Drew Kesel will move next month directly from commencement to a full-time, well-paying, stable job, bucking a trend that has bedeviled thousands of employment-starved graduates of four-year colleges and universities.

What's more, Kesel received an offer in an economic sector many Americans consider dead and gone: manufacturing.

While a tight job market continues to shut out everyone from recent college graduates to workers with years of experience, area industries have erected a permanent "help wanted" sign for highly qualified machinists and tradesmen.

"I don't know of a shop that can't use one or two people," said Frank Roth, co-owner of Elite Tool in Moscow Mills. "The supply isn't meeting the demand."

Given the recent history of American industry, the disparity may come as a surprise.

The nation, after all, has shed an estimated 5.5 million manufacturing jobs over the past 10 years (with 115,000 disappearing in Missouri, including 62,000 in the St. Louis region). And manufacturing output, according to data released Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, dropped seven-tenths of a percentage point in 2008 - the first decrease after seven straight years of growth.

Undaunted by the gloomy numbers, a next generation of so-called "factory rats" charges ahead, preparing for careers they believe will not vanish.

"We still need manufacturing as much as we need any other job," reasons Granite City High School industrial arts student Dylan Lewis. "How else are we going to produce the planes and the cars and the other things we need?"

New manufacturing

Kesel gravitated first to Southern Illinois University Carbondale after graduation from high school in Nashville, Ill. He realized almost immediately that he wasn't a fit for college life.

"I couldn't stand it," he said of his experience at SIUC.

Nor could Kesel tolerate the prospect of a career spent sitting behind a desk.

Capitalizing on a lifelong ability to work well with his hands, he enrolled at Ranken Technical College two years ago.

There, he excelled in a field of study that positions graduates for jobs in "new manufacturing," which merges traditional industrial mechanics with 21st-century technological know-how.

The best way to understand the evolution of the industrial sector is to draw an analogy with the circuitry under the hood of the modern automobile.

Until the late 20th century, car repair was the domain of those with mechanical know-how and a reliable set of wrenches and sockets. Today, mechanics need to be as well-versed in the application of high-tech diagnostic equipment as they are in the workings of the internal combustion engine.

So it is also in manufacturing.

As a result, technical school courses in the manual operation of equipment have all but taken a back seat to writing codes for programs capable of, for instance, directly transmitting a milling sequence from a computer terminal to a lathe.

"We are very particular in our requirements in that (precision machinists) must be programmers as well," said April Kootman, human resources director for Seyer Industries, a St. Peters defense contractor with 15 Ranken-trained machinists on the payroll.

Tom Ely, the director for precision machining technology at Ranken, has watched as the industrial sector has moved from hiring apprentices straight out of high school to bringing aboard employees with the training to meet the economic demands of modern manufacturing.

Factories "can't afford to put (an employee) full-time on a drill press. It's less expensive to put (the drill press) on automation and let it drill holes all day," Ely said.

For Kesel, the payoff for absorbing the benefits of mechanical and technological expertise during his tenure at Ranken was landing a job at a Belleville machine shop - after interviewing with just two companies.

And there are many other future machinists eager to follow in his footsteps.

The industrial arts course taught by part-time race car driver Bill Laycock at Granite City High, for example, is among the most popular classes at a school where most of the students grew up in households headed by blue-collar workers at U.S. Steel Works.

"Some kids are into band and some kids are into athletics," said assistant principal Cindy Gagich. "The hands-on component is what appeals to the career tech kids. It keeps them focused. And it keeps them in school."

Technical advantages

Enrollment at Ranken is currently 2,118, up from 1,517 in 2005-06 and a third more than attended classes on its St. Louis campus a decade ago.

The Association for Career and Technical Education says 14.4 million students were enrolled in secondary and post-secondary trade institutions in 2007-08, up from 9 million in 1999-2000. (The ACTE data do not reflect enrollment in specific areas of study, such as industrial arts.)

Employment placement data from Ranken - more than 10 potential job opportunities for each of its graduates - indicate that the demand for trained machinists may be much higher than that. (On the flip side, according to the Economic Policy Institute, there are currently five applicants for every job opening in the general labor market.)

"A lot of companies scaled back on what they were doing (during the recession). Now they are being cautious and careful. But they are still hiring," said Kootman of Seyer Industries.

Kesel, 24, will begin his career knowing that many people don't understand what he will do as a highly skilled machinist or the forces that pushed him away from Southern Illinois University and into a blue-collar job.

As any parent can attest, the drumbeat nudging students toward college begins in the lower grades with a volume that ratchets ever louder as high school graduation nears.

However well-intentioned, the insistent beat fails to take a crucial factor into account: Some people - such as Kesel - like and see no shame in manual labor.

Roth, of Elite Tool, recounts in vivid detail the guidance counselor who demanded to know why a student of his standing (third overall in a class of 330) had chosen to "waste his time" by enrolling instead in a technical training school.

"You're smarter than that," the counselor told him.

Roth doesn't dispute that assessment. "I did well in school," he said. "But I hated it."

Instead Roth attended Ranken, graduating two years later with honors.

A decade after choosing to "waste his time" at a vocational school, Roth co-owns a business that now has 36 employees.

"I've been to two class reunions," he said. "And I'll compare my assets and paycheck with anybody in my class."