That line is often more useful than the headline total, because it tells you what kind of bet you are making.

Where each number comes from

Tuition and fees. Ask the school for the full cost in writing, as a single total that includes tools, books, uniforms, testing and any lab fee. The FTC’s guidance on choosing a vocational school is blunt about this: if the school will not give you documents to review before you commit, do not enroll. There is more on the whole pattern in how to spot a trade school that is selling you.

Tools. This is a real line and it is bigger than people expect in year one. See what tools actually cost in year one before you guess at it.

Apprentice earnings. These come from one document and only one: the program’s written standards. Federal rules at 29 CFR 29.5(b)(5) require a progressively increasing schedule of wages, with an entry wage not below the applicable minimum wage, but they set no percentages. The percentages are the program’s own. The apprentice wage progression tool turns that schedule into a table once you have it.

Earnings after training. BLS occupational wage data is the surveyed, dated, national source, and this site uses May 2024 figures. Use the median rather than the top decile, because the top decile is not what a new graduate earns. Local union scale is better still if you can get it. Do electricians really make 100,000 dollars works through why the headline numbers people quote are usually the wrong end of the distribution.

Earnings during a school route. Not zero for most families. If your teenager will work part-time through the program, put that in, because leaving it out flatters the apprenticeship route in a way that is not honest.

A worked example of how to read the output

Malik is 18 and choosing between a four year electrical apprenticeship and a shorter full-time program at a private school. The figures his parents type in are their own, gathered from the JATC’s standards and from the school’s written cost sheet, and the example is illustrative rather than a recommendation.

What the tool shows them is not a winner. It shows that the school route is ahead for the first two years, because it finishes sooner and starts earning sooner, and that the apprenticeship overtakes it in year five and pulls away after that. It also shows the size of the gap at year ten, which is large enough that the decision is clearly not about the tuition figure they had been arguing about.

Then they change one number. They lower the post-training earnings for the school route to the figure the school would actually put in writing, rather than the one on the website, and the crossover moves to year three. That is the moment the tool earns its keep: not by answering the question, but by showing which input the answer was resting on.

What this tool cannot do

It cannot tell you whether your teenager will finish. That matters more than any figure here, because the last national completion rate DOL published in a citable document was 46 percent, for fiscal year 2014, and independent research commissioned by DOL found just under half of participants in its study states completed. A route that pays well and does not get finished pays nothing.

It cannot price the parts of this that are not money: the body, the commute, the schedule, the licensing path, whether the work suits them, whether the local is hiring. It cannot tell you what a given school’s graduates actually earn, which is what College Scorecard and TrainingProviderResults.gov are for. And it cannot tell you whether the numbers you typed are true. If a figure came off a marketing page rather than out of a document, the output is decorated fiction, and that is worth being honest with yourself about before you take it seriously.