Mike Rowe has a blunt way of framing America's skilled-worker shortage: the country is losing tradespeople faster than it can replace them.

"For every five tradespeople who retire this year, two replace them," Rowe said during a Ford Pro Accelerate panel on workforce development. "Five out, two in. I don't care how you vote. I don't care what your politics are. Math doesn't care either."

In plain terms, the incoming pipeline replaces fewer than half of the workers who leave each year.

The host of Dirty Jobs has been making variations of that argument for years. But at Ford's gathering, his warning about welders, electricians, and other skilled workers became the starting point for a broader conversation with Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Michael Duffey, undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment at the U.S. Department of War, about what the country gets wrong when it treats college and career training as opposing tracks.

The argument that emerged went beyond the need for more Americans in the trades. It was that the language of "blue-collar" and "white-collar" may no longer describe the jobs employers need to fill—or the education workers need to navigate them. Rowe's proposed alternative: try "purple."

The arithmetic of a shrinking workforce

Rowe argued that the skilled-labor shortage has grown too large to be dismissed as a routine hiring challenge. The shortage, he said, is "real," "wide," "getting wider," and "dangerous."

Part of the problem is demographic. Experienced tradespeople are retiring in growing numbers, while fewer young workers are entering fields such as welding, electrical work, plumbing, advanced manufacturing, and industrial maintenance.

"How long do you want to wait for your toilet to get fixed?" he said. "How long do you want to wait for the lights to come back on when you flip the switch?"

The gap increasingly reaches into manufacturing and national defense as well. Rowe pointed to the submarine-industrial base as a case in point, describing shortages of welders and electricians at a time when the United States is trying to expand production capacity.

Rowe said he received a call in his capacity as CEO of the MikeRoweWorks Foundation from the BlueForge Alliance, the organization that oversees 16,000 individual companies collectively charged with delivering nuclear-powered submarines. "These guys call me to say, 'Hey, we're having a hell of a time finding welders and electricians. Can you help?' I say, 'I don't know. How many do you need?'"

The answer is enormous. According to BlueForge, an estimated 100,000 workers in critical manufacturing trades will be needed over the next 10 years for the next-generation submarine fleet—roughly 10,000 new hires a year.

Asked where those future workers might come from, Rowe's reply was: "They're in the eighth grade."

That, in his view, is precisely the trouble. Companies across the economy—Ford and General Motors, big-box retailers, manufacturers, and defense contractors—are all competing for workers who will take years to develop. "You can't recruit out of the eighth grade," he said.

McMahon's pipeline plan

McMahon agreed with Rowe's premise but focused on the institutional changes needed to build a larger pipeline. She said the Education Department has been working with the Labor Department to place greater emphasis on workforce training and to speed the route into skilled jobs. The coordination carries weight because federal responsibility for education and workforce training is split between the two agencies.

Her preferred model begins before graduation. High schools, she said, should more closely with community colleges, technical schools, and vocational programs so that students can graduate with both a high school diploma and a usable credential.

A student might start with electrical work, for example, and later add credentials in HVAC or welding—an approach workforce policymakers often describe as stacking credentials. The goal is to let young people enter the workforce more quickly, avoid unnecessary costs, and keep accumulating skills over time.

McMahon also urged schools to introduce hands-on learning much earlier, including virtual welding and electronics programs that can make technical work feel tangible and appealing to younger students.

Her sharpest point, however, was aimed at parents and the status hierarchy surrounding higher education. Skilled work, she argued, should not be treated as the fallback for students whose college plans did not work out.

"This is not just, 'Boy, my kid really wasn't smart enough to go to college, so I guess he'll be an electrician or a plumber,'" McMahon said.

A 'purple' workforce

Rowe took the conversation a step further. The problem, he said, is not simply that too many people steer students away from the trades—it is that the country still imagines intellectual and practical work as separate worlds.

He questioned the usefulness of the labels "blue-collar" and "white-collar," particularly in places like Detroit and his hometown of Baltimore, where those identities run deep. The next generation of work, he suggested, may have "a more gray or purple hue."

Rowe then held up his smartphone as an emblem of that shift.

"Here's my liberal arts degree," he said, arguing that a smartphone with an internet connection gives anyone access to "99% of the known information." He noted that he had recently watched a lecture from MIT for free from a hotel room.

His point was not that education has become obsolete. It was that intellectual ambition is no longer confined to a campus, or to students who follow the conventional academic route. Nor, he argued, should people with elite degrees be insulated from the value of learning a physical trade.

Invoking the political line that America needs "fewer philosophers and more welders," Rowe offered his own version: "Our country needs more philosophers who can run an even bead and more welders who can talk intelligently about the Stoics and think critically," he said.

The new industrial mix

Duffey connected that argument to the changing nature of manufacturing and defense. Newer companies in the defense-industrial base, he said, are combining technology and manufacturing in ways that do not fit older workforce categories.

What is needed, he said, are people with skills rather than a particular occupational label—and "flexible factories and [a] flexible workforce" capable of responding to shifting industrial demands.

The clearest signals to watch, by the panel's own math, are the replacement rate for retiring tradespeople and the pace of hiring against the submarine fleet's estimated 100,000-worker need.

That framing made Rowe's demographic warning more than a slogan about empty trade-school seats. The panel's deeper argument was for a different education hierarchy: one in which the future welder may be an autodidact with access to MIT lectures, the future engineer may understand the shop floor, and skilled work is no longer cast as the alternative to an intellectually serious life.

The workforce of the future, Rowe suggested, may be neither blue-collar nor white-collar. It may be purple.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing. This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.