Acting U.S. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling says a four-year college degree “does not lead to the skill for your first day of work” and instead saddles Americans with debt, as the Trump administration pushes to route young people straight into high-paying manufacturing jobs out of high school.
Sonderling made the case in an interview with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow at the 2026 Republican Jewish Coalition National Leadership Summit on August 31, tying the effort to what he described as a manufacturing comeback under President Trump.
“When President Trump ran, he promised two things: high-paying, high-skilled private sector jobs. So, we’re seeing a renaissance in manufacturing. Trillions of dollars of investments are coming in,” Sonderling said.
He pointed to 900,000 new private sector jobs created during the Trump administration and 83,000 new manufacturing construction jobs tied to building out factories for industries including automobile manufacturing, shipbuilding, and pharmaceutical production — a supply chain he said the country lacked during COVID.
Two companies he named as proof of the shift: Toyota, which is moving Tacoma truck production from Mexico to San Antonio, Texas, and Harley Davidson, which is bringing motorcycle production back from Thailand to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Debt Without Skills
Sonderling was blunt about the traditional four-year degree path.
“It leads to debt, and that’s what we’re changing,” Sonderling said.
He said the Department of Labor is working with workforce boards and community colleges to let employers, not academic institutions, dictate curriculum.
“We’re working very closely with our workforce boards, with community colleges, to have industry dictate what that curriculum is. We’re having employers come in saying, ‘Here’s the jobs that are actually available. Here’s the jobs that we’re bringing back, [that] we’re re-industrializing in America,'” Sonderling said.
The goal, he said, is to align training directly with the jobs companies are actually creating so graduates walk out of high school employable without taking on college debt.
“We need those companies to tell us where they are so we can immediately start requiring those courses, so when you graduate high school, you have a high-skilled, high-paying job available to you that doesn’t require four-year degrees,” Sonderling said. “But that’s not going to work if we don’t know where that’s going.”
Sonderling has served as acting Labor Secretary since April 20, 2026, after Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned.
